She looked feral, curled up on a mattress on the floor, having lost her blazer jacket but still wearing her navy-blue pencil skirt and (formerly) white undershirt from the day of the hearing. If those TVs had been stolen, so, too, he assumed, had been everything in front of him. The mattress looked like it had been pilfered from an IKEA. She had food as well, if a box of single-serving Lay’s potato chips could be considered “food,” and several gallons of water in plastic jugs, though she didn’t seem to have touched any of it except the water.

He practically fell on top of her, crushing her body to his, not waiting for her to give him permission. “Oh, baby,” he said, burying his face in her dirty hair. “Oh, baby, I was so scared!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled by his shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m just glad you’re all right.” He pulled her even closer. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No,” she said, finally unlocking her arms and allowing herself to hug him back. “No, he’s been good.”

He held her for a few minutes, breathing his relief into her hair, her skin. “Is this your room? Airplane stair as your bedroom wall?”

“So I don’t have to see those screens.”

“You’re going to get some hop-ons.” She didn’t seem amused. “What the hell is all this?”

“He said he started building this about a week after Ampersand disappeared. He can’t just instantly keep tabs on every news feed with whatever internal machinery he has—it doesn’t work like that—so he set this up and created like . . . a system that collates all the info the news networks have and looks for patterns that might lead to clues.”

“Has he found anything?”

“No, not yet. That’s why he wanted me.”

“Okay,” he said, taking a moment to shake off the terror of the situation. “Why don’t we . . . regroup back at the Yorba Linda house, freshen up, take a shower. There’s no way they’ll be looking for me here; I was in New York twenty minutes ago.”

She opened her mouth as if to protest, considered, and then nodded in resignation. “Let me get my things.”

“What ‘things’?”

“Well, really just these things,” she said, lifting up two items that could only be described as alien lumps. “Pill bug, pulse emitter.”

“I remember this,” he said, looking at the pulse emitter. “That’s the thing that can take them out with an EMP. But what is that?”