“No,” he said, smiling out of the corner of his mouth like she was making a joke when she was not. “You don’t hide them as well as you think you do.”

“How do I stop it if I don’t know what will set it off?”

“Triggers are never as simple as movies tell you they are. It’s not as simple as, ‘Oh, I got raped at a Starbucks now I go into a panic-rage every time I see the Starbucks logo.’ And when you have all these comorbid conditions, sometimes triggers will be obvious, sometimes they won’t be. A lot of the time, you won’t even know what causes it.”

He turned off the ignition, opened the car door, and tossed his head for her to follow him. “Hopefully, the Temecula towing company will be too busy to get around to my car.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m parking. It’s quicker to walk at this point. We’re only about a mile away from the police blockade.”

Cora followed him toward the swollen mass of humanity gathering on the other side of the blockade, which blocked both the road that wound into the mountains toward the crash site and the extensive grasslands that surrounded it. On the right side of the highway was a giant casino that was visible even from a mile away, on the left side of the highway, a brand-new housing development full of expensive stucco houses that couldn’t be more than a couple of years old, all against the backdrop of the California mountain wilderness.

The closer they got to the blockade, the thicker the crowd got. Both the Temecula PD and the Riverside County sheriff were completely overwhelmed, and even the tribal rangers from the Luiseño reservation adjacent to Temecula appeared to be lending a hand. Sol flashed his credentials to get past the police line, climbing on top of a police van alongside a couple of the sheriff’s deputies to get a better look at the situation. He hoisted Cora up alongside him, and it was only up here that she got a scope of what was really happening.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people congregating over a big grassy field a few blocks west of the casino/resort, pushing up against the blockade that Temecula’s Finest were trying to maintain. Some of them were already starting to get into arguments with the police.

“This is a fucking powder keg,” muttered Sol under his breath.

Indeed it was. Cora had expected people more in the vein of the type who would welcome the alien enlightenment that was being held back by capitalism. But that wasn’t the case at all. Sol pointed to one guy in the crowd, whispering to one of the deputies on top of the van with him, and the deputy hopped off the van and disappeared into the crowd.

“What is it?”