It was obviously not a natural cave, but rather more like what the result of an atomic bomb going off deep underground might look like. This wasn’t a cave eroded away by time and water but by heat, the texture somewhere between recently cooled volcanic rock and glass. It was as though the earth had been scooped out by a shovel of fire. So this is where you’ve been hiding, she thought, sitting up.

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice bouncing off the smooth rock for several seconds. This space was like a small planetarium, perhaps the size of the telescope viewing area at the Griffith Observatory, but more haphazard than a perfect sphere, as though it had been carved out in a hurry. A few of Ampersand’s drone lights hovered along the edges of the room, illuminating two passageways, one that led outside into the sunlight, and the other into darkness, another chamber perhaps. It was from this second, darker passageway that Ampersand emerged. Swaying, unstable. Terrified.

She shot to her feet and ran to him, placing her hands on the bottom of his head, guiding his head down to look at her. “I’m here.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and tried to sense what was going on, but the wall was thicker than usual. She could sense a garbled something not too dissimilar from what she’d felt the day of the breakdown in front of Esperas, but nothing clearer than that.

“Was that noise Enola?”

“Yes.” The nuclei of his eyes finally found their focus on her, and despite the thickness of the wall, she felt a sudden sharp terror. “He is searching for me.”

“What was that noise?”

“Seismic pulse, designed to search for unnatural formations, formations like this one.” His focus was dissolving, shattering into a thousand tiny shards of amber glass. “He is searching for me. Careless, reckless. This region sits directly on top of a fault line.”

She tried to stay calm, tried to think of herself as the flotation device but was having a hard time keeping it together herself. He was so frightened. Had Enola found him, cornered him? Was he here?

And if he was, what was Ampersand afraid he’d even do?

“A fault line?” she repeated.

“Careless, reckless. The ground pulse is designed to flush me out, it is designed to detect hideaways like this, but this area is right on a fault line.”

It took Cora a few seconds to see what he was getting at. “You’re saying it could cause earthquakes?”

“It will cause earthquakes.”

“We have to warn . . . we have to warn the U.S. Geological Survey. We have to warn people.”

Ampersand’s sway turned into a stumble. “There is nothing they can do.”

“They can evacuate.” She pulled out her cell phone—no reception, and almost dead to boot. “Where are we?”