She leaned back into her chair, clearly unsure if he had his facts straight. He couldn’t blame her for that—so much had changed so quickly in these last few months, between the Bush resignation and the world economy collapsing to the revelation of motherfucking aliens, it was hard to keep up with how poorly society at large was coping.

“Listen,” he said. “Neither of us have gotten any sleep, and our respective beds are a bit of a drive. Since we’re already here, I could get us some rooms.”

She shifted in her seat. “Are you asking me to share a hotel room with you?”

“No, I said rooms. Plural.”

She looked at her half-eaten potatoes like she suspected him of poisoning them. “Okay.”

“Wow, that was easy.” He probably should not have said that out loud.

“Anything you want,” she said distantly. “Only . . . please don’t go to the police with this. Just for a few days.”

“I wasn’t planning on it, but out of curiosity, why not?”

She looked at him, eyes wide, suddenly electric with fear. “There are other ones under government ‘protection’ besides Ampersand, and Enola is not . . . he’s not well, and they . . . well, if the other ones find out, they might take it upon themselves to put Enola out of his misery, and there are presently no laws in place to stop them. The reason we have to keep Enola a secret for now . . . it’s not the U.S. government we’re worried about. He’s trying to protect Enola from his own kind. That’s all.”

Kaveh leaned back, his plate now cleaned of anything remotely edible, and he glanced at the two spidery earpieces sitting on the table between them. “Would you let me borrow one of those?”

“Why?”

He didn’t even try to hide his conniving smile. “I want to talk to Enola.”

16

16

“So why’re you doing this again?” asked Paris through a sigh. She’d obviously been upset enough that he had waited until almost 2:00 P.M. EST to text her, try though she might to cloak it, and now she was having to duck out during a meeting to pin down the coordinates of where he was, and by extension, where Enola was.

“I’m having to use, like . . . ancient cartography,” he said, pressing his map against the steering wheel in a futile attempt to create a flat surface to write on. He had left Cora at the hotel above the casino, booking an adjoining room for himself. After leaving her alone in her room, he snuck out, hopped right back into his Land Rover, and made the hour-plus drive all the way back up the mountain. “I didn’t want to risk any of the search engines realizing I was pinpointing my own location.”

“Cell tower data isn’t accurate, anyway,” said Paris.

“In this case, better safe than sorry.”