Mrs. Pearl laughed. “Well, this is Champlain, and you got the name right. But I doubt Allison’s your old friend. Not unless you met her in grade school.”

“Excuse me?”

“Allison’s ten years old, hon. She doesn’t have any grown-up friends.”

“Oh. I see. I’m sorry…”

“She must be a popular woman, though, the Allison you’re looking for. We had another call for her a while back. A man who said he was with the Houston police.”

Oh! “Did he give his name?”

“Yes, but I don’t recall it. I told him the same as I’m telling you—sorry, but it’s not our Allison. Good luck finding the one you’re hunting for, though.”

“Thank you,” Sandra said.

*   *   *

A staff conference—Sandra wasn’t invited—kept Congreve in the building well past his usual departure time. He knocked at her office on his way out, a few minutes after seven. “Still here, Dr. Cole?”

“I’m just finishing up.”

“Did you prepare the letter I asked for?”

“It’ll be on your desk in the morning.”

“Fine.”

She glanced out the door as he left. Jack Geddes was still sitting in the hallway, chair tipped back, humming to himself. She listened until Congreve’s footsteps had faded down the corridor. The State facility had begun to take on its after-hours aspect. Most of the day staff had already left; the open-ward patients were back from the commissary, some of them watching TV in the common room. She heard a couple of orderlies laughing together down by the main entrance.

She closed the door and went back to her desk. Then she opened her phone and tapped in Bose’s number.

Chapter Seventeen. Sandra and Bose

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

TURK’S STORY

1.

The medics kept Oscar and me in a weeklong quarantine, scanning us for any sign of contamination. They failed to find anything unusual in our bodies or our psyches, though that wasn’t conclusive—Hypothetical devices were perfectly capable of eluding detection. But we measured consistently clean, and the sample we had brought back with us, the crystalline butterfly in its sealed container, remained dead or dormant.

News of what happened out in the Wilkes Basin quickly spread through Vox. Collective grief for the lost soldiers and scientists was written in the faces of the medics who examined us and in Oscar’s face, too. I asked him what it was like to feel an emotion amplified by the entire population of a city.

“It’s painful,” he admitted. “But it’s better than being alone. What was unbearable was what we felt after the attack that shut down the Coryphaeus—so many dead, and no way to share that grief. It was agonizing, horrible beyond belief.”