He showed me another video segment. Like the rest, it had been shot from high in the troposphere; like the rest, it was hard to interpret. At first glance it appeared to show one more stretch of generic desert, from a part of the world that in my day had been buried in ice. I might have been looking at boulders or pebbles: the scale was marked in characters I couldn’t read. But at the center of the image was a blip of regularity, and the image stabilized and resolved as the aircraft moved closer. There was something structural there, for sure. Mist-obscured squares and rectangles in dusty pastel colors. Some of these objects, Oscar said, were nearly the size of Vox Core. And they weren’t ruined or abandoned buildings, not in the ordinary sense. It was increasingly obvious as the view honed down to a narrow field that some of the structures had left long, linear trails in the Antarctic dust. They were mobile.

“We believe these are the work of the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said mildly.

I guessed he was right. The structures didn’t look like anything human beings would build. But the image abruptly faded to a staticky blank. The drone aircraft’s sensors had failed, Oscar explained. More drones had been sent to the same site, but they had failed too. Oscar chose to interpret the failures optimistically. “Clearly, the Hypotheticals still have a presence on Earth. Just as clearly, they registered the presence of the unmanned vehicles and reacted to them. Which means—I think the conclusion is inescapable—that they’re aware of us.” His smile was fixed and unworried. “They know we’re coming, Mr. Findley. And I believe they’re waiting for us to arrive.”

Chapter Twelve. Turk’s Story

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SANDRA AND BOSE

The institution where Sandra’s brother Kyle Cole lived was called the Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex. It was located on a broad expanse of land that had once been a ranch. A creek ran nearby, and there was, in fact, a grove of live oaks on the property.

When she first arranged to have Kyle committed to this place Sandra had been curious enough to run a search on the term “live oaks”—why “live”? Live as opposed to what? But it turned out the trees were called live oaks because they stayed green in winter, prosaically enough. In Texas, she had read, a grove of live oaks was called a “mott.”

She had tried out the term on the receptionist once, back when she was new in the state and still bashful about her New England accent. “I’d like to take Kyle out to that mott of live oaks by the creek.” The receptionist had given her a blank stare. “I mean the grove of trees,” Sandra added, blushing. Oh. Well, surely.