Noah looks from the transport pods to the gleaming, brand-new Boeing 737 parked nearby; it’s painted a blend of silver and light blue, the color of a daytime sky.

“Nice plane,” Noah says. “I take it we’re back in business?”

“You think you’d be here otherwise?”

Noah doesn’t answer.

“Feel free to thank me at any time,” Cole says.

“Give me a few more days aboveground and I’ll think about it.”

“I thought you weren’t a fan of Stonecut Ridge.”

“I’m a fan of daylight.”

“You’re also a fan of breaking the rules, and we’re not going to be able to go forward without a few. Hence, your brief punishment.”

“Brief. OK. Is she all right?”

“She’s fine.”

“And that boyfriend of hers?”

“He’s recovering nicely. His injuries were minor.”

“Sounds like I broke the right rule, then.”

“Well, then, the cell was worth it. Right? I mean, it had a toilet.”

“What about the kid?”

“What kid?”

“The hacker. Luke’s brother. Did you throw him in a cell, too?”

“I made a terrible mistake with their security, and I couldn’t fix it in time. Luke’s brother responded. I can’t fault him for that.”

“I was the response, and you just faulted me for three weeks.”

“Maybe I just don’t like you, Noah.”

“It’s Dylan you don’t like. You don’t even know Noah.”

“Small blessings, then. Come now. This is a happy day. Don’t ruin the mood by reminding me you’re a sociopath.”

Cole walks up to the transport pods and knocks on the titanium outer shell of the nearest one. Then he runs one hand over the unmarked sensor in its side. Part of the top goes translucent, offering a square view of the young comatose man inside. An oxygen mask covers the lower half of his face; it hides the feeding tube that’s been forced down his throat.

Noah approaches slowly, making no effort to hide his interest in its occupant.

“This is Tommy Grover, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps who fell in with a very bad crowd after his honorable discharge. He’s believed to have been killed and swept out to sea after a car crash on PCH that also killed most of his friends. But the truth, as you can see, is very different. He’s very much alive and in one piece and here with us today. You see, the real story is that Tommy was the lookout the night his friends abducted and tortured Luke Prescott. And unfortunately, he didn’t get away in time, which means he was interrogated by Charlotte. After she’d been triggered by the drugs you gave her.”

Eyes wide, Noah looks up at Cole for confirmation this isn’t a joke. When Cole nods, he feels, for a moment, like they’re back to being partners again. In business, at least.

“So unfortunately, given what he’s seen, Tommy Grover will not be integrating back into society at any time in the foreseeable future. And given that he was rather enthusiastically participating in a plot to repeatedly bomb targets of value to various marginalized communities who had earned the ire of his very special group of fellow bigots, I don’t really think any of us will be shedding a tear for Mr. Grover anytime soon.”

Cole moves to the next transport and repeats the same ritual, revealing the partially obscured face of the man inside. This man’s older.

“And this is Richard Davies. If he has any loved ones, which I doubt he does, they recently came across the smoldering remains of his property in the mountains just south of Seattle, and given his history as a loner and generally unfriendly individual, they probably assumed he burned the place to the ground on purpose and fled into the next phase of his nomadic existence. He’s got no family that we can find, probably because what little family he had destroyed itself when he was a boy. His father lost the family farm. His mother descended into addiction and prostitution, before his father shot her right in front of him when he was a kid.

“Maybe this is what eventually triggered his career as a serial killer. I’ll leave the messy psychology of it to you. But what we do know for sure is that he murdered several women and turned their skin into personal items. Wallets, belts, that sort of thing. We hope he did it after they died, but we’re not sure. We haven’t bothered to wake him up to find out. We figured we’d leave that to you.”

“We?”

“You asked me to reactivate The Consortium, and I’m proud to say I have. And these two men are a gift from all of us. To you.”

“To me,” he says.

While Noah eyes Davies’s transport pod with something that looks like hunger, Cole wonders if the man inside will survive a long plane flight. Surely Noah has more patience and self-control than that; surely he can see the greater potential.

“Your name isn’t going to be the only thing that’s different this time, Noah.”

As if he’s been caught studying the cover of a dirty magazine by the parent holding his hand, Noah looks up.

“This time out, you’re going to follow a dual track,” Cole says. “Now, none of us want to deprive you of your great dream of turning Zypraxon into something marketable that increases competence and effectiveness in the wake of what would normally be paralyzing fear. We share in this dream, even. We do. Truly. But we don’t know how long it’s going to take you to get there. And given the strange, twisting path we took to get where we are today, I’d be the last one to give it an end date.