“Hold your fire, boys,” came Jackson’s cool, authoritative drawl. Despite the weapons pointed at him, his voice sounded lazy from the drive, his gaze looking highway hypnotized in the orange glow of the porch light. He’d strolled up, then casually shaken Ethan’s sweated palm last and hadn’t even made a single joke about it.

Ethan wiped his hand on his pants before holstering his weapon.

“My apologies for the scare,” Jackson said.

“How about yours?” Matthias said. “It’s not every day you’ve got your team looking at you down the barrel.”

“Some days it feels that way,” he said. “I’m used to it by now.”

“Who’s that in the car?” Matthias asked.

Jackson turned back and hollered, “Go on ahead and come out. It’s safe now, they put their toys away.”

“Jack, who is that?”

A bulky figure emerged from the car, standing bow-legged, leaning back against it. Whoever it was, he was in no hurry to meet the men who’d just been pointing guns at him.

“I believe you’ve already met,” Jackson said to Matthias.

“I have?”

“Yeah,” said the figure. “You flunked me out of the course.”

“I flunked a lot of people out,” Matthias said with a chuckle. “That’s the point, to trim the fat. Jackson, what are you doing bringing fat here?”

Jackson chuckled. “He might be fat, but he’s—”

The Fat interrupted with, “Hey,” sounding comically small and wounded for his size.

“But he’s fat I trust,” Jackson said. “In this case, that’s the most important thing. Plus he’s got some free time on his hands now since he . . . left your camp.”

Logan, a recently disqualified SWAT hopeful, had joined the men in the crescent of light near the porch. He mumbled to Matthias that there were no hard feelings before Jackson instructed everyone to grab a piece of equipment from the car. A trunk opened up to reveal a cache of armored vests and gun cases. A few loose shotguns were thrown in the mix.

“What else you got?” Sam said after coming back from the house on his second trip. “What are those? Explosives?”

“Laptops,” Jackson said.

“Oh.”

Ethan was a little relieved that he wasn’t the only less-than-genius one of the bunch when it came to technology. He helped the men carry the rest of the equipment into the house, laying everything out on the living room’s hardwood floor. When they had finished, the men stood around Jackson, eager to hear the news. Or at least the beginning of it: why he was there and how long he’d be staying.

But the sound of footsteps on the stairway, a slow jaunty descent, had everyone silent. After a moment of anticipation, Ethan took it upon himself to break the ice. “Logan . . . meet Kalani, one of our hosts.”

He called out hello as Kalani rounded the stairs, walking out to where everyone was gathered. She slowed at the sight of all the bulky equipment, a little wide-eyed at the recent additions to the otherwise rustic décor.

She finally spoke. “The Cavalry?”

“At least the beginning of it,” Jackson said. “We’ll work with this for now, and with the limited numbers we’ve got. But expect more soon. More numbers, more big black cases, food, and perhaps a little more direction. For now, I’m pretty tired.”

“How’s Lea?” Ethan asked Kalani, aware who was supposedly the most tired. Lea had been on his mind since their return from the woods. But by the looks of the rest of them, it might have been the furthest thing from theirs. Confusion. Unconcealed blankness. Everyone seemed to act like they’d had no idea who Lea was. Or at least feigning ignorance so they wouldn’t have to start discussing her.

Even before Kalani could answer, Ethan felt a little bad for bringing it up.

But he couldn’t help feeling for Kalani, feeling like he’d been upstairs with her the whole time. Through his short absence, he wanted to know exactly what had happened, what had crossed her mind, what she’d been feeling without him.

Finally, after Kalani’s face twitched almost imperceptibly, she answered. “Lea’s sleeping.”

* * *

While the guys eventually found some chairs among the newly piled junk in the living room, and while the preliminary bullshit flowed generously through the night, Ethan was keenly aware of Kalani’s absence. Rather, her quiet presence one room away, in the kitchen. She had made off as if to prepare something, tea perhaps, but she hadn’t come back. Ethan wanted to find her, and find out whatever else he could about what had happened upstairs with Lea. Already, after just an hour, he felt the gap return, the bridge between them almost as wide as their months-long detachment.

He found her sitting over a steaming mug of tea at the kitchen table.

“I was going to bring some out, but . . .” She trailed off, still looking down into it. She grabbed the tag of the tea bag and swung it around the mug.

“You okay?” Ethan asked.

“Are you? You’ve got your friends here now.”

“And you’ve got one upstairs. How is she?”

“She’s not my friend.” Kalani chuckled quietly, almost sadly. “I love her all the same, but she’s not my friend.”

“I know,” Ethan said. “I had a brother, too.”

She swung around, glancing at him. She looked tired. “Had?”

“He had a condition,” Ethan said, his gaze narrowing in on the steam rising from her mug. In his mind, he peeled back twenty years of memories, his brother again hunched over a pot of steaming water, struggling to breathe it in. His therapy.

“What happened? What kind of condition?”

“Can you tell me about Lea first? I think that’s more important.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s still alive,” Ethan said. “Was she sleeping?”

Kalani flinched a little at his words, turning back to her tea.

“Was she . . . medicated?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know about medicated, but she was sleeping. Well, at least, she was in bed. I don’t even know about sleeping. I sat in there for awhile, when I first got back in the house. When I turned the light on, her eyes were already opened.”

“Some people do that,” Ethan said, shrugging. “Light sleepers. I do that. You can read a book next to me and I’ll wake up at the sound of a turning page.”

“Yeah,” Kalani said, sounding forlorn again. “Tell me about your brother.”

“What’s wrong, Kalani?”

She blew into the mug, lifted it, and took a small and quiet slurp. “People don’t wake up like that if they’re medicated.”

“So then she wasn’t medicated,” Ethan said. “That’s a good thing. Right?”

“It’s not good if she was lying . . .”

“Lying?”

“Or pretending,” Kalani said. “Pretending she’d taken pills and got sleepy and . . .”

Ethan moved off the counter he was leaning back on and walked to the chair, taking a seat across from Kalani. “I think you lost me. What do you think’s going on?”

“I saw something . . . something on her nightshirt.” Kalani pushed the mug away as if she was sickened by the sight of it. She looked at Ethan, her eyes gleaming at his like they’d never look away. And for a long while, they didn’t. “I remember that I just did laundry this morning, washing her nightshirt, you know, the one she wears to bed all the time. It was perfectly clean. And then tonight, when she pulled the sheets back, I saw a stain on it. Like, a fingerprint.”

“A fingerprint?”

“Like from the clay.”

“What clay?”

“The pottery,” Kalani. “In the barn. You know how pottery is, right?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It’s a really messy habit. I mean, hobby. It’s real messy, the clay and everything. The dust gets everywhere, it gets on your hands. Wet clay on your hands, clay water dripping on your clothes and everything.”

Ethan leaned back in his chair. “And so . . .”

“And so she was obviously in there tonight, in the barn for some reason. Doing something near the pottery wheel. I asked her about it, and she got defensive. Claiming she was sleeping, of course. And think about it, Ethan.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Trust me, I’m thinking about it.” Damn, he was tired. The unrefined, shop-floor fluorescent lighting in the kitchen didn’t help things. It certainly didn’t help the pressure building inside his skull, directly behind the orbital bone.

“Ethan, what the hell could she have been up to in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, she likes pottery here and there. But she doesn’t like it that much. She’s not going to wake up and wander out there in the middle of the night and start working on some fucking soup bowl. So what was it?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“It’s just weird.”

“I agree. It’s weird. But . . .”

She glared at him. He wasn’t used to that look. “But what?”

“Maybe you should try getting some rest,” Ethan said.

Her eyes narrowed. “It might not prove anything except that she’s a fucking liar.”

“It might be a long day tomorrow,” Ethan said. He was at a loss on what to say to Kalani about Lea. Sorry your sister is a big fat liar? They all knew it, even if most of them didn’t want to admit it. Still, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t go over so well.

He really had no idea what the next day would bring. But he was almost certain it would be longer. Certainly longer than this day, and already it had been almost longer than he could bear. Than either of them could bear.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you tired?”

“No,” Kalani snapped. “What are you talking about in there? What’s Jackson saying? What’s your big plan?”

“You haven’t been listening in?”

“No.”

“We haven’t really gotten anywhere yet. But I know he wants to check out the cave. Matthias wants to do it tonight, but Jackson will make him wait. He’ll make all of us wait until he knows exactly what’s going on.”

“And so what’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but I think a lot of that depends on your sister.”

Kalani sat up sharply, her hands falling away from the mug of tea she had started toying with again. “In what way?”

“Do you trust her?”

Fuck, she looked like she was about to cry. Her bottom lip trembled just so slightly. Or had he imagined it?

He felt himself almost trembling, too. It had been long and tiring night.

“You should get some sleep,” he said, realizing that the voices in the living room had gone quiet. How long had it been quiet? Through the drama and mystery of his conversation with Kalani, and the brief allusion to his older brother, he had a difficult time remembering if he’d even heard footsteps, or the front door open and shut.

He stood and walked back into the living room. It was empty except for Sam, who was lying on the sofa, reading a hardcover book. Ethan asked him for an update.

“What do you mean?” Sam said.

“Where’d they go?”

“Out to the barn.”

“Why?”

“For privacy. They’re waiting for you.”

He walked to the door, eager to finally get an update, some answers. He was sick of sitting around waiting for whenever the bomb would drop—perhaps literally. He’d take just a vague indication of their plans for Tucker, and for Lea. What was the next day going to bring? He was almost out the door when he stopped and turned back to Sam, who was still, oddly, lying on the sofa. It was like he was on a vacation or something.

“Aren’t you coming?” Ethan asked him.

“To the barn? No. I’ve got orders to stay here.”

“What for?”

“Just to keep an eye on things.”

Ethan didn’t press him any further. He knew that by “things” Sam meant Kalani and Lea. On Jackson’s orders, no doubt. Not just a watch for them, to keep them safe. But of them—like they were the suspects. He didn’t like how that concept felt, even though at least Lea definitely was one. But Kalani . . . He hated that she’d continuously been lumped into the problem. He hated the whole thing.

Fuck.

He could always just give up his job here, and the writing job back in Washington. And maybe, if he was around full-time to protect her, just maybe Kalani wouldn’t need that type of “witness protection.” It seemed like hardly any kind of protection anyway. It seemed more like the authorities’ way of keeping tabs on them. Was that who was behind all the equipment and wires? Either way, he wasn’t happy about it.

“So what’s the story on Kalani?” Jackson asked when Ethan walked alone into the barn. The men were sitting around a pottery table, all of Lea’s wonky clay monstrosities pushed to one side. They’d made room for a few laptops that sat open, their fans humming quietly in the warm night air.

“Kalani doesn’t really have a story,” Ethan said. “You know that. It’s all Lea.”

“The black sheep,” Matthias said.

“I guess so.”

“Did Kalani talk to her tonight?” he asked.

“Kalani doesn’t think she was too medicated, if at all.”

“Ethan,” Matthias said, “Sam and I saw the whole thing tonight. She was practically tripping over herself. Slurring her words, even. I was trying to be polite about it in front of Kalani, but she was definitely fucked up.”

“Kalani just said she’s awake and acting clear as day. She thinks Lea just wanted an excuse to get away from you two.”

There was a quiet laugh about that from Logan, the new guy, who clammed up soon after when he noticed that no one else had joined in. Tired people act differently in all different types of situations. Fatigue, stress, it all comes out in a variety of ways.

“It’s come to my understanding,” Jackson said, looking away from his laptop screen, “that Lea is a professional liar.”

Matthias nodded, his face grim.

“Did Sam say that?” Ethan said.

“A lot of things say that,” Jackson said. “Would you say that? Would you agree?”

“I would agree she’s a liar,” Ethan hedged. “But that’s got nothing to do with Kalani.”

“We all know how you feel about Kalani,” Matthias said.

“Anyway,” Jackson continued, after a quick glare to Matthias, “we’ve heard some things back from Washington.”

“You mean from Tansy?” Ethan said. His nerves practically jumped at the words. What had the master hacker managed to dig up?

Now it was his turn to be glared at by Jackson. “Tansy and the others from Washington.”

Right. It was time for him to stop letting his nerves get the best of him and just shut up and let Jackson get on with his briefing. He kept forgetting important little things, such as him being the new guy. Relatively new. Kalani, in a variety of ways, had helped him forget that. Had helped him escape and think up a whole different parallel life than the one he was currently stumbling through.

“We actually already went on a bit of a wild goose chase, looking around for Tucker,” Jackson said. By the look on his face, and by his very presence there, Ethan knew the search came up fruitless. “In fact, we checked out a tuna-canning facility in coastal Virginia last night.”

“What the hell would Tucker be doing there?” Matthias said.

Jackson frowned at him like he didn’t want to elaborate.

“Sounds like it’s a good thing you didn’t find him,” Ethan said.

“I’ll lay it out for you guys really simply,” Jackson said. “For the time being, we can’t trust the ‘authorities’.” He said the word making little air quotes with his fingers. Ethan had an idea who he was talking about, so he didn’t ask. There had always been a disturbing overlap between private security paramilitary groups like Blackwoods and government agencies. Until the trial, and until Blackwoods and its cronies could go down for good, it was a damn good idea to keep things compartmentalized.

“We can’t be too careful,” Jackson said in the following silence from the team. “That’s why I think we should take care of the Tucker situation on our own. And to move forward with this business with the cave alone.”

“What business with the cave?” Ethan said.

“Tucker,” Jackson said. “I think he might be being held nearby, or at least there’ll be a clue to his whereabouts. We can at least find out what’s going on with the surveillance equipment someone so thoughtfully left behind for us. And we’ll likely find a whole bunch of other problems in there, too. That’s why we’re waiting on the rest of the troops tomorrow. A morning raid.”

Ethan liked the sound of that. He’d waited so long for some action. Some real physical steps closer to resolving everything, rather than just sitting around waiting for the bad guys to find them again. An excuse to fire his gun in anger and not training at some shooting range in the next town over. That was his worst fear when Jackson had sent him there, that he’d waste all that motivation on training and not on actually taking out some bad guys.

“We’ll send out a scouting raid before that,” Jackson said. “With some of our numbers we have now. That’s why it’s important we all get some sleep, even just an hour or two. I want to get out there and scope out that cave no later than oh-three-hundred.”

“Sounds perfect,” Ethan said. “Count me in for both.”

“No,” Jackson said. “I’ve got other plans for you.”

Ethan tried to hide his disappointment. Despite not hearing the actual plans, he knew he’d be disappointed. He wanted that cave. He wanted that action.

“You and Logan are on sister detail. Got that, Logan?”

Logan nodded and said a firm yes, dispelling Ethan’s assumption that he’d fallen asleep minutes before.

“You’ll be wherever they are, just feet away. If they’re upstairs in the bedroom, I want you in Tucker’s old room. Or their rooms if it’s vice versa. Or downstairs. Or in this barn. I want you to stick on them hard. Got it?”

Logan nodded at Ethan. He hadn’t met him before, but something in his gaze told Ethan that the two would work well together.

“Lea can be shifty,” Matthias said.

Ethan nodded, agreeing.

“Don’t let them try any shit,” Jackson said. “Either of them.” He looked hard at Ethan and said to him, “Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Ethan said, trying to sound convincing as possible while his attention drifted elsewhere—not to Kalani, as had so often happened in the last twenty-four hours, but on something splattered on the ground. Something gray. Like a stain he’d heard about.

“I understand your situation with Kalani is . . . complicated,” Jackson said. “I don’t have a problem with that per se. On the contrary, I think it may help us in the end. Help us keep her trust. But it still has to be managed.”

Ethan scanned the floor, the whole floor, under the area where they’d been sitting.

“Do you understand, Ethan? I need to know we’re on the same page here.”

It looked like chalk. Like a layer of dried dust. Dried clay.

“Ethan?”

Ethan pointed to the ground under their chairs and feet. “What is all that shit?”

“Huh? What?” A few of the guys shifted, moving their feet to check under them. Finally Matthias muttered, “What the hell is he talking about?”

“You don’t see it? I’m talking about the marks on the floor, the shoe prints.”

“Okay,” Matthias said. “What about them?”

“They weren’t here earlier today,” Ethan said. “You know what else wasn’t here in the barn? Whoever left those shoe prints.” He pointed at the ones in question. Massive shoe prints in contrast to the dainty little prints that Lea or Kalani could have left behind. “Check your shoes,” Ethan said.

They checked, comparing them to the shoe print, which was a very unique design of waving lateral lines.

“This clay dust gets everywhere,” Ethan said, remembering Kalani’s speech earlier. Had she had any idea it was really a warning? “And when it gets wet—”

“Yeah, we got it,” Matthias said as he lifted his foot and looked at the bottom of his shoe. “It’s not mine.”

“Not mine either,” Logan said.

Jackson shook his head no for himself.

“Could it have been Tucker?” Matthias asked.

Another hush fell over the group.

“Whatever it is,” Jackson said, “and whoever it is, I don’t like it.”