I spent the rest of the week completing a work assignment and packing for my trip to Qia. If I could set aside the fact that Salman expected me to sleep with him, I was looking forward to the visit, not least because I would be getting my book back at the end of it.

But when I reluctantly confessed to Aisha the devil’s bargain I had made with him, her brows shot up in scorn and alarm.

“Did he pressure you into doing this?” she asked.

“I’m the one who suggested it,” I explained. It was mid-morning, and we had gone to the park to enjoy the beautiful day. “I don’t see what the harm is, honestly. It’s just one night, and then, I’ll never have to see him again.”

“I can’t say I think very much of him for going along with it.” Aisha glared at a passing goose. “Are you actually looking forward to it, or are you just looking forward to having your book back?”

“Yes? Both? I don’t know.” Aisha had an uncomfortable habit of asking questions to which I didn’t know the answers. “If we were just going out for dinner, I think I would be ecstatic. As it is, I feel as though I’m packing for my own funeral.”

“See, and that’s what bugs me about this whole deal.” She tore off the end of a baguette and threw it at the goose, who reared back in surprise and then struck at it with its long neck. “Personally, I’d feel better about it if I didn’t think he was taking advantage of your naivety and desperation.”

“Thanks…?” As much as I appreciated her support, I didn’t like being called naïve or desperate.

“No, I mean it,” said Aisha, not helpfully. “I guess it all depends on whether you actually want to sleep with him or if you feel like it’s your only option. There’s all the difference in the world between happily consenting to do something and feeling forced into it.”

I stood silently, feeling that terrible tightening in the stomach that accompanies the speaking of an unpleasant truth. Though the idea had been mine, it was impossible for me to say whether I felt coerced or not.

If I had been happily consenting, as Aisha suggested, then why this perpetual feeling of dread? Why did it feel like I was walking to my death?

* * *

I was up late reading articles about Qia when my phone buzzed. It was one of my colleagues from the Hornpipe, Brent Edelstein.

Did you see this? he texted. There’s something strange going on in New Mexico and hardly anyone’s talking about it.

Curious, I opened the link he’d sent me, which led to the website of a local news station in Albuquerque. A reporter I recognized—a slender Latina woman in her mid-twenties—was standing out in the desert, with a backdrop of goat pastures and dry scrub. An old station wagon with no tires lay half-hidden in the overgrown grass behind her. The sky overhead was an ominous shade of gray flecked with thick, dark clouds.

“Residents of this farming community outside Taos are reporting freak weather conditions that local scientists have dismissed as ‘mass hysteria.’ In the past week, multiple residents claim a mysterious rain of gelatinous goo has descended on their cars, houses, and barns. No one has any idea what the goo might be, but one woman fears the worst.”

The scene cut to an elderly woman wearing a flowered button-down and thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses who gestured angrily to the pasture behind her, where a single goat stood eating lazily.

“I came out here one morning last week to water my aloe plants,” she said, “and the ground around the driveway was completely covered in this odd gooey substance. It was like someone had come by and dumped jelly all over the front yard. And I don’t like it, and no one will tell me what it is or whether it’s dangerous!”

The video cut back to the reporter, who said, “This isn’t the first time that residents of Taos have reported a bizarre phenomenon that baffles scientists.” She gave a brief history of the so-called “Taos hum,” a low humming sound that some people in Taos claimed to hear and some did not. “Scientists who investigated the hum said it was all in the mind. Now, some scientists are making the same case for the rain of goo.”

The reporter then interviewed a military physicist working out of Los Alamos, who intoned gravely, “I’ve driven out there, I’ve searched for the goo they claimed was raining down, and frankly, I haven’t seen it. Sometimes, in situations like this, you have one person who thinks they see something, and then everyone sees it.”

The reporter added, “But Taos residents aren’t reassured.”

“I know what I saw, and it wasn’t in my head,” said a local butcher. “It was as real as rain.”

“I’m not one of those crazies,” added the elderly woman. “I could care less about UFOs or Roswell or phantom lights. I think the military knows what this is, and I want to know why they won’t tell us. What are they hiding?”

As soon as the video ended, I texted Brent excitedly:

What do you make of that?

I don’t know, he said, adding a shrug emoji. I’d go out there tomorrow if I could, but I thought you might like to have a crack at it if you’re not busy.

Given that I had already finished packing and my schedule was clear through the rest of the week, I decided to take a drive out to Taos the following day.

Early that morning, I packed myself a sandwich and a couple of bottled waters and, taking care not to wake Aunt Patricia, crept outside into a world that was just waking. As I drove through the center of town, the streets were still mostly empty, except for the occasional jogger, and coffee shops and delicatessens were slowly stirring in the blue-tinted pre-dawn stillness.

Because the drive itself was going to take most of the day, I had already reserved a hotel room in Taos and planned to return home the following morning. I reached the New Mexico border around mid-morning. The temperature had soared into the nineties, and the sun shone without mercy on the blindingly white highway.

In the first couple hours of my trip, I counted only three other cars on the highway. Otherwise, a silence had settled over the desert. My car wound its way around mountain passes and level stretches of sand where the first atom bombs were tested. I began to feel some sympathy for the scientists who had examined the reports out of Taos and seen only hysteria: a person could go crazy out here amid all this emptiness.

About an hour outside of town, the skies began to darken, and a curtain of rain descended over the sky in the east. A strong wind scattered red sand into thick dust clouds and battered the skeletal limbs of creosote bushes.

When the car stalled for a minute and I got out to investigate, I was surprised to find that the temperature had dipped into the seventies. It was the kind of weather we didn’t usually get in Phoenix until around Halloween: wet, but still warm.

It was something of a relief to forget about the trip to Qia for a couple hours as I explored Taos and interviewed residents at a local diner that specialized in breakfast and burgers. A waitress with pinned hair and glittering, jewel-like glasses told me she was afraid to let her children go outside, and she had been forced to keep her dog in the house after he got sick from eating what she thought was contaminated goo food. One patron after another related the same stories I had already heard in the video. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere new until a heavyset man in his fifties wearing a blue trucker’s hat pulled me aside near the jukebox.

“You know they’re building something out there, right?” he asked. “I don’t know what it is, but they got the whole place cordoned off with barbed wire.”

“Since when?” I asked.

“Since about a month ago, right around the time the rain started. There’s a whole big warehouse out there that wasn’t there a month ago.”

Scribbling furiously, I asked him, “Where can I find this place?”

“It’s up over there by Mount Diablo Ranch,” he said.

At my request, he sketched me a rudimentary map on the back of a paper napkin. Thanking him for the tip, I climbed back into my car, praying it wouldn’t stall again, and headed out along Highway 64 toward Mount Diablo.

Rain had started by the time I reached the immense length of flatland and barbed wire at the north edge of town where the nameless, nondescript warehouse was located. The building might easily have passed for a tin-roofed shack if not for its extraordinary size: the White House could have fit comfortably inside. A pair of tall smokestacks at either end of the building belched columns of white smoke into the rapidly darkening air.

Not wanting to get arrested but needing to see the building up close, I parked the car at the side of the road and got out. Crossing a narrow ditch on foot, I crept up to the fence. Grey globs of gelatin were beginning to rain down on stones, scrub, and cacti. A scarlet-red potato beetle attempting to escape the deluge wriggled its legs furiously and stalked off, annoyed at having its world upended.

It was one thing to hear the reports on the news and another to see it for myself. Up until now, I had half-suspected that the locals were deluded or exaggerating. With a new fervor, I pulled out my camera and began clicking away madly. I’d only taken a few pictures when I heard the unnerving sound of a vehicle slowing to a halt directly behind me.

I froze, realizing only too late that I shouldn’t have come out here alone. Instinctively, I scanned the horizon for a place to hide, but the flatness of the area and the lack of cover made that impossible. I could have made a run for my car if the truck hadn’t parked right next to it.

The sight of the truck was ominous enough, but my heart nearly stopped when the driver’s side door opened and David Icarus emerged, looking furious.

He was accompanied by a broad-shouldered, unsmiling man in a Fire Cloud uniform, and together, the two men were striding rapidly toward me with an intensity that suggested this wasn’t a friendly visit. They were standing directly in the path of the car; I could only escape if I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction, and I wasn’t about to allow them the satisfaction of making a coward out of me.

Instead, I stood my ground and waited, my pulse racing, fearing the worst.

“What a pleasant surprise,” said Icarus, maliciously beaming. “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to catch you out here in Taos, though come to think of it, maybe I should have.”

Before I could respond, his companion came forward and grabbed my camera with his huge hands, pulling it out of my grasp. I yelled furiously and lunged at him, beating him with my fists, but I might as well have been charging an elephant for all the good it did me.

“Let’s not get over-excited, now,” said Icarus with an air of perfect calm. “Save your energy for something that matters. You’re going to need it.”

“Give me back my camera, you cretin,” I shouted as the second man moved to block my path.

“Possession is just a matter of perspective, really,” Icarus said lightly. “Anyway, maybe in the future, you’ll think twice before creeping on private property. I could have you arrested, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere near your warehouse,” I spat, “as much as I would like to.”

“Bummer for you,” he replied with exasperating cheer, “but this whole property belongs to Fire Cloud. The police will be escorting you off if you’re not gone within two minutes.”

“What about my camera?”

“I promise you’ll get it back in a week or three. Don’t try to make me the villain, here,” he added, raising his hands in surrender. “It’s my job to keep stragglers away from our properties. We wouldn’t keep having these run-ins if you’d mind your business.”

“If you weren’t brewing toxic rain, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place.” I motioned to the grey goo now raining down all around us, which Icarus seemed to be determinedly avoiding looking at. “Who else is going to hold you accountable?”

As though in response, Icarus stooped down and picked up a small frog that had been lurking under a stone. The frog tried to wriggle out of his hand, but Icarus serenely stroked the top of its head.

“Looks fine to me,” he said. “Anyway, if I were you, I’d be less worried about the hypothetical harm to some horned toad and more worried about the very real harm that could come to my friends—or lovers.”

Despite being manhandled and threatened and losing my camera, it was the first moment in the conversation when I had felt genuine fear.

“What, exactly, does that mean?” I asked quietly.

Icarus returned the frog to its stone and shrugged amiably. “I’m just saying, if anything were to happen to a certain young man you had begun seeing, you wouldn’t be happy about it.”

I kept my face impassive, but my heart was frantically racing. His statement was worded vaguely enough that it could have meant nearly anything. Surely, Icarus didn’t mean to suggest that he knew about Salman. He was just saying that if I did begin seeing anyone, I would be placing them in danger with my meddling. Which, admittedly, still wasn’t much of a comfort.

“Stay out of it,” I said, sounding bolder than I felt. “Don’t pretend you know anything about my love life. Because you don’t.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Icarus with chilling equanimity. “I know that you’ve already been banned from this and all other Fire Cloud premises, and I don’t like it when reporters don’t know their place.”

“Just go home, Icarus. Both of you, go home.”

“You want me to go home?” he asked in mock surprise. “I’ll leave as soon as you leave. Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to eat dinner with my family tonight. But one of us is making that impossible because she doesn’t know how to follow the rules.”

“Screw you and your rules,” I said, though I sensed I had better leave before he physically escorted me off the property or phoned the police. “I’m not the one who spent a year in prison for assault.”

Icarus’s face darkened, and the nonchalant smile he had been wielding like a weapon throughout the discussion evaporated.

“Do you want to see me get really angry?” he asked. “Because if you do, you can keep talking.”

With a contemptuous glare that made it clear exactly how I felt about both of them, I began walking back to my car. Icarus and his assistant followed behind at a few paces the whole way, as if to make sure I didn’t get lost.

Once back in the car, I beat my fists against the steering wheel in frustration. Increasingly, it felt like I was being blocked at every turn—first by the creditors who had seized my dad’s estate, and now by this corporation. If I kept up this fight, I was going to lose everything.

I drove back toward Taos, toward the diner I had visited earlier, while the sky darkened and dusk descended. I couldn’t shake the memory of Icarus’s comment about lovers. Of course, he had just been trying to intimidate me. Of course, he didn’t know who I had been seeing; he couldn’t have. Fire Cloud didn’t have access to my phone. And I used a secure email for personal correspondence. Besides, Salman lived all the way in Paris and Qia, and Icarus lacked the ability to murder someone from halfway across the world. He’d have to come up with better threats if he wanted to silence me.

At least, that was what I told myself. But it was only a small comfort.

Back in the diner, I pulled out my computer and list of passwords, relieved that my camera had been the only item confiscated. As soon as I managed to log into my personal email—the password was so complicated that it took me three tries to get it right—I shot my ghostwriter a message.

Hey Irene, are you down for another assignment? I asked her. Because I’ve been out in New Mexico today, doing some digging, and you won’t believe what I found…