An eerie darkness hung over the place. Everything was gone. Offices empty. Halls strewn with beer cans and blankets. Walls dotted with circles of black cigarette ashes. She walked so fast I could barely keep up, but it wasn’t as if I knew what I was looking for.

She pushed open wide fire doors into a concrete-floored room the size of a big-league infield. Light poured through the windows. There was stuff everywhere. Crushed boxes. Piles of shredded tarp. Plastic bags. I heard the squeak of rats.

“Here you are.” She stood in the center of the room with her arms out.

“Here I am.” Wires hung from the ceiling. A few ballasts were left, hanging crooked and bulbless. On the verge of a massive hack, it’s easy to get excited and make a mistake. Accuracy is everything. I slowed down and looked at every single object. Every bit of wall space. “Where’s the machinery?”

“Sold. It’s just a shell. Globalization sucks.”

Jesus. As if she understood anything about it.

“That phone you got would cost four thousand dollars without globalization.”

“This?” She took out her phone as if it had germs and she had an immune deficiency.

“The complexity of making things can only be affordable with either automation or cheap labor. Trust me. I know.”

Pocketing the phone, she nodded, rocking her cowboy boot heel on the concrete. “You know what I know? I know people. I know this town. I know Marty Luman. He’s real smart but didn’t go to college because he could make a good living here. Now it’s too late. I know everyone in the Shover family because the entire town fed them when they lost their insurance and went broke paying for their daughter’s leukemia treatments. I know Wally Quinn, who got so depressed when this factory closed that he shot his entire family then shot himself. Everyone who had two nickels to rub together left and took their chances someplace else, and I miss them. I miss all of them. These people are real. They’re my friends. This whole town was built around this factory, and when Earl Barrington struggled to keep it open, we all struggled with him. So I don’t give a shit about this phone because I got no one to call anymore.”

That gorgeous bottom lip quivered.

“What happened to the kid?”

“What kid?” she spit out.

“Leukemia kid? Shriver.”

“Greta Shrover died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.” She tossed me my wallet. The throw was good, but I wasn’t expecting it, and it wound up open and facedown on the floor. I scooped it up. “Are we done here?”

Was I done? What was I looking for again?

“There’s nothing to steal, and I didn’t bring my bulldozer. So if you don’t want to walk around with me, you don’t have to.”

She turned her back to me. “Fine.”

Finally free, I could make short work of this.

I bounded up the steps to the second floor. It was divided into two big rooms. They had less junk than the first floor but were just as useless. I checked every room, every scrawl on every piece of garbage, every mark on the walls. Nothing.

I wasn’t worried. Not yet. But I was getting ready to worry.

Third floor. The ceiling was a little lower, and there was no production room. Halls and office after office after office with cots, bags of garbage, broken heaters, a gas generator, a tent, sleeping bags. The stench was distinctly human. It didn’t take long to see what had been happening on the third floor, but checking every single room and finding nothing boiled my raw anxiety until the shell of my denial fell away.

I was running out of places to check.

In the back, I found an open elevator shaft.

Up it, I heard Harper say, “Taylor? You all right?”

“No, I’m not all right.”

Her head appeared from the first floor. “Why not?”

“Because I came a long fucking way and there’s nothing here.”

“What are you looking for?”

What would be the harm of telling her at this point?

“A message.” I was shouting, and my voice bounced off the walls of the shaft, making me sound even angrier. Good, because that was how mad I was. “A cryptic, serial killer breadcrumb left by a fucker who stole something from me. And I’m not trying to insult you, but you wouldn’t know it if you saw it.”

“Did you check the roof too?”

“No, I did not check the fucking roof.”

I didn’t wait for her to answer but stalked back to the hall and up the stairs. The exit to the roof said, EMERGENCY — ALARM WILL SOUND. It was cracked open already.

Slapping the door open, I burst onto the cracked tar of the roof. The grey sheen had melted away, leaving a blue sky and blasting sun. Was the message in the scenery? Walking the perimeter, I could see clear to the horizon. A slope here, a cluster of buildings there, a city far enough away that it was a handful of grey Legos. Harper’s shitty non-color Chevy sat on the other side of the fence. Past the tall reeds flowed a slate waterway too big for a stream and not quite a river. A single house peeked over the trees on the other side of it. The top shingles were pocked with newer, brighter patches. It loomed like a haunted mansion with a piebald roof.

What the fuck was I supposed to find?

I checked my phone. No signal. Nothing. What kind of black hole in the center of the country was this?

Fuck this.

I paced to the edge of the roof because even though I said, “Fuck this,” with every step, I couldn’t leave a single stone unturned. Was I supposed to see something on the roof or in the view from the roof? Was there a basement? Maybe I was supposed to be in the basement? I wasn’t leaving until I figured it out. I’d crawl into one of those sleeping bags for the night if I had to.

I wasn’t coming back here to do again what I should have done the first time. No way. The next time I got on a plane, I was going somewhere that actually existed with victory in one pocket and the world in the other.

I could see the interstate and a billboard for a topless place. In the other direction, an ad for the closed diner I’d passed on the way in. Nothing. No message on the horizon. None on the roof itself. There was so much graffiti on the walls that I walked right over the spray paint underfoot.

“Hey!” Harper called from the doorway leading to the roof.

I looked at her and saw the red writing at her feet. The foreshortening flattened the scrawl, making it readable.

As she walked toward me, Harper said, “We should—”

I held my hand up to stop her from stepping on the message, then I put it together and wanted her and a million others to trample the code until it disappeared.

I touched a red letter. It was dry. A pebble had gotten painted on. I put it in my pocket.

“We should go.” She completed her thought even though she was distracted by the writing. “It’s going to be cold tonight.”

“Sure.”

“Is this what you were looking for?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Does it mean something?”

Did it? I knew what she meant, but I asked myself a different question with the same words. Did it mean something? Did I have to obey? Did I have to believe? Did I have to trust?

“The numbers inside the stars are ASCII text. It says, ‘Welcome.’ The next part is where the guy I’m looking for calls me by a code name I have on the internet. Says… see right here it says if? If I cooperate, I get something I want, and everyone laughs at me if I don’t. Last line between the stars says, ‘Stay a while,’ which is real cute. Because the longer I stay, the more likely I am to be an even bigger loser and have the world laughing at me.”

“Huh. That’s weird.”

“He wants me to think he’s in Barrington.”

“Interesting.”

“Do you know a guy who knows stuff like this? Computer code? You might not recognize it—”

“Don’t know a guy like that.”

“He might be in IT security, or he might be a kid who stays inside a lot and plays video games.”

“Nope.”

“He could be really young.”

She shrugged. “I have to go.”

Everything I’d ever built could crumble, and she was shrugging. Great. She took off, not even looking to make sure I was following. Bounding down the steps, hair flying, she wasn’t wasting any time. I chased her down the dirty stairways and outside.

“Wait up!” I called.

She didn’t slow down, going to the other side of the gate, and she waited there for me as if I was a kid she wished she hadn’t taken to the supermarket.

“I’ll take you back to your car.” She slammed the gate behind me and picked the lock off the chain links. What was her deal? “There’s another hotel about twenty-five miles down the interstate. Or the country club in Doverton might have a room.”

She knew something. She had to. She was trying to get rid of me so she could… what? Talk to the dude?

“I can’t go that far.”

“Why not?” She yanked the lock to make sure it stuck and headed for the car.

Because I’m afraid of leaving the geohash.

Because there’s something on your mind.

“I have the feeling I’m supposed to stay here.”

“Really?” she called over her shoulder before she got in the driver’s side.

“Really.” I jogged to catch her, putting my hand on the top of the door. “And I’m kind of stuck.” I bowed to see in the open window.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Yeah. You are.”

She turned the ignition over, and I hurried around the car and hopped in the passenger side. We regarded each other for a minute. Her eyes were a sample of every single iris color in the human genome. She broke our gaze to pull forward and stopped the car at the striped arm.

“Your turn to get the gate up,” she said.

I didn’t know what switch she’d hit back there or if there were wires I had to cross. I didn’t know if there was a key or a code. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there and tell her to do it. I wasn’t going to puss out on a challenge. Because that was what it was. Flat out.

“Fine.”

I got out and looked behind the box. It was everything I’d expected. A tangle of dozens of indistinguishable wires. Worse, they’d been painted white as if on spite. Two had to touch to make the arm go up. Four had been stripped.

She pulled the car up to the edge of the gate. The arm would swing up then down. If I did something wrong and sent it down early, it would land on the car—or her. I was frustrated as hell and a little pissed off at her for daring me to figure out how to do what she already knew how to do, but I didn’t want to hurt her or bang up her car.

When I touched two of the stripped wires, the arm buzzed but didn’t move.

Mathematically, the presence of four stripped wires made me less likely to find the combination. Three would have made it easier. I would have found the green wrapping, which would have been the ground wire, and eliminated it as a possibility.

I scratched the white paint off one.

Blue.

“Do you need help?” she called.

“No!”

The next wire was blue too.

“I got it,” I added.

But I didn’t, because the third wire was blue, which should have meant the fourth was the ground wire. But I checked anyway and it was blue as the sky. Either there was no ground wire, or they’d run out of green, or they didn’t give a shit and never grounded the wiring.

I touched two more wires and a ball of light appeared. The copper ends of the wires went on fire.

“Do you want me to tell you what to do?” Harper asked from a mile away.

“I said I have it.”

“You don’t sound like you have it.”

I didn’t have it. I didn’t have it at all, but fuck if I was going to admit it.

“You have to—”

“I said I have it!”

Getting out from behind the box, I stood by the gate and faced the car.

She leaned out the window like a fucking know-it-all. “You don’t want me to tell you?”

She was smirking as if she knew damn well I was in over my head. Well, what the brain couldn’t puzzle through, the body could correct with brute force.

“No.”

I bent my knees and wedged my shoulder under the bar. My guess was that the gate had some kind of broken locking mechanism, which was why it slammed down so quickly. Which meant if I straightened my knees, it would rise with me.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “If you can’t figure it out, just say so.”

“So.” I straightened my knees, and my shoulder picked up the gate. It was heavy, and it hurt like fuck, but it went.

“Shit.” She pulled the car forward, but the gate tapped the top of her windshield. “I’ll pull back and you can drive…”

Fuck that. I got my hands under the gate and nudged myself back toward the pivot point at the box. The changed angle would bring the other end of the gate a little farther up. It got heavier and harder to move as the pressure from the fulcrum increased.

It lifted and the shitty little Chevy passed through. I dropped the arm. My shoulder was unhappy, but my feet moved fast to get in before she took off.

“You have a really massive ego,” she said, getting onto the highway.

“All the wires were the same color. Who does that?”

“Wires?”

“You have a different name for them out here?”

“You didn’t see the switch?”

The switch? There was a switch?

“You didn’t see the switch.” She changed from question to statement.

“I guess I didn’t.”

She tried not to smile at my utter ineptitude. The force of her will against the strength of her instincts tightened the muscles around her mouth, twisting it into a wave form.

“It’s cute the way you’re trying to save my really massive ego.” I had to smile, and so did she. “But you’re going to hurt yourself like that. Go ahead, laugh.”

She laughed, slapping the steering wheel. I laughed a little with her.

Just a little.