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“Where are you getting this information?” Piper had one hand on her heart. Cameron could see the way she wanted to ask about the spiderweb of lines all leading to Vail, but she was resisting, likely fearing the answer.
 

“I could tell you,” Benjamin said, smiling, “but then I’d have to kill you. It has to do with how I can still get the Internet.” He tapped the screen for emphasis. “I can’t get at the websites full of cat videos for you anymore, but I do have access to a lot of well-connected nerds. People like me who’ve always suspected things we couldn’t admit to, or who have access to information that’s been kept secret. Like Area 51. Roswell. Both quite unremarkable, by the way. Roswell was about alien craft, but it was U.S. military using them — trying to recreate them anyway, and not doing very well. And Area 51 is yesterday’s news. Do you know where the real action is now?”
 

“Don’t say it, Dad.”
 

“Area 52,” Benjamin said.
 

Piper smiled indulgently.
 

“Anyway, with all these new monolith lines filled in, a pretty clear pattern is emerging. See?”
 

Cameron squinted at the screen. “Looks like a mess.”
 

Benjamin zoomed out farther. “Now?”
 

It looked like a highway map, or maybe a flight map from the inside of an airline magazine. Everything connected to everything else. Except for Vail. That spot was special, and more rock lines seemed to move toward it than anywhere else.
 

“Not really.”
 

Benjamin gave Cameron a look that said,
I have no son
. He pointed again. “It’s a parallel processing network. Do you see it now?”
 

“Is this like seeing any three things as being Orion’s belt, like the pyramids on the Giza plateau?”
 

“Funny you mention Giza, wiseass.” Benjamin hit a key, and the screen changed to show Europe, Africa, the Middle East. There were more lines, another place more connected than anywhere else — this time in the Nile River delta. “We’re seeing the same thing there, according to my international colleagues.”
 

“Colleagues?”
 

“Well-connected nut jobs.” He smiled a toothy grin at Piper then took another sip of his coffee.
 

Benjamin clicked through screens, each showing a part of the globe centered on one highly networked hub. He read them off. “Giza, Machu Pichu, Teotihuacán, Xi’an in China. Do you want to know how many ‘hubs’ like this there are in total?”
 

“Nine?” Piper guessed.
 

Benjamin pointed:
one win for the lady
. “Yep. Same as the number of people still missing.”
 

“How can you possibly be sure there are only nine people missing?” Piper asked.
 

“Well, we can’t,” Benjamin admitted. “But we do know there are nine people missing who are highly prominent, one — ”

“’Prominent’?”
 

“Like Meyer is prominent. Not ‘famous,’ really, but … say … prominent thinkers? Innovators? People about whom we can, once we start investigating, clearly say, ‘Ah, yes — that’s why this person is special.’ If I were to venture a guess — ”

“Don’t venture a guess, Dad.” Cameron put his forehead in his palm. Benjamin had made many of his guesses in front of Cameron’s friends in the past. Embarrassment always ensued.
   

“
If I were to venture a guess,
” Benjamin repeated, “I’d say they’re all representative minds of the best of what humanity has to offer.”
 

“You think they’re forming a brain trust,” Cameron said, sarcastic.
 

Benjamin pointed at the screen. “We know they’re interested in our thoughts. What you described? The reawakening of latent extrasensory phenomena after crossing the stones? That’s what I’d guess this network is for. So yes, it makes sense to me that they would be interested in people who represent ‘the human mind,’ say. The nine high-profile people we know are missing? There’s one from each of these locations. In several cases, they actually built their own residences or structures there, as you described Meyer talking about an ‘Axis Mundi.’ You know that’s what the Aztecs called their great temple at Tenochtitlán?”
 

“She does now,” Cameron said.
 

“But in all cases, whether they were able to build their own Axis or not,” Benjamin gave Cameron an eye, “they were actually
picked up
by an alien shuttle at the hub — the ‘axis’ — nearest them. And in a few cases,” he nodded at Piper, “they had to travel quite a way to get to their pickup point. As you described Meyer’s single-minded determination to reach Vail.”
 

Piper sighed. It was impossible to tell how she was taking this. She’d seen the map already, but only in the past few days had the updates arrived to make Vail’s prominence so obvious. The mess of lines had looked random before, but now they seemed much more coherent.
 

“Piper, you said that he didn’t talk about needing to rendezvous with a ship?”
 

Piper shook her head. They’d been through this many times. “If anything, he seemed to want to run away from them, like everyone else.”
 

Benjamin nodded. “I could give you my theories about that, but some people remain doubting Thomases, so I’ll save it.” He ticked his head toward Cameron for Piper’s benefit, and her nervous veneer cracked enough to smile. “Point is, looking at these maps, it seems hard to deny a few things. For one, these sites were carefully selected. All are mystical places shrouded in lore except for, interestingly, your lovely home.” He nodded at Piper, again tapping the screen. “We don’t know anything special about Vail at all, probably because real estate there is too expensive for Ancient Astronaut theorists to afford land.”
 

Piper laughed.
 

“Regardless,” he said, “to me, this picture — lines of stones and henges — looks like a neural net.” He touched a white line representing a double row of monoliths on the Colorado map. “Nerves.” He touched a dot, not at Vail, representing a circle. “Node,” he said, finally touching Vail.
 

“Brain,” recited a new voice.
 

Cameron turned. Charlie was standing behind them.
 

“Quite right,” Benjamin said, looking up at Charlie, knowing the newcomer had more to say.

“The spores I’ve been working with have been entirely dormant. But now, they’re beginning to germinate.”

“What does that mean?” Benjamin said.
 

“Ask them.” Charlie nodded at Piper and Cameron then gestured toward the screen. “You ask me, the network they’ve been building to harvest our thoughts is finished.”
 

He squatted in front of Piper. “So tell me, Piper, your mind is waking back up, isn’t it?”
 

Piper nodded.
 

“It’s about to start, isn’t it?”

Cameron looked from Charlie to Benjamin, from Benjamin to Charlie. There was something here they hadn’t explained. Some small detail withheld, while the past three months had ticked by, while the network of stones and nodes and brains had been stitching loose ends, inching toward completion.
 

“What? What’s about to start?”
 

Cameron was asking Charlie or Benjamin, but Piper answered.
 

She looked up. Toward the lab’s ceiling. Toward the ship hovering above.
 

“I can hear Meyer,” she said, as if connecting pieces of a puzzle that had, until now, refused solving. “I can hear him in the ship, wanting to come home.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Trevor was asleep, dreaming about bowling with Christopher in a non-apocalyptic world. Turns out that Christopher — in dreams anyway — liked the same kind of nachos as Trevor, like they made at the Brunswick Lanes alley, where they squirted that overly tangy sour cream that squeezed from the machine in a star. He and Christopher both had dates. Trevor’s was Piper. She kept sitting on his lap between frames. Christopher’s date was some blonde named Candace. She had a giant wart on her hand, and a large part of the dream seemed to center on Trevor’s indecision about whether or not to point the wart out to Christopher. But he was also on his way to a 300 game, so …

“Trevor.”
 

“Mmm.”
 

“
Trevor.
”
 

“Mmm!”

His eyes came open. He rolled on the cot, annoyed at being yanked from the dream, and found himself staring up at his mother. Lila’s cot was empty. Heather was on her knees at the cot’s side, her hair a black bird’s nest.
 

“What?”
 

“You need to tell me — what have Christopher, Dan, and Terrence been talking about, for our ‘long-term plan’?”
 

Trevor wondered if he was still dreaming. His head felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds, and here was Mom, asking him about planning. Was she tired of being a comedian, planning a change to goal-oriented motivational speaking if the aliens ever left Earth and let the planet get back to business?
Long-term plan?
In the dark, middle-of-the-night room, her words barely made sense.
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“
You know what I mean!
”
 

His mom seemed to realize her mistake — her voice too loud and tremulous in the quiet bunker, so she looked nervously side to side and smoothed her hair with one hand, the other playing with the neckline of her nightshirt as if it needed something to do. Her eyes were too wide, missing their usual insults. Without her caustic manner, she seemed like another person, soft like a crab with no shell. Trevor felt embarrassed, as if seeing her naked.
 

Then, whispering a little, closer to her normal voice: “You’re one of the guys. You hang out with them all the time. They have a plan, right? We’ve been here six months. We can’t be planning to stay forever.” She laughed, and it sounded off-kilter. “God, we
really
can’t be planning that.” Eyes darting. “When they went up that one time. When they brought back video of the big rocks around the house. They were planning something then, weren’t they?”
 

Trevor watched his mother, unsure. Dan and Terrence were sticking to their story: they’d gone up for recon and to plant something called “sonic whistles” among the tents to drive the topsiders away — devices that Trevor had never heard of and was pretty sure didn’t exist. Sonic whistles sounded like an overly convenient, artificially humane solution to the pressing need to clear space on the lawn so they could breathe below. They sounded like something people might make up to tell other folks who couldn’t handle harsh realities, like how parents told children their dead pets had gone to live on a farm.
 

He’d told Christopher to stop bullshitting him, and Christopher had admitted they’d taken explosives. They’d only managed to plant one, and blowing it now would only hurt people and possibly enrage the alien ship that had killed Vincent.
 

“They were going to plant sonic whistles. To scare those people away.”
 

“Don’t bullshit me, Trevor. This is important.”
 

“I’m not … I’m telling you the truth, Mom.”
 

“Could you find out? Could you find out what they were really doing?”
 

“They weren’t doing anything, M — ”

She shook him by his shoulders, her mouth twisting. “Stop it! This is important!”
 

Her face returned to normal almost immediately, but for a moment she’d been transparent. Trevor had been worrying about his mom for a while as her habits and moods shifted and changed. This midnight encounter, with only a small, glowing night light to dispel the shadows, was only confirming the new oddity. They’d been down here too long. Trevor had found new friends and fared well, he thought, but Lila was moody and strange, Raj followed her like a servant or minion, and their mother had become … well …
this
.
 

“Okay, okay. They were … don’t be mad.”
 

“I won’t be mad. I promise.”
 

“Christopher says they were going to use some of Dad’s stash to … well … level the house.”
 

“His stash?”
 

“Some of that military stuff. Bombs, pretty much.”
 

“Bombs?”
 

“Explosives? I saw a crate in there once when I was nosing around. The plastic stuff.”
 

“
Plastic explosive?
He had plastic fucking — ”

Trevor shrugged, now sitting up. “You know Dad. You saw the gas masks. And there’s Uzis in there too, all sorts of stuff.”
 

It was really no big deal. Trevor was used to certain necessities of living in the New World. Vincent was dead, Morgan Matthews’s brains had stained the living room, and a bunch of people had been fried topside by the alien ships. They’d lived through a riot on the way to Vail and cleared a nest of bad guys from the house before getting inside. Things were different now.