The morning after Jason’s funeral, David woke in darkness to the sound of a knock at his door. He dressed hurriedly and found Erickson at the door, holding a canvas bag.
“Here,” Erickson said, pushing the bag into David’s arms as he stepped into the apartment.
The FBI man sat on one of the unmatched chairs, then pointed at the couch.
“Sit.”
David eased onto the couch. The bag held his uniform, cleaned and pressed. And his black Stetson. He opened his mouth to make a joke about what he would’ve done if the hat had been missing, then thought better of it. He took the hat out and absently worked the curve of the brim in his hands.
“You are entering a new world, sheriff. A world that has rules. I cannot stress to you enough the importance of these rules. I am going to lay them out for you, then you can ask any questions that you have, and then you will follow these rules.”
David nodded his acceptance of the terms.
“The official story is that the FBI is assisting local agencies in your cousin’s murder investigation. Anyone asks why, it’s because the county and the state police don’t have the resources to handle it on their own. As a witness in said murder investigation, you are working directly with the FBI to identify suspects. Granted, some days you’re going to need to be out on patrol, doing your regular job. But other days—when I contact you or when you contact me with new information—you will be reporting to FBI offices at the Countryman Federal Building.”
Erickson took out his lighter and began to play with it. He continued.
“Except you will not be reporting to the Countryman Building. You will be parking in the bottom level, through the security gate. There, you will leave your phone and radio and gun in your truck. You will wear civilian clothing. You will get into one of the white vans. You will be taken to Site One. There, security will search you and then guide you to Building Seventeen. You will go only where instructed. You will talk to no one outside of myself, Doctor Lee, and Priest and Conover. There, you will have case files from the three murders and any resources that you need.”
It seemed as if he was finished.
“Why all the secrecy?” David asked.
Erickson gave him a friendly, pitying look. As if he was talking to a child, one whose capabilities he’d just overestimated.
“Kid, you do understand what that giant is, don’t you?”
David didn’t answer.
“It’s the single most valuable resource on the planet. A gold mine, times infinity. It just happened that it fell here, in our backyard. But the whole world has eyes on it. They all want to know what it really is, what it’s made out of, what can be done with it. They want to get their hands on it,” Erickson concluded with a knowing look.
“Spies?” David asked.
“Of course,” Erickson exclaimed. “What did you think? That the Chinese and Russians and whoever else would just sit on the sidelines and wait to see what we do with the giant? If they find out you have access, then you’re a target.”
No, he hadn’t thought about spies. He’d been too busy cleaning up after the addicts and dealers and hustlers and prostitutes, the carjackers and juvenile delinquents.
“Well,” Erickson implored. “Questions?”
David thought. “What happens if I slip up?”
Erickson pocketed the lighter.
“I’ll be there to guide you, kid. And you don’t have to worry too much about Conover. He’s an old navy officer with a whole lot of years behind a desk. But Priest, she is one of the high-ups at the Defense Security Service. Do you know what the Defense Security Service is, kid?”
David shook his head. “No.”
“Yeah. Nobody else does, either. Which means whatever she does is shit that stays in the shadows. Whatever you do, don’t piss her off.” Erickson stood. “Good luck.”
And so, David found himself in the back of an unmarked white van, headed back to Site One. Erickson’s parting gift was an ID badge that was heavy for its size, as if made of metal. It was solid black, the size of a credit card, with a hole punched out so that it could connect to a lanyard.
There were others in the van, a diverse bunch except in that they all kept their eyes down. They must’ve been given the same rule: talk to no one. He looked out through the window at the apartment towers rising up above the flat horizon. Could there be someone up there, even now, tracking the progress of the white van, trying to learn who was inside?
In the silence, the previous day returned. The encounter at the cemetery. His long-lost cousin, suddenly there, alive and transformed. He hadn’t known what to say. All that had come to his lips was the name.
“Ben.”
It had been the wrong thing to say. The moment of hopefulness and reconnection vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. It was as if a shield had been lowered, just for an instant, before being raised again.
“It’s Charlotte now,” she told him.
He tried to recover, insisting that she join him to see the family. Or that they just go somewhere the two of them. To catch up, to remember Jason. It was almost more than he could process, the loss of one cousin and the addition of another happening at once.
She said no, she needed to leave. Work. She hoped she would see him later. She walked down from the hill into the waiting car and was gone. Of course she left. She just saw her own grave. Instead of accepting her, her parents had told the family she was dead. And then what did David say to her? She wouldn’t be called Ben anymore. He should’ve known that. Shouldn’t have said it. Should have said anything else.
The van pulled into the massive white hangar, stopping in front of the security checkpoint. David willed the interaction out of his thoughts. He needed to focus. He needed to find Jason’s killer. Nothing else mattered.
Walking into the security line, he felt as he had the first day he’d gone off to college. Out of place. Surrounded by people he didn’t know. Desperate to be back in the confines of the familiar.
He followed the others, who subjected themselves to full body searches at the hands of soldiers, then walked through multiple scanners. At the end, each tapped a black ID card to a red-lighted kiosk. When it turned green, they proceeded. He tapped his card. The kiosk turned orange. Before he could say anything, a soldier was beside him.
“This way,” the soldier said.
It was day, and the halls were busier. People moving to and from offices. A door opened, and he snuck a glance at what seemed to be a laboratory before the door slid shut and chopped off his view. Through another door, he saw what looked like a cafeteria. He hadn’t considered it before, but he supposed the bulk of the scientists lived in Site One. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people here. Far more than the white vans could shuttle in and out each day.
The buildings were laid out on a grid, and windows allowed sunlight through, so that David retained his sense of direction. It seemed that the buildings were numbered in sequence, beginning with the one closest to Gulliver’s face, then increasing in a snaking pattern up and down the rows. He memorized the turns they made, in case he ever had to make this journey on his own.
After several minutes of silent walking, they came to Building Seventeen and to an unmarked door. The soldier stood and waited. David wasn’t sure what to do, then remembered the ID card in his pocket and tapped it to a screen beside the door. It turned green. He stepped inside.
The room was as large as it was featureless. Maybe the lack of any adornment made it seem even larger than it was. White walls, a white ceiling overhead with recessed LED lights. Around the walls, there were three other doors, each with a security screen. In the middle of the room was a broad table with seats for some thirty people, though only one person sat at it now. Priest. She looked at him with what seemed to be annoyance.
“You’re here,” she said.
“Is this where I’ll be working?”
She stood.
“This is our meeting room. For those of us who know the truth. Conover, Erickson, Doctor Lee, me, now you. That’s it. No one else has access to this part of the building.”
She walked to one of the doors along the wall.
“Tap your badge here.”
He followed her and did as instructed. The second his ID card touched the sensor, the panel flashed red and barked an angry tone. He looked at her, confused.
“Through here is Doctor Lee’s lab,” she explained. “You are not allowed inside, as you can see.”
She pointed to the door at the far end of the room.
“You are not allowed through that door, either.”
David wanted to ask what was through that door, but Erickson’s warning kept repeating. Don’t piss her off.
She led him to the third door and nodded at the security screen. He tapped his ID card. Green. The door clicked as it unlocked.
“This is your office,” Priest said, guiding him through.
It was a modest space. Blank white walls. No windows. A desk. A table laden with files. Case files, he could tell. Binders thick with forensic reports, crime scene photos, notes from investigators, transcriptions of witness interviews. The only other door led to a closet-sized bathroom.
“The wall is a white board. There are markers in the desk,” Priest said. “Get up to speed. If you have questions, just ask. And none of these files leave this room.”
With that, she left, and David had no idea how to contact her, or Erickson, or anyone. He didn’t know how to leave or if he could, without permission. So he sat at the table and began to read.
There was a summary briefing on top, something he guessed Erickson had prepared for him, covering the basic sketch of the case. The FBI had initially been alerted to the patterned injuries on Jim Holly, the tour guide, and when Kapoor turned up with matching wounds, they knew it was the same suspect. The case was remarkable mostly for how little evidence there was. No fingerprints or DNA or even fibers. No clear footprints. No witnesses. And no security footage.
That last bit didn’t surprise David. Little Springs had been the kind of town where you don’t just leave your car unlocked, you leave your keys inside. No one put up security cameras. And New Town had been built so fast, there were plenty of places that didn’t have security systems or cameras.
Holly had been killed at the airport, which should be locked down. Except his tourism company was in an old building just outside of the airport proper. There was a mechanic who said he thought he saw a man of average height but couldn’t be sure. Nothing that told David anything more than he already knew.
Each of the victims had his own file. David picked up the first, the pilot. Holly had been a commercial helicopter pilot in Texas, most recently running his own operation, flying tourists out over the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston. He’d moved to Little Springs more than a year ago, setting up as soon as the airport was finished. He’d charge a thousand dollars a ticket for a half-hour flight to see Gulliver from above. His wife moved up with him. She was a teacher at the new high school they built to the northeast of Old Town. Holly had no known debts, no prior criminal record. Nothing to suggest that someone would want to stab him to death and desecrate his corpse.
When he first became a deputy, David realized that he approached investigating crimes the way Grandma Mariam had taught him to write poetry. You fill your head with observations and instincts first, she’d said, taking in bite-sized pieces of the world. Then you tumble those fragments about in your mind, letting the rough-hewn edges collide against each other, until one connects perfectly with another, and you discover that they are meant to fit, and gradually more connect, forming the structure they are meant to become.
As a boy, he’d filled notebooks with efforts at poems, bits of lyrics, rhymes. He didn’t remember any of it. The tornado had taken the notebooks along with his parents, and he’d never attempted to write again.
He tumbled the pieces he already had. A successful tour guide. A realtor. Jason. Each killed the same way, with the same weapon. But no indication that the three knew each other, aside from Jason and Kapoor maybe meeting over a land deal. No known motive for any of them, let alone a motive that explained all three. And a hundred thousand people out there, the killer hidden among them.
It had been so easy before the giant, before the world flooded into Garden County. Fewer people. Fewer motives. Fewer variables. Simpler patterns. The rough edges of this case refused to fit. Most murders anymore traced back to drugs. A deal gone wrong. Someone trying to rip off a dealer. A junkie getting messed up on PCP and going berserk. But Jason had no connection to drugs. Did he?
The door clicked and opened.
Sunny appeared, carrying a tray with two bowls. An unexpected smell wafted in front of her. David quickly tucked the autopsy photos into a folder before she could see them.
“It’s lunch time,” she explained. “They told me you were here, so I grabbed an extra serving from the cafeteria. No one has shown you where that is yet, have they?”
“No. Just this room.”
She set one of the bowls in front of him. It held a thick, orange stew and rice.
“Curry,” she said, reading his face. “You don’t like curry?”
She sat beside him.
He sniffed at it.
“I’ve never had it.”
“What? How have you never had curry?”
He shrugged. “There wasn’t exactly anywhere around here to get it. We only ever had Pearl’s diner, and curry isn’t on the menu.”
David stared down at the food as Sunny started to eat. She looked back over at him, and a wry smile crossed her face, dotting her cheeks with dimples.
“You’re kidding me. The big, tough sheriff is afraid of curry.”
“I’m not . . .” He grabbed the spoon. “Fine.”
He dipped it into the bowl, then took a bite.
“Well?” she asked.
“Not bad. It isn’t a cheeseburger, but not bad.”
When they’d finished, she teased him that he sure did eat a lot for a man who didn’t like curry. They pushed the tray to the side then, and both surveyed the stack of files.
“So, you’re a geologist?” David asked. Rocks. Tectonic plates. What the hell did that have to do with the giant?
Sunny read his look. Her smile faded, and she gave a furtive glance around, as if she thought someone might have snuck inside behind them.
“When NASA created Site One, they reached out to the top researchers in basically every field. Biology, chemistry, biomechanical engineering, astronomy, theoretical physics, you name it,” she explained. “This base is sort of the best of the best in science from around the world.”
“I get that. But what does geology have to do with an alien?”
“So, the challenge of studying this thing is that we can’t see inside of it. If it had any orifices, they’ve sealed off. And the outside layer is incredibly dense and thick.”
“You can’t give Gulliver an X-ray,” David offered.
“Right. We don’t even know if what we’re seeing is its skin, or an exoskeleton, or even some kind of armor,” Sunny said. “And because all the countries are still fighting over what to do with it and who really owns it, we’re not supposed to cut into the giant. So all we can study is the surface. And the surface is made out of crystals.”
“Crystals?”
“Right. And that’s why they brought me in. On the earth, crystals form when certain types of magma cool, so it falls into geology. I just happened to specialize in crystal structures. I wrote this paper a few years back theorizing about the potential for crystals to be living organisms.”
“Living crystals?” David asked.
“They have these really weird properties,” she continued, her face lighting up as she described her work. “I ran this experiment where we enclosed hematite in a polymer coat and exposed part of it to blue light, then put it in a hydrogen peroxide bath, and . . .”
“Whoa. Keep in mind I got straight Cs in chemistry in high school.”
She laughed, a loud, genuine laugh. It was so strange, talking to her. They’d barely spent any time together, and it was all amid the insanity of a serial killer running loose and a three-mile-long giant dead on the ground. And yet there was an easy rapport. Suddenly this place didn’t feel so alien.
Sunny continued. “Basically, we took crystals, put them in a weird environment, and they started to break apart, then come back together in new forms. They moved. On their own.”
“So, they were alive?” David asked.
“Well, the real question is, ‘What does it mean to be alive?’ In science, we’ve sort of agreed you have to have eight qualities: organized cells, the ability to use energy, reproduction, growth, metabolization, adaptation, movement, and respiration—breathing. The crystals I worked with could do everything except adapt and reproduce. It was all exciting, just wildly theoretical.”
“And then Gulliver fell.”
“Right. And wildly theoretical became reality. NASA came across my paper, called me in, and set me to work analyzing the giant, to try to figure out what makes it tick.”
There was another question. One David had sat on since she first stepped into the room. Something that nagged at him, a rough piece of information that refused to fit.
“How was it that they pulled you into the murder investigation?” he asked, attempting to sound almost disinterested, just continuing the chat.
She tensed all at once. He had stepped over a boundary, into the realm of things he should not know. Which meant there was still more that they were hiding from him.
Sunny reached across him and grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pen. She sat back down and started sketching. The spiraling patterns of the giant’s skin spread across the paper.
“The patterns on the giant’s skin seem to be created by the crystal structures. They’re fractals. A big pattern that repeats and grows smaller and smaller. I guess they just saw the pattern, and I’m what counts for an expert on it, so they asked for my help,” she explained as she drew.
David was about to push more, to tell her the explanation didn’t make sense, when she looked over and caught his eyes with hers. Then she looked purposefully back down at the paper. His eyes followed hers. There, amid the circular pattern, she had hidden two small words.
they’re listening
David started to look up, to search the room, then caught himself. Don’t react. He nodded at her. She seemed almost pleading.
“Got it,” he said.
She stood, sliding the piece of paper under the food tray.
“I should get back to work,” she said.
She started for the door, and he followed her, opening it. She stopped and looked back at him, her smile reappearing.
“It’s nice to have someone else in here,” she said.
“It is,” David said.
She left then, crossing the big room to the door of her lab, disappearing into an unknown. David saw then that he was inside a labyrinth, one where all the paths were blocked, all truths were hidden behind sensors that would forever flash red. And somewhere out there, roaming free, was the monster.