They had just rid themselves of the waitress when Sumpter's phone rang. He answered with a voice half an octave lower than normal. "Speak to me."

Atticus caught a puzzled "Who is this?" from the caller and recognized the department's administrative assistant, Darcy.

"Sumpter here."

"Randy?" Darcy said with an equal mix of surprise and accusation.

The cool composure cracked and Sumpter stood up. "Excuse me; I need to take this call."

Laughter danced in Ru's eyes as Sumpter hurried away, which confirmed Atticus's suspicion that his partner engineered the call.

"I couldn't help but overhear part of your conversation," Atticus confessed to Zheng. There was no telling how long Sumpter would be gone, so he had to cut straight to the point. "The disadvantage of having sharp ears is that you often hear things you weren't meant to," he covered with a partial lie. "What happened in Butler? Who did you run into?"

Irritation flashed across Agent Zheng's face and was quickly smoothed away. "The Ontongard had the Ae stored in shipping crates at an underground storage facility north of Butler. The Temple of New Reason stole the Ae several years ago; they booby-trapped the crates with high explosives and left them behind—so the cult would know when the theft was noticed."

Kyle had said something about an explosion at a storage facility on Tuesday night while Atticus was trying to get drunk.

"Iron Mountain?" Atticus earned a nod. "And there was a second explosion at the cult's mansion."

Zheng nodded again. "Rennie Shaw and Ukiah accidentally triggered the booby trap, and the explosion made live coverage for several hours. We know that the cult had memory mice in the mansion's basement. What we think happened is that the Ontongard, on their way through Butler to check on the Ae's condition, sensed the mice."

"What was the cult doing with mice?" Kyle asked.

"According to Socket, they had trapped several Gets and rendered them down to mice to perform experiments. They tested poisons, narcotics, stun weapons, tear gas, suffocation, and drowning on the mice."

"Eeewww." Ru wrinkled his nose in distaste.

Atticus thought of the cremation sites and felt sick. "So you're saying the cult didn't blow up the mansion? The Ontongard did?"

"We think so. Two cultists who had been patrolling the grounds of the mansion had been killed in a manner very atypical of the cult. The fire marshal verified yesterday that there're no bodies in the wreckage, so it means at least two cultists are definitely missing."

"Which ones?"

Indigo produced two photographs out of her briefcase. The first was obviously a senior high school photo of a blond young man. "This is Parity. His family owned the mansion. His real name is Thomas James DeMent."

DeMent? Poor kid. The name sounded like a flavor of Pepto-Bismol or "demented." Parity was an improvement.

"He's really this young?"

"Nineteen. His parents thought he was still at college. They flew back from Europe on Monday."

House leveled. Son missing. They couldn't be happy campers.

"This is Ping."

Atticus had noticed the absence of Core and Ping from the mug shots that Zheng gave them earlier and thought them both safely dead. He realized now how relieved he had been not to have to put faces to his brother's rapists; the lack of messy details kept it all nicely distant. He braced himself for Ping to be hulking, muscle-bound, ugly, and, most important, male; so he found himself oddly unprepared for the beautiful young Asian woman in the Polaroid photograph. She wore a nightgown transparent as smoke and a fuck-me look. The edge of the picture was singed, as if it been plucked from a fire.

"Wow," Kyle murmured.

Yes, but how had Ukiah felt about being shared between her and Core? Atticus recalled Ukiah, on the point of collapse, leaning on Ru as he warned them away from handling the drug; relaxed to the point of intimate. What direction did his brother swing?

"We don't have another name for her yet." Zheng had tried for a neutral tone and failed. The cold brittleness crept back into her voice. "She was extremely devoted to Core and would do anything for him; he used her more than once to lure recruits into the cult, including Parity."

She kept her gaze down, trying to hide the hurt and anger.

What had Ping done to Zheng? Or was the fact that the girl was missing the problem? "How does this relate to what happened to you yesterday?"

"I spotted an Ontongard near a house that the cult owned in Uxbridge," Zheng said, naming a town at the southern edge of the state. "It means that the Ontongard are definitely hunting the cult. It was a site known to all of the cultists, so Parity could have been the source of the Gets' knowledge. Ping was inner circle; she would know all the cult's secrets."

"So the clock is ticking."

"Yes. I'll be honest with you. You have not a clue how dangerous this is. The Ontongard Gets view themselves as completely disposable. They're fearless. They will attack until they're destroyed. If they kill you, Atticus, they'll either mistake you for a Dog Warrior—and burn your body—or they'll recognize you for what you are—a breeder—and break you down to mice. It's imperative that you never fall into their power."

Without conscious thought, Atticus stilled, expanding his focus away from Zheng and the table to the room and beyond. Instantly he knew the location of every human in the cafe, including Sumpter, walking through the lobby toward them. Once he realized what he'd done, he pulled back his awareness and took a sip of water. "I'm an undercover narc; I'm well used to dealing with danger."

Zheng frowned at him as Sumpter returned, dropping into his seat with a mumbled "Sorry about that. Now where were we?"

No longer talking about aliens.

"We searched these sites." Atticus steered the conversation to a safe subject by indicating the locations they had visited and found empty. "The cult hasn't been to any of them recently. We have a theory. Right, Kyle?"

"Oh. Um." Kyle pulled up the satellite photos he had searched out earlier. "We know that Ascii was to meet Ice at the Salem train station parking lot. See how close it is to the harbor? We're thinking that perhaps they had a boat."

"What was wrong with the train?" Sumpter asked.

Kyle gave Ru a desperate look; they couldn't mention that the cult had arranged to move a body if the police hadn't found one in the car.

"They were covered with blood," Ru said. "That's what tipped off the people at the rest stop. That and the barely concealed weapons."

"If we can find the boat," Atticus said, "we might be able to find the cultist. It's going to be easier to find than a car—there's only a limited number of places they can dock it."

"When we thought that the cultists were going to poison the Pittsburgh water supply, we searched for any connections they had to boats," Zheng said. "Parity's family had a speedboat, but the marina where they docked it said that the family took it out of storage last summer and never returned it."

"And this helps us how?" Sumpter asked.

"Parity attended Harvard," Zheng said. "He might have brought the boat up with him."

"That's just across the river," Atticus said. "He would probably dock it someplace close by."

"That's what I'm thinking." Zheng sorted through her briefcase and pulled out a laser-printed photo of a sleek boat. "This is a picture of the model, a thirty-four-foot Sea Ray Sport Cruiser. It's named the Nautilus."