I got home in time to cook. The guys wanted to do a post-mortem immediately afterward, but I said no. I was riding a train back to New Jersey—back to my children. I needed to touch them, to sit across a table and hear what small, weird stuff had consumed their days.

I needed to talk to Zach.

It took all my restraint not to march directly upstairs and confront him. This would only close him off—and blow my cover besides. I'd called ahead to Granny the second Piper disappeared on her bike and knew Zach was safe. That was the important thing.

I started baked potatoes in the microwave and shaped four square, sandwich bread-sized hamburger patties.

Karen was busy in the living room, grouping her dolls into some intricate hierarchies. Zach came clopping downstairs and plucked an arc of bell pepper off my cutting board.

"How goes it?" I said, whisking a vinaigrette. "Big happenings in the world of Zach McGill?"

He rolled his eyes at my long-running gag, which dated back to a TV show he watched in preschool, The World of Kimmy McManus.

I asked if there'd been a quiz in European History.

"Nope." He garbled the word, a pepper in his mouth. "Boring old lecture. Jacobins, guillotines."

I controlled my outrage reflex. European History was Zach's seventh hour, which met at the exact time he'd been in downtown Manhattan.

"Are people excited for the carnival Friday night?"

"If they are, they're gonna be pissed."

My nose wrinkled at the word, but I let it go. "Why is that?"

"Because it's off."

"Off? I was going to make my German chocolate cupcakes for the cakewalk."

He did a lip-smacking moan. "Oh do make those. But the carnival's history. Principal said we don't have budget for extra security, so it's canceled."

I finished the carrot matchsticks with a thrust of my knife, then brushed everything into my vinaigrette with the back of the blade. Tossed in bagged lettuce.

From the hall, "What's canceled? It better not be Hannity! I need my Seany Boy ..."

Following the voice came Granny, slippers sliding over linoleum. She snatched two almonds from a bowl on the counter, then took up her customary spot at the dinner table.

"The school carnival," I said. "It's these Blind Mice—they disrupt everything. A lot of kids had their hearts set on that carnival. Parents, teachers too. Shaking up institutions is one thing, but there's a cost."

Ostensibly I was speaking to Granny, but my eyes were on Zach. He stared back through a tuft of lank hair and never blinked once.

How was this my son? He'd just flirted with the most notorious outlaws on the planet, and now he's munching peppers and lying to my face? How was I ever going to know anything about this kid? Whether he was depressed over a girl. Whether his peer group was pressuring him to smoke weed, or worse.

Also: is there any remorse? After Ted Blackstone, I hadn't slept for days. I kept envisioning his face—and the faces of his soccer-playing twin daughters when they learned their dad had died. My pillow had a voice, and it whispered that I'd done it, I'd let it happen, I could tell myself what I wanted but the truth was I could've stopped it ...

Did Zach have that voice? I saw no sign of it. Maybe because I hadn't given it to him—had never made his consequences tough, too guilty about our non-Norman Rockwell home to hold him accountable. I could still remember picking him up from the third grade after a fight. I showed up livid—"Zachary Thomas, we never strike a fellow human being"—but after Miss Hansen took me aside and explained the other boy had been teasing Zach about his father, asking why he never helped coach Little League, or watched the games, or taught Zach not to throw like a girl!, I lost my resolve.

"We—er, Zach's father travels for work," I explained.

He traveled some. Every few months. Kindly Miss Hansen, who did alterations on the side, had patted my arm. I took Zach home with tears stinging my eyes.

I made him knock on the family's door after dinner and apologize, but he didn't lose his Gameboy or dessert for a week.

The rest of our evening was pleasant. The broadband was out—again—so nobody could watch TV. Granny threw a hissy, but Karen happily marched her dolls through Gym, Library, Spanish, and "Lockdown"—which entailed bending all their rubber necks until their heads were between their knees, cramming them in Tupperware, wrapping the Tupperware in blankets, and stashing the bundle in a deep, dark corner of the cabinets.

I loved that she could entertain herself on no more than imagination and a bin of garage-sale Barbies. I wondered, though, if she was withdrawing from reality too much. From one day to the next, kids today didn't know if their bus was running, or school had power, or teacher would show up. Didn't that have to take a toll?

Finally Granny quit blaming Democrats for the cable outage and joined in Karen's game, reprising her frequent role as garrulous school district superintendent. I was a carpet salesperson. (Don't ask.) Zach, prodded by many curt noises and head tips from me, stood in for a fifth-grader trying to foil the villains' plot, which involved either booby-trapping electronic pencil sharpeners in the teachers' lounge or slipping ghost peppers into the sloppy joes sauce—Karen vacillated between the two.

Zach actually got into it. By the end, his evil cackle was superb, a ten-second trill that left his sister in helpless giggles.

When the last plasticine students were saved, I put the kids to bed and texted all-clear to the guys. The Vanagon rolled up fifteen minutes later.

Quaid was bursting with questions. Where'd the thumb drive come from? Had Piper been in touch with Josiah? Even Durwood dropped his laconic manner to wonder how we had gotten past eDeed's security measures. I sat between them on the couch and talked through the mission. Apparently the guys had tracked the decoy Mice leaving the plaza, and when they hadn't seen me, feared my cover had been blown.

"Wood here was ten seconds from blowing into that tunnel, guns blazing," Quaid said. "We saw you and the Jackson girl walk out of the skyscraper just in time."

Durwood fixed his hat. Sue-Ann rearranged her paws below.

Quaid wanted more on the thumb drive. "Did the girl make it? Jackson?"

"I ... assume," I said. "Nobody in the Mice is as good with computers like her. She knew exactly how to use it, what it did."

I considered mentioning those few pauses I'd observed, when Piper had seemed to have doubts—or second thoughts, or whatever they had been. But I didn't. The moments felt personal, shared between us.

Quaid asked, "How does she know the data's gone for good?"

"She didn't say."

"Does it zap all the backups? Does it stay in their—er, system? Software?"

"Didn't say."

"Is there a mechanism to reverse it? Some antidote where they hold the data hostage until conditions are met?"

Rather than repeat myself a third time, I turned my palms up.

Quaid looked across me to Durwood, whose expression had grown dark. "Let's bring Jackson in. See if we can turn her."

Durwood studied the knees of his bluejeans.

"She gave McGill her number," Quaid said past me. "We schedule a meeting, nab her. Let her choose between jail or helping take down Josiah."

"Mm," Durwood said.

As if this were some great rebuke, Quaid clenched his teeth. "They're erasing deeds, Wood. Think about the farm down in West Virginia. Before you know it, you'll have squatters on the north forty."

"Such men would meet a poor end."

"Yeah? Well vigilantism may be your idea of a hoot, but it's not the scenario AmDye is paying us to produce."

"Jackson won't flip."

"What? How do you know?"

Durwood's lower lip pushed up. "Doesn't fit the profile."

"You mean that business with her brother and Harvest Earth?"

Durwood said yes.

I interjected, "He's right: Piper won't give up Josiah to save herself. Self-preservation is not her main goal. She's motivated intrinsically, not extrinsically."

"God help me." Quaid removed his flask from his sportcoat, took a long pull. "Now I'm arguing with Jed Clampett and Sigmund Freud? Look, we are not sitting on good cards here. We gotta start making our own luck. You're worried about Karen withdrawing from reality now? Wait'll they hit the banks. Wait'll credit cards stop working and everybody's hoarding gas."

I burned at the mention of Karen, angry at myself for giving him this nugget to throw back in my face.

"Squeezing Piper won't work," I said. "And I won't be part of it."

"It will work." Quaid goggled Durwood heatedly. "Are you happy? You convinced McGill—now she's positive. Big FBI profilers, you two. Experts in the psychology underpinnings of domestic terrorists."

"She's not a terrorist. She helped me keep Zach out of the Blind Mice."

"Those two things are not mutually exclusive. I'm a fan of moral relativism—you gotta be if you're committed to your vices—but there is a limit."

As Quaid argued on, I parried with cafeteria-grade psychoanalysis, unable to say what I really felt: that Piper was redeemable. That if I had enough time around her, Piper might be turned—not just against Josiah, but toward the Light. She might leave the Mice willingly. Undo the damage without a single threat being uttered. I kept this to myself, knowing the guys would view it as beyond naive.

Quaid drank again from the flask, nearing the bottom of it—and maybe his patience. "Two days ago, Durwood and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet Jim Steed. You know what he did? Besides drag us along on his ritualistic weekly factory walk—which he does even though his security people want him to stop?"

I shook my head.

"Fired us. I had to talk him off the cliff. If we go back to him again with nothing? We're out on our tookuses."

"We have something. We know about the thumb drive."

"You want me to go to Steed with 'mysterious data-wiping thingamajig?' Maybe it we had some hard information on how it worked, where it came from. If you got that."

I sighed. "And why are they going to tell me stuff like that?"

"Because you make them!" Quaid squared to face me, elbow whipping over the couch back. "You have a little capital now—you helped the Jackson girl. You saw, you're a witness. It's time to get aggressive."

The cushion I was sitting on felt suddenly small. Quaid's blue eyes, charming most days, looked cold now.

I looked straight into those eyes and said, "If you're asking me to betray Piper Jackson, the answer is no."

The statement flummoxed Quaid. His mouth pinched and his breathing came in short huffs like a bull's. He reminded me uncomfortably of my ex that last year, rambling into bed after drinks with clients and expecting me—exhausted from corralling children all day—to do what he wanted. Whatever he wanted.

"You've got that big heart, McGill," he said, "and I hate to say this, but it makes you dumb. The Jackson girl is a killer. Stone cold. This thumb drive, whatever it is? It has the potential to push this nonsense past the tipping point. Take Piper Jackson out of the equation, and they're likely to crumble.

"Hey, it's up to you. You wanna be meek and make this about loyalty and dress is up as the moral choice? Your prerogative. But know this: all the lives that fall afterward like dominoes? Those are on you."

Durwood cleared his throat. "Best step out for air, partn—"

"I don't need air," Quaid said. "Need somebody with guts."

I wanted not to cry with every fiber of my being, but the weakness was coming anyway. My jaws. The corners of my eyes. There was a core of truth in what he'd said, about my heart making me dumb. It had stopped me from disciplining Zach the way he'd needed. It had kept me in a bad marriage five years too long.

Now, was it jeopardizing the very fate of civilization?

Seconds before the tears began, I opened the screen door.

"It's time for you to go," I said.

And they did.