don’t need to reiterate to most of you the great lengths some of our best men went to make this possible, and how not all of those men came back to be able to share in the achievement,” Fleming says. “What I do feel a responsibility to address—and I’m glad, frankly, that my janitorial girls are here to hear this—is that this is, without question, the most sensitive asset ever brought to Occam Aerospace, and it needs to be treated that way. I know you’ve all signed the forms, but let me say it again. Top-secret data is not for wives. Not for children. Not for the best buddy you’ve known since you were a kid. This is national security. This is the fate of the free world. The president himself knows your names, and I sincerely hope that’s enough to keep you—”

Elisa’s tensed body seizes at the crunch of a code key into a lock, and it’s not even the lock behind her. Ten-foot double doors on the other side of F-1, which connect with the hallway that feeds to the loading dock, swing open. A helmeted man in military drabs rushes in from either side to secure the doors. They are armed, as are all Occam guards, but not with enigmatic handguns in unemphatic holsters. Large black bayonet rifles are slung across their backs.

A car-length, rubber-wheeled pallet is guided into the lab by a third and fourth soldier. It carries what Elisa, in the first seconds, believes to be an iron lung. Polio was the orphanage’s unexorcisable boogeyman; any child forced to sit through overlong sermons and dry lectures could fathom the horror of being trapped forever in a neck-down casket. This object is similarly podlike but several orders larger, with riveted steel, compression seals, rubberized joints, and pressure meters. Whoever is inside, Elisa thinks, must be gravely ill for even his head to be kept inside the tank. Fleming is on the move, directing the pallet to a cleared space alongside the pool, before Elisa recognizes her own naïveté. Sick little boys do not earn four armed escorts.

The final man through the double doors is buzz cut with gorilla arms and the hulking gait of one suspicious of indoor spaces. He wears a denim coat over roughshod gray twills, and even these garments seem to constrain him. He circles the pod, muttering directions and indicating wheels to be locked, knobs to be adjusted. He doesn’t point at these with a finger. Looped around his wrist is the rawhide strap of a scuffed orange baton ending into two metal prongs. Elisa isn’t sure, but thinks it’s an electric cattle prod.

Both Fleming and Dr. Bob Hoffstetler advance upon the man with right hands outstretched, but the man’s furrowed eyes glare past them, across the length of the lab, directly at Elisa and Zelda. Dual veins fatten his forehead like subcutaneous horns.

“What are they doing here?”

In direct reply, the tank rattles violently upon its trailer and a high-pitched roar typhoons from within, sloshing water and frightening soldiers who expel curse words and bring about their rifles. What looks like a hand, but can’t be, for it’s far too large, slaps against one of the tank’s porthole windows and Elisa can’t believe the glass doesn’t crack, but it doesn’t, and the tank is rocking, and the soldiers are fanning into formation, and Fleming is rushing at the janitors and shouting, and Hoffstetler is wincing at his failure to protect them, and Zelda has two handfuls of Elisa’s uniform, dragging her into the hallway along with their carts, and the man with the cattle prod holds his furious glare for a second longer before dropping his head between his shoulders and turning to face the screaming, captured thing.