“You’re fucking lying. Stop it.” Tim’s eyes welled over with tears and his hand dropped to his lap, the phone cradled in his fingers now like a precious jewel. Exactly the same way he had once cradled his son’s head, the day he came home from the hospital. Tim and Karen had been so in awe of the child, so in love so instantly it just hadn’t made any sense. Even in the dark weeks had followed—Karen had suffered from some extreme form of post-partum depression, and had even muttered in the middle of the night about harming the baby—the sight of Jake’s tiny face had never failed to make things okay again.

Then had come the years of watching him grow. Watching him turn into a boy. An incredibly smart little boy who asked such engaging questions. Who liked to explore on his own. They would take him to a playground and he would go up to each swing, each piece of jungle gym equipment, and study them like a scientist who has met, for the first time, a new form of life, a new variety of rock formation. Jake would spend hours in the sandbox just letting the sand sift through his fingers, watching it fall and catch the light. There had been a brief terrifying period where they’d thought he might be autistic. The child psychologist they consulted had told them that wasn’t the case at all—Jake was just a curious child. One who wanted to find out how things worked and what they were for. It was a sign of very high intelligence, though in a kid that young things like that were notoriously hard to test for.

Jake had just started kindergarten when Tim had gone off to Chicago. He had been fitting in fine, quickly making friends and happily sharing toys. All the worries and concerns and sleepless nights had seemed to pay off. Tim’s son was going to thrive, and with his new job as head of reference at Seattle Central it had looked like their little family was going to be moving up in the world. Building something bigger and better than any of them could have had alone.

Phil Nero had taken all that away because a virus in his head had bored tunnels through his brain. Because something smaller than the eye could see had moved in and started renovating one perfectly particular electrician’s brain.

“Kempfer!” the phone shouted. Tim stared down at it, torn. He wanted to pick it up and learn more. If he did, though—if Horne told him that Jake was still alive, that he was still a father and therefore had certain responsibilities beyond revenge—that would make everything change. It would take away the pure simplicity, the story Tim had been telling himself. The one thing that had gotten him as far as Seward Park.

He had to know. He put the phone to his ear.

“Okay. I’m here. Tell me what you know.”

Horne sounded almost apologetic. “Maybe it’s better if I show you. I can show you the tape if you want to come back to me. I can show you that Nero didn’t kill your son.”

“I don’t need to see that tape again,” Tim said. “It wouldn’t prove anything. Even if Nero didn’t kill Jake while the cameras were rolling, how do you or I know that he didn’t just come back later and finish the job? Or that some other drooler did it for him? No, Horne, that’s not enough. For all I know you could have edited the tape.”

“Okay. That’s understandable. How about something else, something a little more tangible?”

“What have you got?”

Horne smiled down the phone line—Tim could hear it in his voice. “You’re on South Orcas, right? Just south of that smoke plume. No, you don’t have to confirm it. In five minutes I want you to look down the street, toward the west. Your instinct is going to be to run away but fight it. Fight it for yourself, not for me. If you like what you see, you come back to me.”

“How do I know—” Tim began, but Horne had already ended the call.

Tim held on to the phone like a magic amulet for a second afterward, unable to put it down. Then he shoved it in his pocket.

Seward Park was directly to the east. It would take minutes to lose himself in the maze of house-lined streets there, lose himself so thoroughly that Horne’s men wouldn’t find him for hours. He could do it, just walk away from whatever mad demonstration Horne had in mind. He could go, complete his quest, get his vengeance.

But what if Horne’s offer was a one-time deal? What if he only got this one chance?

What if Jake was still alive?

The particulars didn’t matter. He could have been picked up by the evacuation, taken east. He could be living happily with Tim’s parents back east even at that very moment. He could be sleeping in cousin Angie’s dorm room in San Francisco, if there was still a San Francisco.

Jake could be holed up in their house, all the doors locked, eating expired peanut butter out of his last jar. He could be waiting to be rescued.

No, Tim told himself, the particulars didn’t matter—at least not until he found out what Horne knew. If Jake was alive then getting revenge for Karen’s death didn’t matter, either. What mattered was finding Jake and protecting him.

The five minutes evaporated like water from the bottom of a boiling pan. Tim hadn’t even moved from his spot on the sidewalk when Horne showed his hand. A helicopter—probably the same one he’d heard overflying the smoke—came over the rooftops straight toward him, cutting through the thin rain. It was a light transport copter, maybe a Blackhawk. Tim didn’t know how to tell military helicopters apart. It had a single rotor and a sliding door on its side that could be opened to let troops jump out.

The helicopter stopped in midair and then slowly bobbed down toward the street, blasting up a great wash of dust and trash and rainwater that splattered the windows of the stores on either side. It pivoted in the air until Tim could see it side-on, maybe three hundred yards away. The door slid open and Tim peered inside its belly.

Standing there, dressed in a poorly-fitted khaki uniform and a comically large helmet, stood a boy who could not have been more than six years old.

“Jake!” Tim screamed, and then he started to run.