The message had apparently come through the contact form on his website—it was addressed not to Jake but to the administrator. It was written in all caps.

WHEN JESUS DIED, THE CURTAIN IN THE TEMPLE WAS TORN INTO TWO PIECES. THE GRAVES OPENED, AND MANY OF GOD’S PEOPLE WHO HAD DIED WERE RAISED FROM DEATH. MATTHEW 27:51–3

GOD TURNS HIS FACE FROM ABOMINATIONS AND CASTS MONSTERS DOWN TO HELL AND THOSE WHO DISOBEY HIS WORD WILL FEEL THE WRATH OF ETERNITY. AT HAVEN DEAD MEN WALK FROM THEIR GRAVES AND GOD DEMANDS JUSTICE FOR THE CRIMES OF THOSE WHO DON’T LISTEN. I WILL BRING HELLFIRE TO HAVEN LIKE GOD DID TO THE SINNERS AT BABYLON TO PURGE THEM FROM THIS EARTH AND I WILL BE WELCOMED BY ALL THE ANGELS IN HEAVEN WHO WILL SING MY PRAISES.

The message was signed Angel Fire and included a link to a Tumblr, www.wrathofgod.tumblr.com, but when Gemma tried to click on it, she found it disabled.

Jake took the computer back from her. “The site was registered to an Estelle Williams in Sarasota. They already wiped it clean, but I managed to get screenshots, though. Give me a second.”

Gemma thought of all the pages she’d Googled turning up suddenly wiped or just failing to load. “Who’s they?”

He shifted on the bed, and Gemma realized he was nervous. “One of the federal departments, I assume,” Jake said, looking at her sideways, as if expecting she wouldn’t believe him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if by tomorrow everyone’s reporting that Haven never existed at all—it was some holographic experiment and we’re all supposed to forget about it. Look.” He swiveled the screen toward her again. “This is some of Angel Fire’s stuff.”

Gemma keystroked through a few pages, most of them decorated with grinning skulls or licks of flame and peppered with biblical verse and lots of exclamation points. “She thinks they’re raising people from the dead at Haven?” she asked.

“She thought that,” he said quietly. “If she really is responsible for what happened, if she did turn herself into one gigantic IED, like they’re saying, she’s scattered across the marshes by now.” He shook his head, and Gemma couldn’t help but think: another person dead. Another person dead because of Haven. Nurse M, Jake’s father, and now this woman, Angel Fire. “She must have timed her message to go out to a bunch of people at once. Even the news channels got wind of it, and they’re always the last to know anything.” He closed the laptop and slipped it into his backpack—which was, predictably, black—and stood up. “So? Are you ready?”

“I guess so.” She knew it was stupid to be freaked out by some nutter’s theory about Haven and its weird science. But she couldn’t shake the image of people staggering through the darkness of the marshes, reaching for her with clammy hands.

“You need to be sure sure.” Jake stood up. “We might get arrested.”

Suddenly, though, Gemma felt as if all those Sour Patch Kids were nails trying to claw back out of her throat. She had the sense that being arrested would be the best thing that might happen to them.

Jake had told her that several weeks after his father died, he’d woken up in the middle of the night, certain that someone had just shaken him awake. But he was in the room alone. Still, every few minutes he felt a phantom pressure on his shoulder, as though someone was tapping him.

“I know what you’re probably thinking,” he’d said, a little too forcefully. “But I don’t believe in things like that. Spirits, voices from the grave. I’m not like my dad.”

Still, the impression of a presence wouldn’t leave him. Every few minutes, there was a tap-tap on his shoulder. So he had stood up, walked down the stairs, and walked straight out of the house.

His mom had just returned from Las Vegas, where she’d been living doing God knows what, essentially refusing to recognize the existence of her son except in the occasional birthday message, usually an email sent a few days late. Within a month, she would be gone again, and Jake would move in with his dad’s sister, a widow who’d never had children and never wanted any.

Guided by a certainty he could never afterward explain, he had walked the five miles to the Wahlee basin campsite where he and his father had set off so many times together, and found a rowboat pitted with rust, likely left there by a local fisherman. The whole time, he said, he could feel an occasional tap on his shoulder, like a kind of Morse code, telling him to go on.

He had no compass. No water. No supplies. And yet somehow that night, alone in the marshes, he knew exactly where to go.

Dawn was breaking by the time he saw a bank of spruce and knew he’d reached Spruce Island. The institute was hidden from view. He realized he must have rowed all the way around to the west side of the island, which was still undeveloped. The security was lighter, too. There was a fence, and guard towers, but at dawn they were abandoned.

And still the finger kept tap-tap-tapping on his shoulder.

He pulled his boat up onto shore, less than ten feet away from a downed tree that had taken down a four-foot section of the fence.

He was on the island less than ten minutes before he was caught, thrown to the ground by military-style guards, frog-marched across the island and out to the dock, where police were already waiting for him. He never went near the main buildings, had only the briefest glimpse of the white-walled institute and the people inside it.

But it was enough.

She looked around the room, wishing she didn’t have the melodramatic feeling she was seeing it for the last time. Even though it had been her idea to try and get to Haven tonight—or maybe because it had been—she felt she couldn’t back out now. “I’m sure,” she said, grabbing the only sweatshirt she’d brought. She wished it weren’t bright pink.