“Four thirty,” Marcus said.
The inbox was empty. Samantha refreshed it.
“Five.”
One email came in at 8:05.
From E. Voss. Ask me at ten.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Sam,” Marcus said. “That’s six minutes.”
She pulled the plug. She was scared for Vlad, and ten o’clock was two hours away.
“What did she say?” Marcus asked.
“Ask me at ten.”
“That’s not a no.”
Samantha sat down on the floor and started lacing her shoes.
“Where are you going?”
“For a run.”
“Good,” he said.
“Crap. I can’t leave you here by yourself.”
“I’ve got Cooper, a stove, and crappy oatmeal. I’m fine.”
“You can’t even get to the road.”
“I can get to the porch.”
“With what foot?”
He swung his foot off the couch and put it on the floor to show her. “Be back by quarter to ten. Go, Sam.”
Cooper was at the door before she was.
“So much for the dog,” Marcus said.
She went down the two-track through the aspens at a jog and turned down East Portal Road at the gate, away from the tunnel and the trailhead. The road was gravel and followed the creek. She hadn’t run since Basalt. The first mile was all downhill. Every part of her body was sore from sleeping on a floor and two weeks of carrying things. Cooper ran ahead and came back and ran ahead. He didn’t seem to mind her relatively slow speed.
Eleanor had answered everything else within the hour. Samantha guessed she didn’t want to put this answer in writing.
She picked up the pace. Cooper fell into a comfortable trot next to her.
A power line ran beside the road on wooden poles. At Tolland, which was a meadow and a few cabins, she turned around and started back up.
Halfway up she stopped at a pole because Cooper stopped to pee. There was a gray box bolted to it at head height, with a padlock and a metal tag with a number stamped on it. She stood there breathing hard and stared at it.
She had no idea what it was. It could have been a switch, or a meter, or something for the railroad. She had spent the morning telling a power company how to run eight hundred thousand of these. She couldn’t tell one from a mailbox.
If it was a switch, it had woken up at eight.
She said the number on the tag out loud and repeated it a few times until she had it. Then she ran the rest of the way up without stopping. It took forty minutes.
Marcus was on the top step with the case beside him.
“Don’t look at my foot,” he said.
She looked at his foot. It had swelled up over the top of his sock again. Two weeks ago he would have asked her to carry it.
She sat on the step below him and stretched her calves until they stopped shaking. Cooper drained the water bowl and lay down on her feet.
“There’s a box on a pole down by Tolland,” she said. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“Is it one of theirs?”
“I don’t know what it is, Marcus.”
He let that go. “What if they keep him?”
“Then we go get him.”
“From the FBI.”
“I don’t know.”
At ten she set the dish on its spot on the rail and plugged it in.
“Ten,” Marcus said.
There was one email, sent at 9:51, with the table under it. She read the last paragraph first.
Your friend is not under arrest. He is asleep on the floor of my office. Two people from the FBI are waiting for him to wake up.
“Okay,” she said. She was so relieved she felt sick.
“Sam.”
“He’s asleep.”
“That’s the most relaxed he’s been in two weeks.”
“You stopped counting.”
“Thirty seconds.”
She read the rest.
“Thirty-seven thousand four hundred of twenty-six’s boxes took theirs,” she said. “Before the last server got fixed.”
“Out of eight hundred and ten thousand.”
“Yes.”
“Divided by twenty.” He frowned at the trees. “Eighteen hundred and seventy.”
“Truck-days. Somebody’s going to drive out to thirty-seven thousand poles.”
One in twenty-two. If the box by Tolland was a switch, and if it was twenty-six’s, those were its odds. She didn’t know how she would ever find out.
“Sixty seconds. When did the last one get fixed?”
“Sixteen after.”
“Sixteen minutes,” Marcus said.
“Nothing of theirs has gotten in anywhere since. Right before the boxes woke up, they sent their whole queue out again.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Somebody over there panicked.”
“Ninety. What did my email do?”
She scrolled down to the table and looked at the held column. Most of it was the gateways.
“That,” she said, and turned the tablet so he could see.
He read down the column. Samantha noticed his lips moving, which he did when he was adding things up.
“Did we win?” he asked.
“The gate’s on a billion devices.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
Marcus whooped. Cooper got up off the step and barked at him.
“The whole canyon can hear that,” she said.
“Two thirty.”
She opened a reply and typed Tell him I left it up. She sent it.
“Three.”
She watched the inbox. Nothing came.
“Four,” Marcus said.
She pulled the plug.
Inside, she wrote the number from the pole in Doug’s notebook. Then she lay down on the floor by the door, in case the truck came up the road, and went to sleep.