Chapter 2: The Biome Is Not the Wilderness

The van stopped without warning.

No deceleration, or almost none—just the engine dropping, the chassis settling, and then nothing, as if the vehicle had simply decided it was done. Kayla had been awake for six hours by then. She'd counted the van's stops and starts through the night, cataloged the turns, tried to triangulate direction from the way the early light was moving across the ceiling vinyl. East to northeast, mostly. That confirmed what she'd already worked out from the facility's orientation. They were somewhere in the southern Nevada basin, probably Clark or Nye County, probably within forty miles of the coordinates that had appeared briefly in Exhibit C of the contract's third appendix before the page numbers jumped.

The doors opened.