The helicopter was a thing of noise and force, a peripheral monster previously observed, now brought front and center and Hawk was forced into it. Alex, Emile, and Dyson all followed. Each of them were allotted a chair in the belly of the beast, so to speak, and a headset so they could be heard above the roaring blades overhead. Hawk strapped herself into the chair, thinking unpleasantly about digestion, and stomachs, and things with large teeth.

"My first 'copter ride!" Em said, when they got their headset on.

"I'll buy you a t-shirt," Henry said. There was an earnest-ness to it, as if he meant it.

"Mine too," Hawk said.

Alex said nothing. But he squeezed her hand, and then kept it claimed.

There was a fifth person in their group, already swallowed by the helicopter beast. He was unknown, in a black suit, briefcase on his knees, balding, gray, and looking faintly nauseated. Lawyer, Hawk guessed. She turned to him. "Where are we going?" She said.

"Ah," said the man, confirming her guess. "I can't discuss...I mean, we are not at liberty to discuss anything related to the Ararat Project, unless you sign these." Papers were produced from the briefcase, a section of them handed to Hawk, to Alex, to Em. They were very thick. "It's just your standard Non-Disclosure Agreement. Doctor Dyson has already signed his."

Em, who was sitting near the still-opened door, reached out and grabbed Alex's before he had time to protest. Hawk, who knew her friend a bit better than most, handed hers over before violence was called for. Em removed the clips keeping these monstrous contracts together, and chucked all three agreements out the door. Suddenly their garden was a mass of flying paper creatures, pages flapping about like wings.

"Yeah, so that's a no from us," Alex said. He sounded shocked.

"I guess we all have to get out." Hawk said. And didn't move.

"You have to sign," the Lawyer said, ignoring that the things they needed to sign were being turned to confetti by the helicopter blades.

"Your boss is the one who wants us involved. If he really does want us, he has to take us as is. We're not going to blab to the press," Hawk added. "Not until we have something more concrete than exploding smoke in an aquarium. So are we leaving or not?"

"Yeah, make up your mind quick. Y'all are murdering my hibiscus," Em said.

A moment of hesitation.

Hawk took off her seatbelt.

"Fine. Take off." Lawyer straightened his tie and set his briefcase down on the floor, where it sat forlornly. "Kaiser warned me you probably wouldn't sign, anyway. But you understand, that means you can't be in on any major Ararat discovery."

"We know about the Prisms ripping holes in the world," Alex said. "Do we need to know more than that?" This question was directed at Dyson, who shook his head. The helicopter door was slammed shut and, a few moments later, the whole assembly took off.

"They are gonna raid the fuck out of my house, aren't they?" Em said, looking down as her home—and the small collection of Kaiser Willheim's men in her yard—receded into insignificance.

"Willheim is concerned about certain applications of his personally owned intellectual property," the Lawyer said.

Em looked at him as if he were a bug, then turned to Dyson. "The fuck?"

"He means they want the prism back. And probably the busted laser." He crossed his legs. "And I repeat the earlier question. Where are we going?"

"The Event's epicenter is in the Bronx zoo." The lawyer looked uncomfortable. Hawk supposed he was flying without the NDA safety net, and didn't like it. "Willheim and the Ararat Project are already there with the rapid-response unit, but the governor of New York isn't precisely happy about evacuating."

"How much of an evac are you asking for?" Hawk said. She hoped it was more than a few blocks."

"The entire state." The lawyer said. Paused. "It's a large event."

"We really need to define 'large' here." Hawk said. "I don't have much of a point of reference."

There was a moment of hesitation.

"That. Whatever you were about to say. Say it. What is it?" Alex said.

More hesitation. "You really ought to sign the NDAs."

"We really ought to go home," Hawk said.

He sighed. "Fine. We got a look at the Prism." Pause. "I didn't see it personally. I don't know what that means."

"We do. Go on." Hawk said.

"It's about half the size of a Volkswagen. Big enough to put a person inside."

These words defied understanding for a minute. They held enormity, in the form of knowledge. And then Hawk remembered the Prism they had, that had destroyed a neighborhood and killed an old woman and her dog, had been somewhat bigger than a grain of sand, but she still could have seated it on a penny without much difficulty.

"Are we talking van, or Beetle?" Alex said. From his tone, he was trying to inject some humor into things. It failed.

"Beetle," he said. "And we have no idea how far that will spread, which is why Kaiser is pushing to have the entire state evacuated. So far we've gotten a few blocks—"

There it is, Hawk sighed, and put her head in her hands.

"—around the zoo, and we've shut down the major roads leading into that part of the city. But without more authorization from the powers that be, we can't do much more than that." The Lawyer said.

"What are you telling FEMA?" Hawk asked.

"We aren't talking to FEMA yet. We will be, probably within the hour, but it's going to take time to get the machine going. And apparently that is very bad. Something called the Glass Line will be expanding—"

"Think Chernobyl. Only instead of being kilometers away, like Pripyat, there's whole fucking neighborhoods built on top of the open reactor." Em said.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"The people in those buildings are probably already dead," Dyson said. "They just have the dying part left."

"Unless we can distribute honeypots like candy." Hawk muttered, then paused. "Didn't the Bronx zoo just get a honeypot display? Like, in the last couple weeks? I remember a news story...like...Youtube news, but..." She shook her head, trying to force fragile memory into the necessary pattern.

"Yeah," Em said, in the same tone. "I remember thinking you'd like to visit."

"I remember being irritated that they didn't call me to help them set up a habitat for the fragile little shits. Well, there's one goal for us." Hawk sighed. "Check to see if their honeypots survived."

"Speaking of goals, I find it highly suspicious that this is happening in a zoo of all places." Alex said.

"Why?" Dyson said. "Not public enough?"

"Well, the publicity is part of the problem, isn't it? It's a huge gesture on the public scale. Something they could have done at any time." Alex shook his head. "No. But it is probably the only place outside of a lab where he can access monkeys."

Em said, "it's probably the only place inside a lab where he can get monkeys to test on. They aren't letting people do that anymore. Not without a huge donation."

"And I'm pretty sure Studdard feels like he already donated all the money he wants to the Ararat Foundation. He found a way around the rules. Go in. Fuck up a zoo. Wait for us to figure out what he did right and what he did wrong, steal the research we did, and he's good to go." Alex said.

"You're implying—" Dyson said.

"What? That Ararat is Studdard's clean up crew? What'd you think you were? Actually responding? All we're doing right now—all we can do—is dig around and pull up a few maybes. The realities, we haven't earned our way to those yet. And as long as Willheim is driving this boat—and he will be , for a very long time—the truth is a thing we have to earn." Alex paused, because yelling in a helicopter sucked, even with microphones and ear phones. "Our job is two fold, then. First up, we have to collect data. I'm assuming that Kaiser will have some kind of boy scout grade shit for us to deal with at the site." A look to the lawyer, who nodded forlornly. "Right. So we'll get our knot tying kits or our surgical kits or whatever and we'll collect the data Studdard wants, and then we have our second job, which is to keep that data away from Studdard at all costs. And I really hope I'm not the only person who thinks the best way to do that is keep it from Kaiser too."

Alex leaned back and let the other adults scramble for some kind of plan.

Hawk stepped into the void. "I agree. Dyson, I know you worship the man—"

"I don't. Just...for the record." Henry Dyson said.

"Okay, well, he's still your boss and I understand that there are things you have to say to him—"

"Not necessarily," Henry said. "I can keep a secret with the best of them...and it sounds like I need to here, so..."

"Right. And that's what we'll tell Kaiser. We want to flush out any moles. Like. Right now, who knows about the honeypot thing?" Hawk said. "Other than us, there's Kaiser, and that's it."

"And people we may have talked to," Alex said, dryly.

"Okay, well, we haven't talked to anybody." She said.

"What about Leo? The cops who were with him? The weirdos at our house who saw you walk in empty handed and come out with bugs? You're an entomologist whose specialty is so well known that when a zoo doesn't call you for advice you get grumpy, and it's justified to your colleagues." Alex spread his hands. "And I'm not saying that Studdard is bright enough to have X-ray vision and see around corners—"

"But anyone observing Kaiser would be lead to us, and from us to the ants." Hawk nodded. "We're on stage."

"In fact, I'd bet you money this is why this happened. You and your ants, love. You were the catalyst for this." He gestured down at the space between them, which currently held a tablet with an online map of the Bronx zoo. "Not the cause. Do not get me wrong. The only blame I assign is Studdard's share, and if there's secondary responsibility, it's Kaiser. But you and I should not be alive. People ask why we're alive. They ask why we're different. They'll come to the same conclusion we do. Especially now that you went through all that trouble to get your own ants."

Caught on her husband's energy, like a butterfly pinned in a catalogue, Hawk said, "Go on."

"Kaiser organization leaks like a sieve. You don't need me to know that. You need eyes. He's grandiose and given to extremes and about as hard to shove around as a marble dipped in oil and set on a downward slope. He blabbed. It doesn't matter to who. Kaiser knows about the bugs. Now Studdard knows about the bugs."

"And he did this...what?" Hawk gestured at the tablet with the map. "This test to see if it's the ants?"

"Part of it, yeah," Alex said, taking a deep breath, and walking his fingers down to the gorilla exhibits. "Here's your primate test. All that you think you ever needed, right there, with lots of extra variation. Lemurs, chimps, marmosets. No o-rangs," he pronounced this Oh-Rang, "but that's fine. And there's a lot of non-human critters too, including--and this is what got my attention--the one thing Kaiser couldn't buy for us off a shelf: a mature honeypot colony."

"It's not my ants," Hawk said, looking past Alex to the window, where clouds were racing past, clouds and the dregs of Sedona, on the way to the airport and some slim, trim SuperJet waiting on the tarmac for them, no doubt. But the clouds here were racing past and she felt like she was racing with them, being driven to pieces with the speed of flight, the speed of thought. Ants. In a box. That's what we are. "It's the wrong species. It may not work."

"Well, then, Studdard learns two important things. He learns that what he needs is the M-de-whatsis you have, and he learns how we will respond to him in the future."

It hit her rather like a dose of cold water. She saw the same reaction on other people's faces.

"Yeah. We don't think about that part. Every move we make tells the other guy something about us. How we react under stress. What the first thing we reach for turns out to be, which, sorry Sherlock, is very seldom our most valuable thing in terms of monetary worth. We go for the things that make us us. What we can't survive without. What we value. That's what Studdard really wants to know here. What do we value. I think that Studdard is working on something big. Big enough to blow his whole life up. And this is his test of two things: The effect of honeypots on primates, and how Willheim and our team specifically react to danger."

"So what the fuck do we do about that, Alex?" Em said. "We can't not respond."

"No. We can't. But we can afford to be mindful about what our actions say. Like...you need to rescue somebody, you rescue them. You see a piece of evidence we can't live without, you grab it. But if it's something we can reproduce in a lab..." He shrugged.

"What's the point? This isn't going to trial," Henry Dyson said.

"No. But...look, my dad, Baylor West, he did some shit, mkay? And he always played like he was dumb. Taught me to do it too. To make at least one real stupid mistake in front of the mark. Something you know you understand the way you'd drive your car or walk your dog. Fuck up math. Misspell potato. Anything to make the mark think they can take you. We can't always use this, because usually a con requires the mark to believe the con can do whatever he's selling. But when you can? You do it."

"Why?" Henry said.

"Because right now the only hope we've got is to get Studdard to make a mistake." Alex shouted. "Because this is an escalation way beyond anything I expected. He went from a neighborhood and one dead woman to a major population center, when before he kept his tests well away from people. Something about that test changed his approach and made him think he needed to step things up. Now, I really want to assume that it's Hawk and her honeypots that did it. I can't be sure enough to play with that, because once he realizes there's a game he's going to start playing too, and we really do not want that."

"Why not? Why shouldn't we fuck with the guy a bit?" Em asked.

"Because he has a world-tearing laser in his back pocket and he's not at all afraid to use it. I know you hate your parents, but if Studdard called us right now and said he'd put a Prism in their backyard...what would you do?"

He met Em's eyes for a very long time, until they flushed and looked away with shame.

"We all care for people. That's leverage. That's something a guy like me can use on all of you. We don't, because we value each other. We value our friendships. I'm not scared of giving Hawk a gun because I know exactly what she would do with it. But Studdard does not value us. Period. We are the things between him and his goal. He wants us dead. And I hate my daddy, Em, the way you hate yours. More, maybe, 'cause I know Baylor doesn't have the limits God gave Euclidean geometry. But I'd crawl across hot coals to safe his butt. Which makes him, and Hawk, my leverage. Hawk has her mother, and she has me. I don't know you guys that well, but I promise that there is someone you would drop everything to rescue, and Studdard will go through your connections until he finds someone he can point a gun at. We cannot count on his ignorance."

"But you think we can get him to make a mistake?" Hawk said.

"Yes." Alex said.

And there was no more time. They were at the airport, and it was time to get on a plane.