Dat Vinh had been given one thing to do and he’d failed. He wasn’t worried about punishment, per se; one advantage of faceless, nebulous structures was that there were no annual reviews or demerits. But there would still be repercussions. Dat Vinh had been tasked with keeping Sam and Hillary safe and spiriting them away. Every day on the road was another spent in danger, another sign of his failure.

“What are we doing here?”

“I’m looking at old copies of Time magazine. I think just about everyone smoked in the 50s. Babies included.” Sam looked up and considered Dat Vinh. “What are you doing?”

Wasting time. Inviting trouble. Missing an opportunity. Courting disaster. There was any number of things they were doing when they really ought to be getting the hell out of that antique store.

“I’m waiting on Hillary to feel satisfied. I’m waiting for those two loonies to say something to her that lets her feel confident that this is yet another dead-end. So that we can cross it off her list.”

“Bingo.”

“And then we’ll get back in my car, she’ll pull out said list and we’ll bumble onto another gas station or mine shaft or abandoned reform school because someone saw something there two decades before she was even born.”

“Right again. Though, it’s closer to three decades.”

“And in the meantime, at any time, ASP could find us. When they do find us, as I’ve explained to you a few times already, they will use every weapon, physical, psychological, or otherwise, to extract whatever information they think we know. And then the torture really begins.”

With a listless sigh, Sam put down the magazine and gave Dat Vinh his full attention.

“You know all this -- what Hillary’s up to, what we’re up to, and what ASP will be up to -- and yet still you ask what we’re doing here. Seems to me you already know the answer. All the answers.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Dat Vinh’s patience was worn about as thin as a wafer.

“Yet, you, I mean, we still let her do this. You’re doing nothing to speak some sense into her so we can get off the road and get into one of our safehouses!”

“All the answers,” Sam repeated.

“Same as you,” Dat Vinh said.

“Except you haven’t told us a single useful thing about the Milieu. No matter how many ways we ask it, you won’t tell us who you really are. What’s in it for you? You keep telling us that there’s an army of boogeymen after us…”

“ASP”

“...but you clam up any time either of us asks anything more than surface-level questions about you and your friends. You hem and you haw and you say that you’re not at liberty to divulge. I get that, but then I don’t think we’re at liberty to go along with you, sight unseen. Fact is, Hillary’s almost always going to do what she sets out to do anyway, no budging from that. But if there were a chance to sway her, to convince her to do something she hadn’t come up with on her own, hiding key information like who you are and what exactly you’re looking to accomplish, that isn’t the way to do it.”

He could tell them. There were, strictly speaking, no rules against it -- another advantage of their creedless, ruleless ways. He could explain exactly how the Milieu had come to be, how and why they’d released the Project Bluebook files on the 701 cases. He could tell them all he knew, which, surprisingly, wasn’t insignificant. He’d cobbled together quite a picture of the Milieu over the years through countless conversations with people he’d see once and never again.

But how would they react if he told them that the Milieu's endgame was destruction? Would they climb on board when he let them in on the little secret, that the Milieu hoped the release of the files would spur on a global war -- perhaps a galactic war -- that would result in the end of life on the planet as it was conventionally understood?

It was unlikely.

Instead, he had hoped to dance around the truth. He had hoped fear of ASP would be enough. It hadn’t sufficed so far.

Dat Vinh knew the real task at hand wasn’t convincing Sam. He would do whatever Hilary told him to do until he was granted leave to go home. His sole goal was to end this forced servitude and get back to his band. He might as well have been scraping tally marks onto a penitentiary wall.

Hillary, that was his real challenge.

‘I’m grateful to you, Dat Vinh. Number one, for joining us on our little road trip. Number two, for actually making that road trip possible by way of driving us around. But being grateful is different,’ she’d explained in the parking lot of the antique store, ‘than trusting you. You’ve done your fair share to make me grateful. You haven’t done a thing to earn my trust.’

Amongst the rattan ottomans and grimy windchimes, Dat Vinh wrestled with an unsavory truth. He would have to tell them. They were damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. They were one good breeze from falling headlong off a cliff. They were one misstep away from the quicksand. Left or right, it didn’t matter which path they chose. Trouble lurked in every direction.

“Fine,” Dat Vinh said, pushing aside the coffee table book Sam had lazily started examining, “what do you want to know?”

“Me? I’m happy with ignorance. Content. Knowledge is power, but power is dangerous. I’ve been realizing that more and more every day. Anyway, it’s what Hillary wants to know that matters. And I think she’ll want you to start at the top.”