The navigation on Michelle's phone led them to a little blue house at the end of a cul de sac. Her friend Jeffrey, a lanky man with sandy brown hair and black grease stains all over his pants and shirt, lead them into his house without hesitation as soon as they said Michelle's name.

They sat down on his couch. Sam between them slept with his head on Patrick's arm, and Jeffrey went into his kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. "Is Michelle okay?" he asked.

Elena bit her lip and turned to Patrick, who sighed and said, "The police caught up to us. We had to put up a fight, and Michelle got hit in the head."

Jeffrey's jaw dropped. "Is she okay?"

"We had to run," Patrick said. "She was breathing when we left. We don't know . . ." He pressed his lips together.

Jeffrey let hi breath out. "They hit the little guy, too?"

"No," Elena said, gently tousling Sam's hair. "He saved us. Used his . . . powers. But they hurt him, too."

"The people or the powers?"

"Powers," Elena said.

Jeffrey raised his eyebrows. "Quite an ordeal you've been through, there."

Elena nodded. "We need to get back on the road as soon as possible, before they track us to you."

Jeffrey came out with two mugs of coffee. "And I want to get you back out there as soon as possible. I've got a van you can use, just into the shop a couple of weeks ago."

"And you're just giving it to us?"

Jeffrey smiled and looked down. "I owe Michelle. For a lot."

Elena's throat felt tight. She knew the feeling.

"But before you go, I want to share something with you." He took his phone out of his pocket and held it out to them. An address in Texas showed on the screen.

"What's that?" Elena asked.

He grinned. "I've got a friend who works in record keeping at CPS. Owes me a favor. She's going to get in a lot of trouble if anyone finds out, though. This is the last known residence of the parents of this little guy."

Elena gasped. "How could you possibly trace that? We don't even know his last name."

"Planck isn't exactly a common first name. That, and Michelle gave me the last names of some of his recent foster homes. Not a lot of redheads, and we know that Sam is about eight years old. More than enough to narrow it down."

It might be nothing. It might be a dead end; Sam's parents might not even live there anymore; they might not know anything; there might not be anything to know from so early in Sam's life. But it was a lead, and it was a lot more than they had had a few minutes ago.

"Thank you so much, Jeffrey," Elena said. "I've got Michelle's phone, can you text it to her?"

He nodded and tapped away at his device.

Sam stirred on Patrick's shoulder, and Patrick shifted his position to be able to pick him up. "You okay, buddy?"

"It hurts," Sam whined, then his eyelids fluttered closed again.

Patrick picked him up onto his back, and Elena followed. "Thank you so much, Jeffrey."

Jeffrey walked them to the back door. "Glad to be able to help. Please let me know when you find out how Michelle is doing."

"I will," Elena said, "but it might be hard to get ahold of her, since I have her phone."

"She knows you have her phone, yes?"

"Yeah, I'm sure she'll call it when she wakes up." If she wakes up. Elena pushed the thought out of her mind.

Patrick passed Sam over to Elena, and a little electric shock passed between them. Jeffrey led them out to the shop and handed over the keys. "We'll bring it back soon," Patrick said.

"I'm sure you will, if you can."

Jeffrey opened the back door, and Elena placed Sam in the backseat. He groaned and shifted into place, then he fastened his seatbelt.

"Thanks so much, Jeffrey," Elena said. "I don't know where we would have been."

"Well, hopefully you can get your names cleared before too much longer."

Elena made herself smile and wave as she jumped into the passenger seat, but she couldn't shake the thought that it wouldn't matter whether or not they cleared their names, if they waited another week or two. Nothing would matter at all.

Elena set up the navigation on Michelle's phone; Jeffrey's car was set up with a charger station. It would be a twenty hour drive to the house from where they were, assuming they didn't stop to rest. Elena didn't figure that would be an option. She had never driven a van before—Patrick and Michelle had had to get special licensing to drive the motor home—but even if she could drive so they could take turns, she couldn't imagine sitting in the truck seat for twenty hours.

A long silence passed between them as they returned to the freeway. It was rush hour, and the traffic was heavy, but for some reason it didn't stress her out. Maybe some part of her had come to grips with how long their journey would be. They'd spend some time in heavy traffic, and later into the night, they'd make up for lost time by traveling with no traffic at all.

Sam slept peacefully in the back, and Patrick said nothing, so for the first time in awhile, there was complete silence. Elena reclined her chair and leaned back in her seat a little, resting her eyes.

"What are we doing, Elena?"

Elena looked over to Patrick, whose eyes were shiny. She gasped—she had never seen him like this. "Are you okay?"

"I don't get what we're doing."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what do we think we're going to accomplish? We figured out what was going on with Sam's powers. Why did we even need to do that?"

"So that we could bring him back and have a story to tell that wouldn't sound completely crazy. He'll be able to demonstrate, and—"

"Okay, fine. Now we know what's going on. And we keep going."

Elena swallowed hard. "Yeah. We know enough to clear our names, or at least reduce our sentence a little. But that's not what it's about anymore. We don't know enough to reduce the flux, or control how the energy changes."

His eyebrows furrowed. "We were running away from the Tech United people because they were going to experiment on Sam, and now we're experimenting on Sam."

Elena's breath caught in her throat. "Patrick, we're not—"

"Oh. No." He shook his head. "No, we're taking great care of him. That's why he's passed out and injured in the back."

"Patrick, we're still—"

"We're accomplishing nothing, Elena! We're on the run from the police, and we're the only people on the planet who knows it's going to end if we can't figure out a way to stop this thing. And yet we're running away from the Tech United facility, which has the actual equipment we'd need to run real tests."

Elena felt like the police officer's baton had struck her in the back again. Patrick was supposed to be the one who didn't worry. It had always driven her crazy, but now she realized how much she relied on him being the one who kept calm when she felt like her life dangled on a precipice.

Days ago, she'd worried about losing her job like it was the end of the world. Patrick had merely watched, unsympathetic to her struggling, but something about how Patrick and Michelle had kept their calm had comforted her on a deeper level. Now the world was ending. Of course he was worried. How could she expect him not to be?

She just wished he wasn't. As crazy as it sounded to think it, she missed the old Patrick.

She took a deep breath. If he couldn't keep his calm, she would need to. "Okay. What do you suggest we do?"

He blinked a few times and wiped his eyes. "I think we should talk to Tech United now."

Elena winced. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, Sam won't go for it."

"He's eight and we have the car. And he's asleep."

Elena checked over her shoulder to make sure it was still true. His eyes were closed, and he was slumped over in a position that could only be comfortable in sleep. "I don't trust them, Patrick. Do you?"

"Then we go to the police."

She considered it. He might be right. They would only make things worse for themselves by continuing to run from the authorities. But they couldn't just turn themselves in. That confrontation needed to involve Tech United, too, or they'd just be arrested, and their claims would be dismissed as crazy.

Or maybe they wouldn't. At this point, it didn't matter. They didn't have time to try to convince other people they weren't crazy, and they didn't have time to argue with lab scientists about experimental methods. They had only enough time to solve the mystery, to save the world from Sam. That's what Michelle had told them to do.

"Patrick, if Sam can't push his powers out any further, we have about six days to figure out what's going on."

"I thought it was seven."

"Seven before we die. Six before—" her voice cracked— "before the pain is more than we can take."

"Okay, fine. But that's my point. Who cares if we get arrested? What matters is that this mystery gets solved."

"Exactly. That's why we're heading to Sam's birth family."

"Yeah, but—" Patrick grimaced— "but is that really our best shot at getting this solved?"

"It's our only shot."

He shook his head. "Tech United has the best chance of solving this, not us."

Elena bit her lip. He was right. Tech United would solve it easily. She lowered her voice, even though she was confident Sam was still out cold: "Yeah, they'll solve it the easy way. They'll kill him, Patrick."

His jaw pulsed. "No, no way. They want to be able to control those anomalies way too much to kill him."

He could be right. They might want control over the laws of the universe enough to risk the lives of everyone in it to get what they wanted. Elena shuddered. "Tech United having free reign over the laws of science would be worse."

"You'd rather the world end than trust Tech United with it?"

She let her eyes fall closed. "You'd rather Tech United have control over the world than for one person to die?"

"No, I—"

"Because one of these will happen if we bring him back. There's no way to avoid it. They don't believe us, or they're not careful with how they do their tests, and the world ends. Or they're not careful with pushing out and pulling in the anomalies, or they're too careful about what happens to the world, and Sam dies, maybe a few other people. Or they do their experiments just right, and they have control. And they can control the laws of physics."

"What's wrong with that? Sam already can!"

"And given the choice, he uses them to make things turn pretty colors. What do you think Tech United will use them for?"

Patrick blinked a few times and let his breath out. "Okay. The world ends, or it falls under the control of a corporation that was okay with experimenting on a kid to get that power . . . or the kid dies."

Elena took a deep breath. "Yeah."

It was too much for her to internalize. She couldn't keep calm, but she couldn't panic either. For a long time, it was silent in the van.

"So what do we do?" Patrick said.

Elena fixed her eyes on the road. "If we can solve this, we put a stop to the anomalies. We don't ask him to demonstrate them. We tell him never to use them. We return Sam to the police."

"Then we go to prison for the rest of our lives."

She smiled a little. "And the world will be saved, and so will Sam."

Patrick set down his arm on the rest between them and opened his hand. She placed her hand into his.

"Okay, Elena," he said softly, a single tear tracing its way down his cheek. "Prison it is."