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There was no need to finish the thought. He knew if she was with her dad their only choice would be to call the whole thing off and hope they could get away without being spotted.

The search was not as difficult as Connor had expected it might be when he saw the crowded food court. Redheads were few and far between. He still had to consciously look at each person, but if the person wasn’t a girl and didn’t have red hair, he didn’t have to look any closer.

After circling the food court and examining the lines (he saw only one redhead—a boy sitting on a barstool at the Johnny Rockets counter, chowing down on a plate of fries), he studied the people who were already seated.

No redheads.

This might go faster than he’d thought. He took the escalator down to the second floor.

He went store by store, thoroughly scouting the shops he thought would be most likely to interest her and peeking his head into the others. This method got him through most of the stores in mere seconds.

At The Gap, he caught a glimpse of a redhead stepping into the dressing rooms and, for the three minutes he waited for her to exit, he suspected he had found Dylan. Olin hadn’t called yet, and a glance at the tracking app confirmed she was still in the mall. There weren’t a lot of places left to look. But then the redhead came out of the dressing room modeling a burgundy top for a man who stood waiting, and Connor knew it was time to move on. Unless Dylan had aged twenty years overnight, this woman wasn’t her.

He had nearly finished searching the second floor when he ran into Olin. “You didn’t find her, huh?”

Olin shook his head.

“Well, we still have those stores to check,” Connor said, pointing to half a dozen retailers in front of him.

“I just checked those. You sure that app works?”

“I’m sure. She’s here somewhere.”

“Where else could she be? I guess we can go through the mall again—”

“The theater.”

“What?”

“There’s an AMC on the top floor. She’s been here for over an hour, right? I bet she’s watching a movie.”

“So, what? We’re going to go scouting the theaters now? Don’t you think that might draw some attention? Plus, what if she’s not there alone? What if the whole family went?” It seemed Olin had also considered the risk of running into Dylan’s father unexpectedly.

“Actually, I was thinking we would sit at one of the tables in the food court and wait for her to come out. That way, if the whole family went, we’ll see them before they see us.”

Olin seemed to like that. They took the elevator back to the food court and found a table with a clear view of the movie theater.

It won’t be long now, Connor told himself.

CHAPTER 38

Logan Wright did not think like everyone else. He knew that.

Most people muddled their way through small lives, hoping for small rewards for small accomplishments. They were so distracted chasing their idea of the American dream, they missed the whole point. And they certainly didn’t realize how fragile all of it was.

Not Logan.

He knew. He understood this world and his purpose in it. He hadn’t gotten to that understanding easily, though, which was why most people never got there at all, he figured. Most people weren’t as patient as he was. They weren’t willing to do the research to understand the world or the hard work he knew he must do once he understood it.

It was that work that had brought him here, to the Albright Mall, this evening.

He took the elevator up to the food court and ordered a Number Two at McDonald’s. He wasn’t hungry, but he thought sitting in the food court alone without anything to eat might make him stand out.

Kind of like those two clowns over there, staring at the AMC like something exciting was about to happen.

What were they doing?

Whatever it was, if they were indeed looking for something exciting, they were going to get it soon enough.

Logan selected a table as close to the center of the room as he could get, then took off his backpack and placed it by his feet. He picked his way through his food for a good ten minutes before looking at his watch. It was eight-oh-three. Tick-tock, he thought. Why wasn’t anything happening?

He told himself to be patient. Things don’t always go as planned. He was about to be a part of something big, and big things were worth waiting for.

Logan had been on his journey to this particular big thing for years now. He still remembered the day that journey had begun. He had been mindlessly scrolling through Facebook when he saw a link that led to a website called BeyondUnderstanding.com. He’d clicked it mostly out of curiosity. And read.

At first, he’d thought the ideas he was reading didn’t make any sense. But the more he read, and the more he thought about it, the more they did. He’d signed up, begun participating in the forum. He still had questions, but they were questions people in the forum had been able to answer.

By the time a popup had appeared on the site, warning him that the information presented here was not to be trusted, he was already a believer. He knew the site had been hacked. (What he didn’t know was that he was now sitting only thirty feet away from the person who had hacked it.)

He couldn’t imagine what the hacker thought he would accomplish, but he didn’t spend much time dwelling on it, either. He’d notified the website owner through a contact form, and the popup was gone fifteen minutes later.

Hope it was worth it, he had thought at the time, imagining the hours someone must have spent, all to post a popup that became a running joke on the forum for months afterward. Well, whatever. They had a hacker of their