“Which means you’re not going to stop, because Daddy’s been a suspicious bastard since he was born,” said Shelby. She turned to her father. “Alex isn’t going to steal from us, all right? He has plenty of weapons of his own. Lots of nice sharp things he can stab people with if they annoy him. Lots of nice sharp things I can borrow, since we’re getting married and that means I have a common-law claim to his knives. Now can we please get on with opening the door?”

Riley scowled—more at me than at Shelby—and produced a keychain from his pocket. It bristled with keys, flashlights, tape measures, and all the other pieces of detritus that tended to build up on a keychain that was used regularly. My father’s keychain was quite similar. I swallowed the urge to smile. Riley probably wouldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to cause any more trouble.

And then he unlocked and opened the door to the central store, and I stopped thinking of anything beyond gazing in impressed delight at the room—or rooms, really—on the other side.

“All right,” I said. “This is excellent.” The way the Tanners had been describing their storeroom had led me to picture a really big closet, impractical as that would have been for supplying the entire Thirty-Six Society with ammunition, weapons, and the other assorted pieces of gear they needed to do their jobs. I’d been off by a factor of at least ten. The room on the other side of the door looked like it took up most of the footprint of the house, an impression that was reinforced by the large support beams that appeared every eight feet or so, lending strength to the foundation. The space between those beams was packed solid with shelves. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, switching on as we moved into the room.

“Motion detectors,” said Riley proudly. “They make sure we’re not drawing too heavily on the local grid, and also prevent someone from forgetting to turn off the light when they just swung through to grab a fresh spool of fishing wire.”

“We make little shopping trips constantly,” added Shelby, walking past me to examine a shelf loaded down with nets of various sizes. All of them were carefully organized, and matched up with helpful labels identifying their weight, manufacturing material, and any special features. “If you’re passing through Melbourne, you buy a few bales of chicken wire, or some fishhooks, or a bunch of dried meat and bottled water. Then it all gets funneled to the various stores around the continent. That way nobody ever has to buy so much that it sets up a red flag in some government computer somewhere.”

“It’s uneven, of course,” said Riley. “When our girls were younger, Lottie and I could barely afford to contribute enough to pay back what we’d taken, much less help build against the future. As they got older, and we got more free income, we’ve increased our contributions. To each according to his or her need.”

“I’ve been sending money home,” said Shelby. She sounded distracted. It wasn’t hard to see why: this place was like a cryptozoologist super store. I found myself taking internal notes to share with my family when I got home. There was a lot here that we could learn from, when it came to organizing and preparing ourselves for any disaster the world happened to throw our way.

“The specialized ammunition is this way.” Riley started down one of the aisles, clearly expecting me and Shelby to follow. We did, past rows of knives, hanging racks of khakis and bulletproof vests, and into a square-shaped construction of shelves loaded down with ammo boxes. Again, the omnipresent labels made it clear what each of them contained. The shelf labeled “silver” was conspicuously denuded, with only about twenty boxes of ammo remaining, spread out across a variety of calibers.

“May I?” I asked, indicating the shelf.

Riley nodded, not saying a word. I took that for consent, and reached for the first box that came to hand. The label identified its contents as .9-millimeter, and the weight of it supported that; it was heavy enough to have contained silver bullets, and it rattled appropriately when I hefted it in my hand.

I opened the lid. I looked at the bullets. I scraped one of them gingerly with the edge of my thumbnail. And then I shook my head in disgust, replacing the box on the shelf. “Painted,” I said. “We’d need to do chemical composition tests to be sure, but I’m willing to say that I don’t think there’s a speck of real silver in that box. Your bullets are gone.”

“How can you be so sure?” Riley demanded. “They weigh the same. They shoot the same.”

“Yes, but you don’t usually wrap real silver bullets in embossing foil,” I said. “They’re fakes.”

Silver bullets are expensive as all hell, in part because their manufacture is so difficult. They can’t be pure silver: the metal’s too soft, and it would warp inside the barrel of the gun, either causing a dangerous misfire or resulting in a slug too twisted to have any real force behind it. Bullet makers who want to work with silver need to find the exact right balance of alloys, silver, and lead to come up with something that will be effective against the sort of things you hunt with silver—lycanthropes, for instance—but will still work in a standard gun. Even a “pure” silver bullet will generally be at least half lead by weight. That means you can’t tell them apart just by lifting the ammo box.

Just by lifting the ammo box . . . I turned a thoughtful eye on the other shelves. “Someone who stole this much silver ammo would have trouble carrying it out without being seen, even under this sort of security setup,” I said thoughtfully. “How much stock do your people put in the labels?”

“When I was seven, I got into the stores and swapped a bunch of twine weights around. I thought they looked better that way,” said Shelby. “I was grounded for a week without desserts.”

“We take our organizational system very seriously,” said Riley. “Why?”

“Because if I were planning to try sabotaging you, I’d need a heat source—maybe some sort of portable lamp, you can buy them at most camping goods stores—and a bunch of silver foil.” I turned my eye toward the other shelves, looking for anything that seemed out of place. All the little cardboard boxes were neatly labeled with the caliber of the bullets they contained, stacked in even towers and pushed back until they formed level planes. It was a good system. It would make it easier to put things away; no wasted space, no mess, no inefficiency. And nothing to betray someone who really understood how it was supposed to work. Anyone who had been involved in the restocking process would know how to move things, how to conceal them . . . how to hide whatever they’d purloined in plain sight.