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"What is it you want?"

"Get your ass up."

Vi came to her feet, made a slow turn, eyeing the abandoned factory houses up and down the street. She touched the earpiece again, gave it a soft tug. It didn’t budge, but she could feel her skin stretching.

"It isn’t coming off," Luther said. "Not without a scalpel. Start walking."

"Which way?"

"Toward the water tower."

She started walking.

"You can see me?" she asked.

He didn’t answer.

The water tower stood a quarter of a mile away, its silver tank dulled and heavily graffitied.

Still, she could read the palimpsest of the tower’s namesake.

"You’re feeding my son?"

"He’s being fully cared for, Violet."

"I need to see him."

"That can certainly be arranged."

"How?"

"Obedience, of course."

She was closing in on the tower now.

A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the base.

"Up and over," he said.

She ran her hands through her hair which had been pulled into an off-center ponytail, then touched the fence, a heavy coating of rust on the metal. As she began to climb, she noticed she wore a pair of tennis shoes and a black tracksuit that had never belonged to her.

Near the top, she made a lateral move across the fence and swung her leg over between a gap in the barbed wire, caught the leg of her tracksuit on a stray jag of metal coming down, ripped a six-inch tear.

Gasped at the coldness of blood and the burn of torn flesh.

She hit the ground on the other side, turned, stared up at the tower—a hundred and seventy-five feet of rusted metal that should’ve been razed years ago.

It creaked, swaying visibly in the wind.

"There’s something for you at the top. Something you’re going to need."

"The top of the tower?"

"That’s right."

Violet saw where the lowest rung of the ladder stopped six feet above the concrete foundation.

"I can’t reach that."

"I’m sure you’ll think of something."

She stepped onto the broken concrete and stopped directly under the ladder. When she stood on the balls of her feet and reached her hands up, her fingers just grazed the bottom rung. Bending her legs, she jumped and grasped the lowest rung with one hand, then both, grunting as she pulled her eyes parallel with her blanching knuckles.

Her right arm shot up, fingers catching on the next rung and tightening around the metal.

She cried out, fighting through the next pull-up, the hardest she’d ever done.

Her knees slid over the bottom rung and she let her weight rest upon it.

Gasping.

Sweat burning in her eyes.

Violet clung to the rusting ladder, allowing her pulse rate to slow. When she could breathe without panting, she got her tennis shoes onto the bottom rung and stared up toward the base of the water tank.

"Is this safe?" she asked.

"Does it look or feel safe?"

She began to climb.

The ladder itself was impossibly narrow, a foot wide at most. As she stepped onto each new rung the weight of her footfall set the metal vibrating on a low and haunting frequency.

Forty feet up, and she still hadn’t looked down, maintaining a hyperfocus on each rung, down to the rust-speckled metal. It was all that mattered—making clean steps. Certainly not the world opening up all around her, or the perceptible leaning of the tower that grew more pronounced the higher she climbed, or the picture her mind’s eye kept conjuring—the bolts that held this ladder to the top slowly pulling out of their housings.

The wind pushing against her carried tiny ball-bearings of sleet.

Halfway up, she had to stop and make herself breathe.

Not breathless from exertion, but fear.

When she opened her eyes, she was staring down the length of the ladder between her feet, figuring it must be seventy or eighty feet to that concrete slab at the tower’s base. It moved back and forth, or seemed to at least, though she knew that was the tower itself swaying and a surge of bile lurched up her throat.

Hold it together. You’ve been through worse. This is for Max. For Andy.

"You aren’t freezing on me up there, are you?"

"No."

Her words thick in her throat, palms sweating, sliding too easily across the