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"Please don’t hurt her baby," she said. "Please."

"You are good," he said. "You are very good."

"Will you spare her child?"

"For no reason?"

"I’ll earn it."

Vi could feel herself coming unhinged, a psychotic refusal to acknowledge what had just happened.

"That could be interesting."

"Promise me."

"Head back down. We’ll talk when you reach the ground."

For several minutes, Vi sat there, unmoving.

The drizzle had become rain and it beat down on her head, a bitter cold beginning to fester someplace deep inside of her.

Andy

ON the screen, I watched Violet slowly working her way down the water tower’s ladder. The camera shot came from over a hundred yards away—handheld and constantly zooming in and pulling back to correct the focus. Condensation on the lens lent a foggy overlay to the picture.

I’d heard everything Luther had said. Watched the fight. Seen Violet throw the woman over the railing.

Now the screen went black.

Again, I sat in darkness, the thought crossing my mind that I had just dreamed all of this.

Sleeping was sight and picture and color.

Waking this unending night.

His voice convinced me otherwise.

"She’s amazing, isn’t she?" Luther said. "It must be something to know her. I mean, really know her. Do you really know her, Andy?"

"Whatever you want with Violet, use me," I said. "I’ll go along with anything you want, but please, let Violet and her son go. They don’t need to be a part—"

"You love her, huh?"

The question more painful than anything I’d experienced sitting in this chair.

Emotion swelling in my throat.

"I owe her," Luther said, "and still..."

His voice trailed off, and for a moment I could only hear him breathing, and the patter of rainfall on plastic.

Violet

HER feet touched the concrete slab, and despite the horror of the last fifteen minutes, the relief of being off that tower was palpable.

She stared over at Jennifer, fought off a surge of nausea.

Such destruction.

Pointless.

Vi climbed back over the barbed wire fence.

So tired. So cold.

Think, Violet. Think.

She scanned the houses and buildings in the distance.

Nothing moved in the gray, steady rain.

She had Jennifer’s knife hidden up the right sleeve of her tracksuit, the butt of the handle resting in her palm. It had made descending the slippery ladder more difficult, but now she had it, and she prayed he hadn’t noticed.

He was watching her, she was sure of it. Had to figure on surveillance cameras everywhere. Maybe someone helping him.

She could make a run for it, try to reach civilization, but he had her son. Had Andy.

Vi jogged across the road toward a brick building with a fifty-foot chimney on the far end.

Time to get out of this freezing rain.

"Turn left," Luther said.

Or not.

She veered away from the abandoned factory.

"Now run," he said.

She accelerated, the shuddering footfalls driving pain through her right ear, where she was beginning to suspect that Luther had stitched the earpiece into her skin.

Otherwise, it felt good to run, the exertion warming her against the chill.

She ran down the street for several minutes before he spoke again, passing ruined automobiles and more rotting houses.

"The housing project. See it?"

"I see it."

"That’s your destination."

The building loomed fifty yards away, rising above the oaks whose brown leaves had fallen and become rain-plastered to the pavement.

"What’s in there, Luther?"

Violet crossed the street and stopped out-of-breath where the sidewalk entered the courtyard of a six-story structure that resembled a crumbling L.

"Did I tell you to stop?"

She went on past a collapsed swingset and an overgrown sandbox, its only remnants the two-by-six board frame. A few toys had been left behind—a front-loader, a big-wheel missing its big wheel, plastic green army men scattered in the grass, casualties from some long-forgotten war.

She approached the double-doored entrance which had been leveled years ago, the building’s windows glaring down like a hundred black eyes.

Over the threshold into a darkness