“Kez,” I whisper. Or think I do. “Kez—”
A shadow moves in front of my blurred vision and leans close. I try to focus.
It’s not Kez.
It’s him.
Empty, bland face, expressionless eyes. One side of his head is crushed in, but healed over. It’s been years since the day his sister was taken. Years for him to learn how to pretend to be normal, or some approximation of it.
The fumbling uncertainty of Leonard Bay is gone as he searches me, finding and collecting my weapons. I feel a tug at my pants legs, and then he flips me onto my face. Zip ties tug my hands together behind me. Fast, efficient, merciless. I can’t get to the ankle gun, if it’s even still there.
“It’s for your own protection.” I hear the words indistinctly, like they’re coming from the surface and I’m far, far underwater. “Trust me.”
He flips me over again. I’m trying to get control, but I just manage an uncoordinated flail with my legs before he has the collar of my jacket and is pulling me relentlessly onward. I can’t see anything but what we pass, and that’s just shapes and shadows that resolve into concrete columns, padded iron supports. The acoustics of the room shift, or my ears do, and I realize that we’re passing a silent, still sculpture of a processing line. The smell is horrific here. A physical presence forcing itself down my throat.
But everything is so clean.
“I knew you’d choose this,” he says. His voice is faint under the constant ringing. “Clever people always do this to themselves. You just can’t help it.”
“Kez,” I say. “Where’s Kez?” I try to fishtail, slow him down. It doesn’t work. He’s strong, and when I manage to hook a foot onto a passing support, it just slides free at his next tug. “What did you do to Kez?”
“She’s fine. I didn’t want to hurt her, you understand that? She’s not the point. I admire what she does.”
He’s pulled me through most of this assembly line, I think, but no, it just keeps going. Conveyor belts and metal bins, snaking off in all directions. The guts of the machine. Millions of fish passed through here. Billions. All bled and gutted and filleted and packed for easy consumption. And now it’s me being processed.
“You said there’d be choices!” I manage to shout it, and now, finally, my voice sounds nearly normal to my ears, though there’s a constant loud, sizzling hiss I’m not sure I’ll ever lose again. “This isn’t a choice!”
“We haven’t even started,” he says. “Do you know how much time it takes to destroy a life? One second.” His voice is strangely flat and unaffected, like he doesn’t know how to communicate emotion or doesn’t care to try. If he had an accent, he’s lost it with time and training. “Sometimes it takes longer. It took my sister a lot longer to die. Minutes.”
I don’t know how to answer. I can’t tell if the knife is still on my belt. The shotgun’s gone. I don’t know if I have anything left to use at all.
“Three,” he says. “Two. One. We’re here.”
He stops pulling me, and I immediately roll right to try to twist his wrist, break free, but he isn’t surprised. He lets momentum carry me over to my right side, and I feel myself sliding forward as he throws me, like a bowling ball. I try to stop myself, but he steps back, and I feel his foot land firmly in the small of my back. I feel a tug and a small, sharp nick of pain. My hands are free. I try to push myself up.
He kicks me hard, so hard I feel all the air forced out of me, and then I’m sliding forward again.
Into the dark.
I hear the door slam behind me and locks being thrown. I hear my own panicked breathing, the frantic slap of my body flopping against the floor. Tile, I think. Burning cold. It’s absolutely black in here, except for the pallid strobe afterimages my eyes are still remembering in chemical traces. I force myself to go still, to relax. He stayed outside. I’m alone in the dark. I just need to breathe and think.
My hands and ankles are free. I can stand up. I just need to be careful not to bash my head against something, trip, break bones . . . I’ve always had a low-key fear of the dark, but this is nightmarish. I don’t want to move. I just want to curl into a ball and hide. Instead, I force myself to take inventory. I’ve been cut, just a little. I can feel the wound throbbing on my wrist, but it doesn’t seem that deep. I feel for the knife, but the sheath’s empty. So is my shoulder holster. I reach for the backup ankle gun that I strapped in place, and remarkably, it’s still there. He didn’t find it. It’s a small .38, lethal at close range. I feel miles better with the light weight of it in my hand.
I look for the burner phone I stuck in my jacket pocket. It’s gone too.
It reeks in here, even worse than the last room. So bad I cough and choke and nearly throw up again until I steady myself.
It isn’t fish this time. I know this smell, this particular smell that the fish odor covers so well.
I’m in the room with death. Something large.
The lights suddenly blaze on, brighter than hope, and I find myself scooting violently backward until my back hits the metal door behind me, unable to take my eyes off what I’m seeing.
I’ve found Sheryl Lansdowne.
I scream. I can’t help it, it just bursts out of me like a blowtorch’s flame, piercing and desperate and horrified. My first thought is that she’s been broken like a china doll, only china dolls don’t bleed when their arms and legs come off. Her limbs are separated a precise distance from her torso. Her head’s still attached. She’s still dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans; the cuts to remove her arms and legs were so precise that the fabric was sliced clean.
It takes me a few horrific seconds to realize what else I see. Sheryl’s fingers and toes have a lifeless, bluish tinge to the flesh, and they’re actively decomposing, like they’ve been severed from her for hours, maybe as much as a day.
But her face and the exposed skin on her neck still look pink. Pale, but alive.
She opens her eyes.
“Hello?” She sounds drugged. Calm. Her pupils are enormous, like black holes. “Tyler?”
She’s alive. Somehow. Impossibly alive. And then I force myself to look at her body, at the places where the limbs were severed. The wounds are covered with some kind of plastic bandages. She’s still bleeding at the edges in a steady flow. There’s an IV hooked up to her body, line embedded in her neck. She’s getting plasma and some kind of clear liquid in a bag.
It’s painkiller. It has to be. Because she’s not screaming.
She smiles, like she’s been told a joke. Then her face twists, and her eyes fill with tears, and she says, “I didn’t want to.” As if she’s having a conversation with someone who isn’t there. I slowly, slowly work my way out of my paralysis and push myself up to a crouch, then to a standing position. I make myself look away from Sheryl and toward the rest of the room. It’s just a small, white room—tiled on all four walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. There’s a drain in the floor. Her blood is dripping down into it.
The only way in or out of the room, other than the small drain, is the door I came through.
There’s a small electrical outlet on the far wall, and—weirdly incongruous—a small speaker plugged into it. I catch a glint of glass sitting at the top of it: a camera.