Olly nods. “I’m not a monster. You can leave with your family. And in return, you give us a day before you call the cops. All you have to do is drop your gun and put your hands up. Come on, Mrs. O’Neill, let’s work together on this, for all our sakes!”
Her mind is in overload. A collage of competing images and instincts. Don’t trust them, get the kids, don’t trust them, get the kids…
She has to choose, so she decides to believe him.
Get the children back first, worry about his intentions later, she tells herself.
She stands, puts her hands up, and lets the nine-millimeter fall to the floor.
“Come out from behind that trough, put your hands on your head, and get down on your knees,” Ginger says.
Rachel does as she’s ordered and Ginger pushes Kylie toward her. Kylie falls into her mother’s arms and Rachel hugs her.
“This time I’m never letting you go,” Rachel whispers.
Olly shoves Stuart toward the little pietà. He turns to his sister. “That, Ginger, is how you do these things. That is how it’s supposed to work. Not with this,” he says, waving the gun at her. “With this,” he says, touching the side of his own head. “You see what I did there? All I did was talk to her. No guns, no violence—a self-correcting mechanism. All you need is a phone and a voice. And a little bit of brains.”
“So you’re really going to let them go?” Ginger asks.
“Of course not! How can we possibly let them go? Jesus Christ, Ginger, I worry about you.”
“We’re going to kill them?”
“Yes!” Olly says with exasperation.
“Might as well do it now,” Ginger says. “It feels like we’ve been here half the night playing reindeer games in the snow. Better close your eyes, folks. For you the war is over.”
72
As early Christmas presents go, the Ultimate Houdini Magic Kit couldn’t be more geeky, and Kylie is at the age where her friends will tease her about such things. Magic? I mean, seriously, who does magic?
So she didn’t tell any of them. Except Stuart, of course. She told Stuart.
And she learned a few tricks. As she promised herself in that basement when she’d been chained to the oven, she did, in fact, learn how to escape from handcuffs. She watched those YouTube videos and she practiced. A lot. She got good at it. As good as one can get in a few weeks. She can escape from a standard handcuff in under thirty seconds. Now, zip ties are a different story, but all metal handcuffs can be opened with a universal key if you know what you are doing. As a good-luck totem, she always carries a handcuff escape key with her on her key chain.
Always.
Unseen by anyone, she unpicks the lock that is cuffing her hands in front of her.
Now what? Snow is pouring in through the holes in the roof. Her mother is holding her, Stuart is crying, and there on the floor right in front of her is the pistol that her mom dropped.
She reaches down and picks up the gun. It feels heavy. Impossibly heavy. The twins are talking. “Might as well do it now,” Ginger says. “It feels like we’ve been here half the night playing reindeer games in the snow. Better close your eyes, folks. For you the war is over.”
Kylie lifts the nine-millimeter, aims, and pulls the trigger.
73
Olly’s face caves inward, rushes out the back of his skull, and sprays over the cinder-block wall behind him. Kylie has never seen anything like it. It’s beyond horrific. But she has only a fraction of a second to be horrified. Ginger swings her gun around and points it at her.
“You little bitch!” Ginger screams and shoots blindly at Kylie.
Kylie fires again, but this time she’s miles high and the bullet clangs into the ceiling.
A rusted piece of the roof thuds to the floor between Ginger and the body of her brother. Startled, she turns to see what it is. Kylie hustles her mom and Stuart behind the concrete blood-collecting trough.
Ginger recovers herself and fires four times in quick succession.
Four shots slam hard into the trough.
Ginger moves, closes one eye, and aims carefully at Kylie’s shoulder peeking out from behind a crack in the concrete, but there isn’t going to be another shot. The revolver is empty.
“Shit!” Ginger says.
She’s out of ammo, Rachel thinks, and she takes the nine-millimeter from Kylie, stands, aims, and deliberately pulls the trigger. The trigger doesn’t do anything. The nine-millimeter is empty or, more likely, jammed and she has no idea how to fix a jam.
The two women glare at each other.
Another look of recognition.
Mirror Rachel, Mirror Ginger, you could be me, I could be you.
Rachel shakes her head. She’s not buying into that we’re-not-so-different-you-and-I bullshit. We all have choices.
Ginger smiles and drops her gun.
“I’m coming for you,” Rachel snarls and runs at her.
Ginger quickly assumes a self-defense stance, but Rachel’s momentum knocks them both to the ground.
Ginger springs to her feet and Rachel finds something metal on the floor and tosses it at her; it misses and thuds into the cinder-block wall.
Rachel gets up and throws a fist at Ginger but she’s far too slow and Ginger easily dodges it with a neat sidestep. Ginger’s blue eyes glint with pleasure as she head-butts a stunned Rachel in the face.
Rachel has never had her nose broken before, and the pain is so shocking that she is momentarily blinded. Ginger punches her in the ribs, stomach, and the left breast.
Rachel winces, collapses onto one knee, and then somehow gets up again.
“You liked that, bitch? You’ll love this,” Ginger says and she punches her in the throat, the left breast again, and then square on her bloody nose.
Heavy, well-placed, well-aimed blows that hurt.
Rachel goes down hard.
Ginger leaps on top of her and flips Rachel onto her back.
Ginger is so quick and efficient that Rachel has no chance.
“No, ugh.” Rachel gasps as Ginger’s hands wrap around her throat and squeeze.
“I knew you were trouble. Knew it right from the start,” Ginger says, her wild, ecstatic, crazy face leering above Rachel. Spittle is flying from her mouth. She’s grinning. She’s enjoying this. “I knew it!” Ginger says and squeezes harder. In FBI self-defense class, she learned how to choke someone out in a few seconds.
Rachel’s vision is tunneling.
Everything is becoming white.
“You’re going to die, bitch!” Ginger yells.
Tunnel.
Whiteness.
Nothingness.
Rachel knows she is disappearing forever now.
She can feel her life dribbling away onto the grimy concrete floor.
How to tell Kylie she loves her but that she isn’t going to make it?
Can’t tell her. Can’t talk. Can’t breathe.
Nothing anyone can do.
Rachel understands everything now.
The Chain is a cruel method of exploiting the most important human emotion—the capacity for love—to make money. It wouldn’t work in a world where there was no filial or sibling or romantic love, and only a sociopath who is without love or who doesn’t understand love could use it for her ends.
Love is what undid Ariadne and Theseus.