“He wants this, okay? Do you understand that?”
“He’s hurting her!”
Jennifer swung the bowie at Violet, who leapt back.
Her impact sent a tremor through the catwalk, the metal vibrating, and Vi had to grab the railing to steady herself.
Her stomach burned. She touched her hand to the front of her tracksuit, and it came away red. The blade had passed through the nylon and cut a shallow streak across her abdomen.
She looked up at Jennifer who seemed stunned at what she’d done, fingering the blood on the knife.
Jennifer’s face broke. “I’m sorry,” she said.
The babies still screamed through their earpieces, and Luther was saying something that was lost amid the cries.
“I have to do this,” Jennifer said.
She stepped forward and Vi stepped back.
They both froze.
Jennifer rushed forward, and Vi rushed back.
Like some terrible dance.
When they stopped again, they were still six feet apart, both panting.
Jennifer faked a step and turned, sprinting in the other direction, disappearing around the other side of the water tank.
Vi stood motionless, listening. She could no longer hear the woman’s footsteps—nothing but the wobble of the railing, the pattering of the rain on the tank.
She could only see several feet in each direction before the catwalk disappeared around the curve of the water tank.
The sound of the crying babies had faded away.
Violet said, “Jennifer?”
She ventured three steps around the tank—nothing.
“Jennifer?”
She never heard the footsteps, only felt a new vibration in the catwalk, turned just in time to see Jennifer charging her in socks, the woman’s face overcome with a sudden ferocious flush, eyes gone cold and determined.
Predatory.
Vi watched the knife moving toward her, everything replaced by a diamond-hard streak of self-preservation.
Twenty-four inches of walkway left little room to parry the oncoming attack, and with Vi already pressed up against the water tank, she simply reacted without thinking, her right hand deflecting the knife thrust, clenching Jennifer’s wrist, and before she realized what she was doing, she’d simultaneously struck Jennifer’s arm above the elbow and jerked her wrist back against the blow.
The woman’s radius snapped and the knife clattered to the metal walkway and Vi drilled her chestplate with a palm-heel strike.
From Jennifer’s charge to this moment had taken the blink of an eye, Vi running on instinct and muscle memory. Vi lunged to grab the woman, her fingertips just missing the tracksuit as the backs of Jennifer’s thighs hit the railing, her momentum carrying her torso over the edge.
Vi caught a glimpse of the heels of her tennis shoes and then the woman was gone but for her fading scream—three and a half seconds of pure, vocalized terror.
She’d never heard anything to rival the sound of a human body slamming into a concrete slab from a hundred and seventy-five feet.
A thousand things breaking in the space of a millisecond.
Then silence.
Violet gripped the wet railing, staring down at Jennifer, sprawled far below.
She’d killed before, but they’d been monsters.
That woman was an innocent.
This felt...wrong.
She backpedaled into the water tank and sank down onto the walkway.
“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 that reeked of mildew and decay.
Her wet shoes tracked over the peeling linoleum, and the farther away she moved from the entrance, the darker, more claustrophobic it grew.