He’s balled his shirt and uses it to mop blood from his chest, carefully circling the hole he’s tucked a finger into.

– Mean, you don’t have to do it that way, but from what I gather it’s something they respect around here.

He drops the bloody shirt and puts his back against the wall and shakes his head.

– Which stands to reason, right? I mean, if punching a hole in your own heart doesn’t say something about who you are, I don’t know what will. Shit hurts, I can tell you that.

I sit across the room from him, watching the place on the floor where Evie was before they took her away.

– Heart’s blood. No reason why it should make a difference, but Daniel mentioned it a few times. Said it made for a closer bond between whoever was spilling their blood and whoever was drinking it. What do you think? Me, I can’t see why that’d be. But who knows. Mothers say they can tell when their kids are in trouble and shit, even when they’re hundreds of miles away. Maybe it’ll be like that. Maybe I’ll know when she’s in trouble. Or happy. Or sad. Maybe I’ll just kind of always know what she’s feeling. What about that?

I touch the finger I’ve stuck in the wound I reopened in my neck, the scabs have sealed tight against it. I ease it out and some blood leaks and then stops.

The Count pokes at his own wound.

– About that time, huh? Well, let’s see.

He draws his finger free and the clean edges of his unscarred flesh suck closed.

He looks around the empty room, hushes his voice.

– Truth, I didn’t hit my heart. Fuck that. Sometimes a little medical training comes in handy, let me tell you. Hey, would I have been surprised if my aim was off and I stuck myself in the fucking aorta? No. But there was no way I wasn’t gonna try and miss. We can theorize all we want about what the Vyrus will heal and what it won’t, but that was a chance I wasn’t interested in taking.

I put my hands on the floor and push myself up and work my back up the wall until I’m standing on my good leg.

The Count gets himself up.

– Yeah, getting late here, isn’t it? Probably time to call it a day. Things are gonna be plenty interesting for me. Should be getting my beauty sleep. Sure you don’t want to stay and see how this is all gonna work out?

I head for the door.

He walks behind me.

– Yeah, kind of what I thought. You got places to go, things to do, people, no doubt, to fuck up. Too bad. Things are gonna be getting very interesting around here, Joe. I mean, they got no one. I mean, no one on deck to take Daniel’s place. And here am I. Just arrived out of the cold dark. Overcoming terrible struggles in my first night. Representing by sticking a fucking pipe in my heart and successfully bringing a new Enclave to the Vyrus. Got the inside track, man. Got influence already. Like, the king is dead, long live the king, right?

At the landing we look down. The Enclave at meditation, arrayed on the floor below, seated and silent, the most withered at the front, the robust at the rear.

The Count points.

– I’ll have to start in the back with the guys who are still kind of getting the hang of fasting and all, but that won’t last. There’s no seniority here. Just willpower. Whoever can take the most, push the Vyrus the furthest, and live, they go to the front row. After that last year riding the bad dose, I can take a lot.

He places a hand on my shoulder.

– Thanks for that, Joe.

I ignore his hand.

I inhale. Smell her. Her new smell.

Knocking his hand away, I go past him. I smell her again. There’s a door between us. I make it go away.

She’s in there. Sitting, back against the wall, legs sprawled in front of her. She’s pulled the trache tube from her throat and holds it and stares at it, as she fingers the already healed incision just above the candy necklace that is speckled with blood. She looks up at me and shows me the tube.

– It itched.

– Sure it did.

She drops it and touches her head.

– My hair feels weird. It feels like it’s growing.

The sores on her face have started to fade. Purple to pink.

It hurts lowering myself to the floor, but I do it.

She wrinkles her nose.

– You smell funny, Joe.

She sniffs.

– Everything smells funny. It all smells bad here.

I look at her neck.

Thinking.

You don’t change things by wanting them changed. You change them by knowing what to do and when to do it. And by doing it.

I never seem to know what to do until it’s too fucking late.

She pinches her nostrils closed.

– I don’t like it here. I want to go home. Can you take me home?

I nod. But I’m lying.

I’ll never get her out of here. I’ll never get her past the maniacs down there. I’ll never get her away from the psycho setting up to take over this madhouse.

I touch her neck.

– Hey, baby, know what?

She covers my hand with hers.

– What?

– I love you crazy.

She smiles at me and opens her mouth to say something and I start to squeeze and this is what I know how to do and this is what I have to do and it is not too late to make this better and she looks at me like she suddenly doesn’t know who I am and grabs my fingers and I can do this I can do this and she looks at me and I can do this and Enclave come into the room and pull me from her and my fingers hook the strand of candies around her neck and it snaps and they scatter over the floor and she screams at me.

And I’m gone.

The Count looks down at me.

– Know much history, Joe?

I sit in two feet of dirty water at the bottom of the sewer shaft where they threw me and look up at him.

He points at himself.

– Not my best subject, but there’s stuff you connect with, right? Like even in the lamest class, there’s bound to be something you get a rise out of. History of Western Civilization was like that for me. That class was like nap time.

There is no ladder. No way back up.

– Monday, Wednesday and Friday, one to two-fifty for an entire year, man. Professor Hocker would start droning and, like, fifty undergrads would simultaneously nod off. You could sell that guy’s lectures on CD and make a fortune from insomniacs.

A feeder runs through here, washing the cold water around me, the occasional clump of waste getting lodged against my back.

– Only time I perked up and took notice? When he started getting into the Roman emperors.

I sit in the water, it soaks my clothes and makes my knee hurt worse.

– Those guys, once they got rid of the senate, know how they ruled? They ruled by caveat. Know what that means? Means they ruled by fear. Means they did whatever the fuck they wanted to.

The water is dirty. Does that mean it’s on its way to the river, or away from it? I don’t know.

– Hey, you know that fear rules the brain? Seriously. Our brains, this is amazing, they devote more space to dealing with fear than to any other emotion. Because, hey, fear is what makes us learn shit and survive. It’s fucking key. Know where it lives? Fear lives in this little thing, ’bout the size of an almond, called the amygdala. Fear in the brain. Something bad happens to you, you got no choice but to be afraid of it happening again. Until it happens so many times that you get used to it.

Iron grates on concrete as he drags the shaft cover to the edge of the hole.

– So tell me, how many people who you love do you think you have to have taken away from you, before you stop being afraid that it’ll happen again?

He looks over his shoulder, looks back down at me.

– Oh, hey, and can you guess which of the emperors was my favorite? No? Give up? OK, I’ll tell you.

He sticks his head into the shaft.

– Caligula.

He laughs through his nose and shakes his head.

– Yeah, sick but true. I am so fucking predictable, right? But I tell ya, once I get my thing going up in here, that’s gonna be the scene. I’m gonna introduce a whole new way of doing things around here. I mean, everybody is scared shitless of these dudes, how can I not find a way to make use of that?