Off to the side, he thought he heard Freeboot laughing.

Then Callus swung his heavy stick across Monks’s shins.

Monks yelled, a roar of rage and disbelief at the agony that burst through his bones and shot up into his brain. Pain was so intimate. There was no way to hide. It knew everything about every tiny bit of you, flared up in every one of those millions of nerve endings that you were unaware of most of the time.

“You cocksucker,” Sidewinder sobbed into his ear. The sling tightened viciously. Through the spots starting to float across his vision, Monks saw Callus swing the stick again. This time, the impact was hard enough to chip bone. Monks clawed back at Sidewinder’s face, his feet dancing crazily, trying to run of their own accord.

A third blow crashed across his shins, bringing him to the edge of blacking out. His consciousness was filled with the torture in his legs and the sound of his own choked bellowing in his ears.

The pressure around his neck let up suddenly, and the sling was released. The rifle butt slammed into his back, driving him sprawling onto the ground.

“Next time we’ll use a sledgehammer,” Freeboot said. “Now get back under that floor.”

Monks crawled to the foundation’s opening and forced himself through, moving helplessly past the wool-wrapped bundle that was Mandrake. Maybe he had been aware of what had happened, maybe not.

“He still needs his blood sugar checked every hour,” Monks panted. “And the insulin shots.”

Something came into view outside. There was just enough light left for him to recognize Freeboot’s bare feet.

“Yeah?” Freeboot said. “I’m starting to think you’ve been keeping him sick. Trying to get me to let you go.”

“If you want him to die, you’re almost there,” Monks said hoarsely.

The feet stayed there a few seconds longer. Then they were gone.

“You, fuckhead-I ought to make you get in there with him,” he heard Freeboot say to Sidewinder. “You better be right on top of him, watching every second. Callus, bring the kid.”

Another pair of feet appeared outside the opening, this time wearing boots.

“You stick your fucking nose out, I’ll blow it off,” Sidewinder said. His voice trembled with fury.

Monks curled up again and closed his eyes, trying to rub a little of the fire out of his throbbing shins. A couple of minutes later, he heard the sound of bootsteps on the kitchen floor above him, then hammering. The plywood sheets under the sink were being nailed down. There might have been a hidden camera, watching him the entire time, he thought.

Or Glenn had gone to Freeboot and alerted him that Monks was planning to run.

Gradually, the pain subsided to a bearable ache. The discomfort of being cold and wet moved in to join it. Lying in the dirt, trapped by the floor joists, he couldn’t move enough to warm himself. Within half an hour he was shivering convulsively.

A warm deer carcass to crawl into would have looked pretty good about now.

A couple of hours later, Monks heard Sidewinder kick loudly against the lodge’s wall.

“Hey! Asshole!” he yelled. “Come on out.”

Monks uncurled himself stiffly and squirmed to the foundation’s opening, his raw shins scraping against the hard rock-strewn dirt. He pulled himself out into the rainy gloom, fearful that he was going to get a boot or rifle butt in the face. But Sidewinder only held the leveled weapon on him.

“Freeboot says you can go back inside,” he said sullenly.

Monks’s eyes teared up with pleasure when he stumbled into the firelit warmth of the lodge. But when he walked into Mandrake’s bedroom, he saw that the shackles with the cable attached were lying on the floor.

“Put ’em on,” Sidewinder ordered. His raingear was dripping puddles onto the floor, and his face radiated his rage and resentment.

Monks sat, pulled off his boots, and snapped the iron rings around his own ankles.

“Freeboot’s got some business to take care of,” Sidewinder said. “He told me to tell you the kid better be better when he gets back.” He turned on his bootheel, in pseudo-military style, and stalked out.

Mandrake was in bed, lying on his tummy. He didn’t open his eyes or respond when Monks turned him over. His forehead was hot. Whatever complication was at work was advancing. Monks helplessly moistened the inside of the child’s mouth. Dehydration was quickly entering into the mix-while sheets of rain pounded down on the metal roof.

Sidewinder hadn’t said how long it would be until Freeboot came back, but this much was certain: the kid was not going to be better.

Monks sat down and painfully unstuck his pant legs from the crusted blood on his shins, then pulled them up to his knees. By now the lacerations were surrounded by long purple bruises, and swollen into knobs. He explored them with his fingers, grimacing fiercely. At least they weren’t the kinds of wounds that were likely to get infected, and any bone chips would eventually heal themselves. It just hurt like hell.

A couple of minutes later, he heard the lodge’s door open and close. Quiet footsteps hurried across the floor toward him.

Marguerite stepped hesitantly into the bedroom. She looked concerned, even frightened. Her eyes widened at the sight of his legs.

“I heard what happened,” she said. “I got Freeboot to let you back in.”

Wearily, Monks nodded thanks.

She stepped to the curtain, to leave, he thought. Instead, she looked around the outer room, then came back in and knelt beside his chair.

“I’ll help you get away,” she whispered. “I know how. You have to take me, too.”

He stared at her in numb amazement. For the first time, she seemed really to be looking at him. Her dark eyes were clear, free of the spaced-out affect he had grown used to.

But wariness followed instantly. He had not forgotten that she was the one who had set him up in the first place.

“Is this another one of Freeboot’s tests?” he said.

“No.” She looked puzzled. “Freeboot’s gone, he’ll be gone all night. So will most of the others.”

That jibed with what Sidewinder had said.

“How did he catch me?” Monks asked, probing to find out if there was a hidden camera that might be watching them right now.

“Coil told him.”

The news came like another ugly bucket of sludge, thrown on top of all the rest. But it had the ring of truth.

“What changed your mind?” Monks said.

As she hesitated, guilt, shame, and the admission of her own stupidity passed across her eyes.

“I didn’t want to believe you,” she said. “That Mandrake’s going to die. But I’ve been watching him, while you were…gone. He seems like he’s almost dead now.”

Monks kept staring hard at her, trying to believe her.

Her gaze faltered. “I understand why you don’t trust me,” she said.

“Bring me a gun, and I’ll start.”

“I can’t get a gun. But Hammerhead’s standing guard. He volunteered, because of me.”

“And?”

“You could take his gun,” she said.

“Just walk up and ask him for it?”

“I could-you know, get him thinking about something else,” she said, with her eyes still lowered. “You’d have to hit him, or something.”

Sure, nothing to it, Monks thought. “With what?”

“There’s pipe wrenches in the toolshed.” She held out her hands about three feet apart. Monks was distantly surprised that she even knew what pipe wrenches were. But that was probably as good a weapon as anything short of a firearm. A knife or garrote was too risky against a man as strong and well trained as Hammerhead.

A hard blast across the back of the head, while not exactly honorable, might do it.

“What about this?” he said, reaching down to rattle his shackles.

“There’s bolt cutters, too.”

“Can you get other gear? Flashlight, matches, compass? Some food, warm coats. A rucksack, to carry Mandrake.”