She started one she’d memorized in high school that had always stuck.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”

Matthew whispered, “I love this one.”

She brought the knife around, had intended to drive it straight down in a single, fluid motion, but seeing the blade poised over Matthew’s chest stopped her.

She kept telling herself do it do it do it do it, but nothing happened.

She couldn’t move.

A droplet of sweat fell from her brow and struck a piece of newsprint covering Matthew.

Several seconds had passed since she’d finished the line of poetry and any moment now his eyes—

Matthew’s eyes opened—a flicker of contended calm before he saw the knife and what must have been a visage of primal terror staring down at him.

Do it do it do it do it do it do it.

Matthew’s lips parted, as if to speak, but instead he started to sit up.

Violet stabbed him through the chest—the blade buried to the hilt, and she was on top of him and leaning all her weight into the knife, twisting, and she could feel his heart knocking frantically against the blade, the vibration traveling through the steel and leather up into her hand—four perceptible beats and then it stopped and Matthew let out a stunned gasped.

For a long time, she didn’t move.

Just stared down into Matthew’s eyes, watching the intensity of life recede into a glazed emptiness.

She couldn’t stop trembling.

At last she rolled off of him.

Already, his blood was pooling on the cardboard and soaking through the right knee of her tracksuit. She crawled out of the box and got three steps toward the oil drum before she spewed her guts across the floor, stood bent over retching until she could produce nothing more than dry heaves.

“I did it,” she said, gasping. “You hear me you son of a fucking bitch, I did it.”

She spit several times. The acidic tang of bile burned her throat.

“I want to see Max,” she said, her body quaking with the malevolence of what she’d done. “Luther. Luther!” she screamed.

Luther didn’t answer.

“Luther!”

“You have a lot to learn,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Trust. Specifically, when not to give it.”

Her son screamed through the earpiece.

Violet’s legs failed and she was suddenly on her knees and screaming, her fingers raking through her hair. Luther was still talking, but she didn’t hear a thing. Everything drowned out by the rage and the cries of Max.

“Please, Luther!” she begged. “I did what you asked. Please!”

Max’s wailing intensified.

She jumped to her feet and wiped her eyes, rushed over to the cardboard box and took hold of the knife, pulled it out of Matthew’s chest, the blade lacquered in blood. She wiped it against her pant leg and hurried out of the alcove and back into the corridor. The darkness so perfect she had to trail her hand along the wall for a guide and brace against the garbage that covered the floor.

Thirty seconds later, she stumbled out into the lobby and through the ruined double doors into the rain.

Her son still screaming, and she screamed back, “Stop hurting him!”

The crying became louder, like someone driving a nail through her eardrum. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand the thought of what Luther was doing to him.

“I’m going to kill you!” she screamed.

Violet grabbed the earpiece, ripped it out.

Immediately, a flash of searing pain and the heat of blood streaming down the side of her neck.

She dropped the earpiece and stomped it into pieces with the heel of her tennis shoe and ran out into the night.

The rain pelted her face and the sky flushed with the pinkish tint of city-glow from the lights of downtown.

Across the concrete barrens, just darkness and the slightest silhouette of things—the water tower, trees, smokestacks.

She ran through an abandoned neighborhood, her shoes soaked through to her socks.

Gulping air.

The weakness in her legs growing more pronounced by the moment as the freezing rain poured down on her.

Under the pink sky, the profile of factories loomed in the distance.

She broke out of the neighborhood, found herself running across a wide expanse of fractured concrete—a parking lot treed with old light poles.

By the time she reached the first building, her heart was screaming in her chest, and her eyes burned with sweat—a moment’s reprieve from the cold.

The building stood fifty feet tall. Brick. Graffitied and with giant, multi-pane windows, mostly emptied of glass. Vi jogged along the side of the building until she came to a pair of double doors.

She struggled to drag them open against their rusted hinges, then slipped inside, out of the rain.

As the doors eased shut behind her, she stood dripping and panting and straining to see, waiting for her eyes to adjust, to begin to work again.

Darkness.

Her pulse thrumming against her eardrum.

She wiped the sweat and rainwater from her eyes and blinked against the sting.

Already, she was cooling down.

Drenched through, the chill beginning to muscle in.

She couldn’t imagine walking back out into that freezing rain, but continuing on into this building, in complete darkness, seemed no better.

She crumpled down onto the floor, her sobs echoing down some corridor whose terminus she could not see.

Her son was at that monster’s mercy.

She’d killed two people in the last eight hours.

And the man she loved was in all likelihood going to be killed horribly.

By the time she’d gotten back on her feet, she was shivering violently, her fingers barely able to grasp the knife.

The skin behind her right ear sang with agony, blood still pouring down her neck.

She started forward into the black, one slow and shuffling step at a time, the knife outstretched in one hand, the other trailing along the wall. She kept thinking she’d suddenly see something, that the darkness would dissolve away, but it held.

Twenty steps.

Thirty.

Forty.

She stopped counting after a hundred.

Then the point of the knife touched something hard.

She stopped, reached forward.

A wall.

She’d come to a point where the corridor branched to the left.

Righting herself, she moved on, and ten steps later, the wall her fingers had been following came to an end.

She stopped and listened.

Water dripped in the distance and there was something above her now.

Sky.

Just the faintest orange tint of it.

The frame of the window sharpened into focus and in that weak light that filtered in, she saw that she stood in the ruins of a long, factory floor.

Her eyes pulling every possible detail out of the skylight.

Equipment everywhere.

The remnants of an assembly line.

Immense machines.

Broken-down robotic arms.

Conveyor belts that hadn’t moved in years.

She walked carefully down the line, glass crunching under her feet.

Her teeth chattering.

The smell of grease still prevalent.

The factory must have stretched two or three hundred yards from end to end, and as she neared the other side, she started seeing half-assembled cars on the conveyor belt—no wheels, no engine blocks, doorless, and all rusted into oblivion.

At the other end of the factory she stopped. Heard the rain falling on the roof fifty feet overhead.

She moved through a pair of double doors and before passing again into darkness, saw the first few steps of a metal stairwell in the shreds of light.

There was nothing to do but descend.

She gripped the wobbly railing and headed down.

Baby steps from stair to stair, her footfalls causing the metal to resonate.

She went down three landings before the stairs ended.