Standing once more in darkness—no light, no sound, not even the drip of water—and the smell of must and mold overwhelming. She staggered blind for three steps until the point of her knife touched a wall.

She coughed violently.

It took her several minutes to find her way out of the stairwell into another corridor.

She went on, the sense of disorientation growing stronger with every step, the pointlessness of this setting in: she was wandering in darkness in the lower levels of an abandoned building with not the faintest concept of where she was going, or that it might lead her to Luther and Max.

At the next break in the wall she moved through a doorway and out of the corridor.

She could go no further.

Whatever room she’d entered felt small and more confined based upon how it killed the echo of her coughing.

She walked into a table, then several steps later, some object that stood several inches taller than her and much wider.

A panel of glass.

Plastic buttons along the right side.

A vending machine.

This was a break room.

Violet crawled through the dark under one of the tables and unzipped her jacket, which she balled up into a sopping pillow.

She huddled there with her knees drawn into her chest, and it was a long time before she stopped shivering and longer still before her mind and body succumbed and sailed her off into sleep.

Andy

HIS voice was suddenly in my ear, but it wasn’t coming through the tiny speaker.

I could smell the lemon candy on his breath. The peculiar odor of Windex.

I hadn’t heard him enter this room, hadn’t heard his approach.

He’d simply materialized beside me.

“She ripped her earpiece out,” Luther whispered. “Now I have to go find her. This is okay. Not as planned, but okay. You’ve been wondering about the control in your right hand, no?”

I said nothing.

“It isn’t on yet, but it will be soon. I have this thing I’ve been dying to try out. Well, two of them actually. A his and a hers. I can tell you think you love Violet, but have you ever wondered how much? How deep it runs? I invented a way to tell. It answers a very primitive question, Andy—do you love the ones you love more than you fear incomprehensible pain? Is there a point where the pain becomes so all-consuming, that if you had the choice you’d shift the agony to the one you love most? We’ll know shortly.”

“Stop this,” I rasped, and there would have been tears in my eyes but for the severe dehydration.

“Andy, I’m giving her the chance to see what she’s capable of. To see the darkness in her heart and not turn away from it.”

A light clicked on, far overhead.

Luther held a spoon to my mouth.

“You’re going to need every bit of your strength,” he said. “Eat.”

It smelled like rancid apple sauce, but I was so hungry.

He fed me four bites out of the baby-food jar, and I had just begun to suspect that it wasn’t apple sauce after all, but some other putrid fruit or vegetable, spoiled beyond recognition, when he set the jar aside.

“Yum,” he said. “Right?”

I was fighting the urge to vomit.

“It’s amazing. What is it?” I asked.

“Beets.”

I threw up all over myself.

“That’s disgusting, Andy.”

“Honestly, Luther. Did you kill him?”

“Kill who?”

“Max. Her child.”

He just smiled.

I stared into his face for the first time in over a year. His hair was shorter than I remembered, only down to his shoulders, but still a coarse, pure black that held an unnatural, quasi-purple sheen, like the skin of a black snake. His face also shone with a preternatural paleness and his teeth were rotting. He popped a lemonhead into his mouth.

“I think it’s great that you’re writing again,” Luther said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your manuscript. I found it in the cabin. I’m considering trying to get it published when I’m done with you. Good title, Desert Places. My only fear is that no one will believe what you went through if I try to pass it off as non-fiction. Wouldn’t make a bad potboiler though. Who was your agent?”

I just glared at him.

“Come on, Andy, this book could be huge. Set me up for life. Help me complete my renovations here. You’re a celebrity.”

“If I agree to help, will you let Violet go?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can come up with some other way to elicit your cooperation that’s fun for me. Speaking of...” He smiled, spit the white lemonhead pit across the floor. “We should give Violet a little help in finding us. This is a big factory, after all.”

Luther walked across the room toward a waist-high cart with a control panel on top the size of a laptop. On the side of the cart, a rack of tools had been mounted to the metal frame.

“I kidnapped this brilliant engineer,” Luther said over his shoulder. “He not only built and wired these chairs, but he was their first occupant. I’ve got plans for this entire place—there’s so much potential—but for now, meet my new toy.”

He wheeled the cart toward my chair.

This was the most light my eyes had seen in I didn’t know how long, and I drank in my first decent glimpse of the place—a warehouse of sorts, ten or fifteen thousand square feet, with a high ceiling.

Across the room, I noticed another chair like mine. A bulky coil of cables extended out from the underside of the wooden gurney, and then the package spliced—one group running into the control panel, another disappearing through the wall.

My chair, I realized, was identical.

Luther stood at the control panel, smiling down at me.

“You truly cannot imagine how fun this is. I told my IT guy I wanted a device that could establish immobilization and then deliver heat, cold, electricity, perforation, abrasion, blunt force trauma, pressure—all the elemental forces. Imagine if the Inquisition had had the benefit of electricity? So Andy...” He was turning a knob now, something beneath me beginning to hum, a subtle vibration in the chair. “What’s your pleasure?”

Violet

SHE realized that she was awake.

Still shivering.

Still lying on a hard floor in the pitch-black.

Her right ear throbbed, and when she touched it, her fingers grazed a swatch of dried blood and skin that had begun to scab over.

Her stomach ached.

“Max,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”

She fell apart and wept, realigned herself to the horror that had become her life, and then gathered herself together again.

She’d shifted in her sleep and it took five minutes of walking into walls before she finally stumbled out of the break room and back into the corridor.

She stood there for a moment, waiting to see if some image might emerge out of the dark, but nothing did. A disconcerting hum, like the sound of wind moving through a tunnel, broke the silence, though it seemed a great distance away—far above her.

She went on as before, the knife out front, one hand trailing along the wall, figuring she must have slept for hours, because her clothes were almost dry.

The corridor ended in another stairwell, and she climbed several flights until she reached the top and pulled open a door.

Light streamed in.

She stood at the entrance to a large room sectioned by cubicle space. The light was weak and gray and still it burned and she had to stand there for several minutes, letting her retinas grow accustomed to the onslaught of daylight.

Through the maze.

Depressing partitions of long-vacant workspace.

Cheap desks and chairs. Rogue paperclips. Stray power cords.

She stopped in one cubicle and stared at a calendar still pushpinned into the fabric wall—six years out of date.

Light slipped in through wide, narrow windows near the ceiling that gave no view but of the sky. The hum was loudest here and the sound was of wind blowing through those glassless windows, passing through the room like breath over an open bottle top.