She had worked hard at figuring out how she was going to find Mr. Sugar’s house. He’d requested that she be blindfolded on the drives out, but he had never taken any care to hide how he made his money. He owned an energy drink company called Power Up Beverages. The motel manager had let her use the office internet and she searched for corporate information on Power Up. His fridge had been full of the products the company made, and he was always guzzling one down. The president’s name was Carl Duffy. There was even a picture of him, the smiling pig. She plugged his name into a directory and found an unlisted number, but another directory turned up an address and Google Maps confirmed the topography she remembered from looking out the windows of the room he’d kept her in. The house had been high on an escarpment overlooking a lake. Gannon Lake. She was even closer than she’d thought: it was less than twenty kilometres from the motel. But to get there, she could not hitchhike, and neither could she dawdle about it. There was only one viable option: she would run there.

She hadn’t run a distance longer than five kilometres since her injuries. A half-marathon, in her best days, would have taken her an hour forty-five, but she imagined a run like this, cold, would take her three hours if she wanted to have any strength when she got there.

She printed out the map and folded it up. She thanked the manager and told him she’d be back for another night. She didn’t tell him there was little or no chance that he would ever see her again. But if someone was onto her, having someone else who could offer her pursuers a good lead might buy her much-needed time. In her room, she changed into the clothes she’d been wearing the night she left Henry Wiest in the parking lot, clothes he’d brought for her: a pair of sweatpants with the word CANADA on them and a T-shirt. She’d wrecked these clothes walking in the woods, but they were the best clothes she had for running. She set out, heading for the smaller roads behind the town, and before she was through the first kilometre, she’d taken off the tennis shoes and thrown them into the scrub. She’d trust her naked feet to get her there. Back when she’d been serious about running, she’d met a lot of barefoot marathoners who swore by it. It felt okay, if she stayed on the paved part of the road. By the time the sun was past its noon height and she was running past farms and fields, she had settled into a rhythm.

As she ran, she began to hear a voice in her head. Not a crazy voice, just her own voice, as if being broadcast directly into her mind from outside of herself. It was saying, You are good, you are good. You have done nothing wrong. You are an angel. She saw the killing she’d done in a new light and something inside her, like a weight, went down into her belly and settled and she began to run faster, with more power. The guilt and horror streamed off of her, and she began to understand why Henry Wiest had had to die, why Terry Brennan had to die. Why Carl Duffy, once he had given her what she wanted, would die. All of them had stepped out of the natural order, and removed her from it as well, and now they were all subject to new laws. Laws that did not obtain in the real world, where people had names and relationships. In this other world, the laws said she could eradicate anyone who had witnessed, participated in, or caused her shame. She had known love and obeyed its laws, which were trust, openness, abandon when it was called for, generosity, selflessness. The new laws demanded the opposite: secrecy, caution, selfishness, and righteous anger. She was a certain kind of angel. She ran in Larysa’s body, but she felt with Kitty’s soul. And in Kitty’s soul, there was a surfeit of murder.

In her pocket, however, there was a folding knife. The good, heavy knife that Henry had given her. It was in her sidepocket and it tapped her as she ran, over and over, like a crop against horseflesh. The rhythmic urgency of her footfalls paired to the metronome of the knife pushed her. Along this road were little fruit and vegetable stands with trust boxes lying on the rough-hewn tables. She grabbed an apple at one, a bell pepper at another. She had brought a single bottle of water with her, and she drank from it slowly, pacing herself with the slap of her feet against the pavement, counting to a thousand and then taking a mouthful.

Within an hour, she had covered half the distance and it was mid-afternoon. She took a risk at a corner store at the base of the road that led up into the escarpment and stopped there for a sandwich and asked to have her bottle refilled. The man who served her noticed she was barefoot, but he didn’t say anything, and she was in and out in five minutes. After that, the land began to rise at the base of the lake, and her energy flagged momentarily. Then she thought about how close she was to completing her mission here, and she drew herself up and ran harder.

She was running in cover, taking paths through the woods when she could still see the road, running on loam and moss. Somewhere she’d cut her foot on a piece of wood, or a stone, but she felt no pain at all. She was perilously alive. Maybe this was the end of her life. She was running to her death, rushing to it. She knew what Mr. Sugar – Duffy – was capable of. Her little hunting knife would be no match for him. She wouldn’t be surprised if his arsenal extended beyond chains, locks, prods, and gags. When he’d won her back the week after Terry ran out of money, he’d turned up the torture, putting cigarettes out on her skin, slapping her, crushing her with his disgusting body. “Now Kitty is home,” he’d said to her, and never before had the word home seemed so lifeless.

He was planning on keeping her forever, and he could afford it. There were special offers for people like Carl Duffy. People like Carl Duffy liked to have souvenirs. Who knows how many girls he’d had from Bochko before her, how many keepsakes he had. She had thought perhaps Terry had exercised that right before quitting her and she’d had to know for sure, which was why she’d visited him. But now she knew she’d gone to see Brennan because he had to be punished. Carl Duffy would have what she was looking for, and she would see the blood spurt from his throat before she took it away from him.

The map told her she was just a few kilometres northwest of Kehoe Glenn. She had no worries that she would fail to find Mr. Sugar at home; he ordered all his food off a website. It was brought to the door three, four, five times a day. He sent out for breakfast, for fresh coffee, for snacks. She had watched in raving hunger as he devoured pizzas, Chinese food, and burritos in front of her. He would toss her a crust or a noodle and she’d have no choice but to accept these scraps. After his meals and entertainment, the huge man would often lapse into sleep and leave her manacled for hours.

She’d only escaped the threatened permanence because Sugar had been careless and that Henry man had been a fool. Chance was the only way she was going to get out, and chance had favoured her. She ran up onto the escarpment, feeling her blood surging in her veins. She was an animal now, a machine, an agent of deliverance. Carl Duffy was about to die, and she was about to be free. It was August 15, a Monday evening in her twenty-sixth year on earth.

] 26 [

Monday, August 15, morning

The morning after Wingate’s underground ordeal, Hazel woke to a quiet house. She’d had a fitful sleep as her legs had jumped and woken her repeatedly. She’d wanted to go right back out, to mobilize whatever was needed to get those girls out of there, but both Wingate and Greene had convinced her they needed a better plan than that. And backup. And the aid of the Queesik Bay Police Department.

Cathy had gone to Greene’s wife’s B&B, but Emily would have nothing to do with it and insisted on sleeping in her own bed. Now, at 8 a.m., Hazel opened her mother’s room and called to her. There was no reply: it was early, and her mother had taken to sleeping late. But Hazel noticed that her breathing was strange. It was shallow and raspy. She went closer to the bed and called to her mother again.