The room began to swim. I closed my eyes. “Ollie,” I said. “Please.”

I think I said this aloud. I’m almost sure of it.

*   *   *

“Lyda. Wake up.”

The room was dark. It was sometime in the thin hours between midnight and dawn. My skin felt hot. Rovil slumped in the guest chair, dead asleep. I should wake him, tell him the fever is cooking, and that I needed meds. I should call the nurse. I should …

“It’s getting close to my time to leave.”

I looked to the right. A few feet away, light and shadows formed the shape of an angel. Her face was the orb of a street lamp glowing through the window; her wings, spread against the wall, were made from the light spilling through the open door.

“You’re fading,” I said.

“It’s the meds,” she said. “They’re making it hard to get through.” Someone passed outside my door, and her wings seemed to flutter. “You could have silenced me a long time ago. All those prescriptions from doctors of the NAT ward? But you kept palming those pills, hiding them under the tongue. Strange behavior from a nonbeliever.”

“Guardrails,” I said. I had wanted to give her up, but I was afraid that without her I’d be dead. And now, finally, the automated delivery system of the IV drip proved to have more willpower than I did.

“You’ll need to be stronger than Francine,” Dr. Gloria said. “It’s the withdrawal that killed her—not the judgment of God, but My absence.”

“Not making any promises,” I said.

“I want to tell you: Do not mistake the messenger for the message. Just because you won’t be able to hear me soon, don’t imagine that I’m gone.”

I almost laughed. Oh, the double-talk of a feverish brain yammering to itself.

“I was with you in the beginning,” she said. “And I’ll be with you always.”

In the beginning.

“Tell me,” I said.

I didn’t remember much from the night of the party. But I remembered the feel of the knife in my hand. And I remembered Gil taking it from me. Which was true?

“Please.”

“You did not kill Mikala,” the angel said. “And neither did I.”

Her head seemed to tilt toward me. “Oh, Lyda. Did you really think that you were the kind of person who could murder your own true love?”

For the sake of our child? I thought. I didn’t know. I was afraid that I could, and afraid that I couldn’t.

“It’s time to abandon your confidence in your own guilt,” she said. “Your self-loathing is beginning to look self-serving. For the sake of the child, you’ve got to protect yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

A figure stepped into the room, blocking the light from the hallway. The movement broke Dr. Gloria into pieces. Where she’d stood had become nothing but patches of light and shadow, and I couldn’t make out her pattern for the noise.

“Lyda.” The angel’s voice whispered like the hiss of an air vent, like the static of a radio. “You have been betrayed.”

And then even her voice was lost to me.

*   *   *

A figure in scrubs bent over me. A woman. She touched my cheek. “You’re burning up.”

“Ollie?”

“I can’t stay long,” she said.

So clever. Dressing up as a nurse. The old tricks are the best tricks.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have walked out on you. If I’d been with you—”

“If,” I said. “Dead.” I meant to say, If you’d come you’d have been killed. The cowboy had been hired to kill us all. Or most of us. I finally understood why.

“Has her fever been this high before?” Ollie asked. She was talking to Rovil. He hovered behind her, a worried look on his face.

“She was like this after surgery,” he said. “They thought she wouldn’t make it, and then her fever suddenly dropped. A little miracle. I was glad to be there when she woke up.”

I tried to speak, and Ollie asked, “What is it, Lyda? What do you need?”

“Ganesh,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t understand,” Rovil said.

“It’s the fever talking,” Ollie said. She straightened, but her eyes held mine. Oh, she was so quick. All she needed was the smallest nod to point her in the right direction.

“Call the nurse,” she said to him. “I can’t be here. I’ll see you outside in a couple hours.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The parking lot of the CHRISTUS St. Vincent Medical Center was a black page, the cars set upon it like characters from a metal alphabet. Empty spaces separated the characters into words, and each row formed a sentence. Hospital staff and media people and ordinary visitors had cooperated with the parking lot in the writing of it, and they rewrote it over the course of the day, adding and removing vehicles, adjusting by make and model, by color and year, until finally, just before dawn, the editing subsided and the final message of the night could be read. The sadness of the world’s parking lots was that no one was ever there to decipher it.

Almost never.

Olivia Skarsten leaned against the hood of a black sedan parked at the edge of the lot and considered the pattern laid out before her under the dim lights. The message came to her just as Rovil Gupta stepped out of the hospital’s sliding doors. He saw her standing by his car and began to walk toward her.

“‘The skin of the ground is cold,’” Ollie said. “‘But the sun is coming.’”

“Pardon?” Rovil said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just something somebody told me. How’s Lyda doing?”

“They gave her meds to bring down the fever, and something else to let her sleep,” Rovil said.

They got into the car. “I’m staying in an out-of-the-way place,” Ollie said. “If you could drop me there I’d appreciate it.”

“Of course,” he said. He asked for an address to punch in to the GPS, but she said she’d just direct him. They left the hospital parking lot and turned south.

“I’m going to go back to my hotel and sleep for a few hours, then start the drive home,” he said. “I hate to leave Lyda, but I’ve been away too long.”

“You’ve done enough,” Ollie said. “Turn left at the light.” Eventually they got onto Central Avenue and followed that under the interstate. The sky began to lighten above them. “You and I never got the chance to talk much,” Ollie said.

He smiled. “I just assumed you didn’t like me.”

“I get that a lot,” she said. “I don’t have a spiritual advisor to remind me when I’m being too harsh.”

“It is a great help,” he said.

“Maybe we’d all be better off with a touch of the Numinous,” she said. “Maybe not so much as you and Lyda.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Rovil said. “Then again, most substances turn toxic at extreme levels.”

“Water, for example.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Turn up here.”

“Of course,” he said. “Is your hotel nearby? It seems pretty residential.”

The houses along the street were one-story brown boxes like miniature prisons. The front yards were desert rock and clumps of parched plant life.

“It was cheaper to get a house for a week,” she said. “More like house-sitting. I found it online. Slow down … okay, this one.”

It was another rectangular brown home with a one-car garage and a few clumps of trees to provide some privacy. It had gotten terrible reviews online and was in no danger of being rented soon. An hour ago she’d disabled the amateurish alarm system and moved in. Rovil didn’t think to ask how she’d gotten from the house to the hospital. The silver pickup she’d stolen was sitting in row three, one letter in the parking lot’s little prayer.

Rovil put the car in park. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” Rovil said. “I hope—” He noticed the pistol in her hands and raised his eyebrows.

The garage door began to open.

“Pull in,” Ollie said.

“What are you doing? Where did you get that gun?”

“We’ll talk more inside,” she said.

She had him turn off the car and give her the keys. The garage door slid down behind them. Then she escorted him into the house and down uncarpeted stairs to the basement. It was dim down there, but not dark: Earlier she’d covered the three narrow windows with cardboard and put fresh mini-fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling lights. The space was unfinished, with a cement floor and walls bare to the studs. Most of the room was taken up with junk: boxes of dishes and plastic ice trays, an old-fashioned plasma TV, a stained loveseat, a toddler-sized carousel with three plastic horses upon a cracked base. Things you didn’t bother to take with you. Ollie had decided that the family that had lived here had planned to make the basement into a rec room, but then the young father lost his job, the marriage hit the rocks, and the woman and her child moved back east.