“Why does anyone get up on a cross?” Ollie said.

“Yes,” Rovil said. “I understand that now. Finally.” He began to cry again. He’d been crying a great deal since Ollie had administered the dosage. After the convulsions and glossolalia, after the wailing and laughing and calling out to unseen powers, Rovil had finally remembered where he was, and what he had done. The avalanche of remorse nearly buried him.

Ollie was getting tired of it. She tried to get him to focus, to answer her questions. At first he only wanted to tell her the Good News that had been revealed to him by Numinous: They were loved; every human was connected to everyone and everything else; they were all part of one organism; and on and on.

“Okay, I got it,” she said. “But you have to tell me what you’ve done.”

“Confess my sins,” he said. He sat slumped in the loveseat, still tied at the wrists and ankles. His clothes were plastered to him with sweat. “There are just … so many.”

He began to speak. He told her not only about Mikala’s murder, and the poisoning of everyone at Little Sprout, but all the transgressions he had committed before—and so many after. Over a decade at Landon-Rousse he had crafted a trail of evidence that allowed him to pass off NME 110 as his own work. It wouldn’t stand up under investigation, but no one at the company was motivated to look their gift horse in its molecular structure.

“Then Lyda called,” he said.

Somehow, impossibly, the drug was on the street. The lab analysis of the Logos sheet had removed all doubt. He suspected a leak inside Landon-Rousse. He’d made enemies within the company, he told her. The old Rovil of course suspected that his coworkers would steal from him.

“That’s when you hired the cowboy?” Ollie asked.

“Oh no,” he said. “I’d hired him long before that, for other work at LR. This was just the latest assignment.”

“What the fuck do you do for Landon-Rousse?”

He blinked at her through his tears. “Terrible things.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’ve out-conspiracy’d my own brain.”

Rovil’s theory about a leak at LR disappeared, he said, when Lyda told him about the church. No one with access to ready-made pills would do something so indirect as try to form a church and build printers. Lyda was right—it had to be Edo. But Rovil, even with his resources, could not get close to the man.

“I had no choice but to follow where you two led,” Rovil said. “I needed to shut down the church, shut down Edo. No one could know the drug came from Little Sprout. It would ruin me.” He winced and smiled. “I didn’t care about the company, you see, just my position. My power.”

He shook his head. “I don’t even understand that person now. There was something wrong with me. I couldn’t see it before, but now—now I’m a new person. I feel reborn.” He took a breath. “I’m ready to make amends.”

“See, that’s the thing,” Ollie said. “I don’t want you to be redeemed.” She took the pistol from her pocket. “I find it offensive that someone who’s done so much evil should be chemically converted into a saint. I believe—and maybe this is old-fashioned of me, Lyda would think so—I believe that there is a you who is responsible. Not a corporation. Not a machine. One person. A soul.”

“I agree with you,” he said earnestly. “I know now that there’s something bigger than this life. Something … after.”

“I do too,” she said.

“If you believe in Hell,” he said, “and even if you don’t—don’t do this. For your sake, don’t do something that you’ll regret.”

“We’re almost done,” Ollie said. She thumbed the hammer, cocking the gun. “You know what I need to hear.”

He nodded. “His name is Vincent.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I woke in a different room, a smaller space but somehow less crowded. Fewer machines, I realized. So, out of the ICU, then? Rovil wasn’t there, no nurses were in sight, and Dr. Gloria …

A chill of panic moved through me. I was alone. For the first time in years, truly alone.

I could feel the emptiness where the doctor used to reside. Even when she was angry with me, staying out of sight, I had never felt this absence. I remembered talking to her during the height of the fever, the way she seemed to be slipping away into shadows, the way she leaned over me that final time.

You have been betrayed.

I tried to sit up, but a stab of pain in my shoulder brought me up short. The left side of my body was wrapped in an elaborate sling. I pulled aside the sheet. My right ankle was in an oversized handcuff (footcuff?), which was secured to the bed by a steel chain. What the hell?

I lay back down. My body was heavy with fatigue, and my brain felt sandbagged with painkillers and antiepileptics and whatever else they’d pumped into my veins. But the fever was gone. I was fully awake for the first time since the shooting. And all I could think about was Ollie.

Eventually a nurse—a skinny kid who looked, despite his muttonchops, to be sixteen years old—arrived with a breakfast tray. I pointed to a bouquet of white and red flowers that sat on the windowsill. “Who are those from?” I asked. My voice came out as a croak.

He found the tag. “‘Get well soon,’” he read. “‘The Millionaires Club.’” He smiled. “Hey, that’s nice.”

Fuck. Fayza and the Millies had found me.

Hootan was dead, Aaqila was dead or injured … and I was alive. Fayza had to assume that I was associated with the cowboy and had set up her people. Could she have sent someone across the border to kill me? Was someone in the hospital right now?

When the police arrived I was almost glad to see them. They were three detectives from the New Mexico State Police. They told me they’d been here twice before, but I’d been too out of it to answer their questions. “How about now?” they asked.

They spoke to me as if I were a criminal. Understandable, I suppose; they knew how egregiously I’d violated my parole. One of them even checked my arm for the missing pellet. It was also clear that they had already talked to Rovil, and there was no telling how much he’d told them.

“Start again from the beginning,” one of the other detectives said.

The beginning? I didn’t know when that was. Francine? The night Mikala died? Or before that, on the night I first saw her, standing in a crowded room, a wineglass in her hand? And then where to stop—with Dr. Gloria’s flaming sword?

I was exhausted and angel-less. There was no narrative line I could skate, no combination of facts and lies I could imagine that would make my position any better. Worse, any details could be used against Ollie and Bobby … and Edo. If I incriminated Edo, I would only hurt Sasha.

I said the only thing I could think of: nothing.

My silence made them angry, and they did not give up so easily. At some point one of them said something that got me to react: “You don’t have to be afraid of him. We can protect you.”

“Afraid of who?” Then I got it. “Wait, he’s alive?”

“We found blood, and a bloody handprint as he left the house.”

The cowboy was alive! I’d been sure he’d been mortally wounded by the doctor’s sword. During the fever, that had made perfect sense. I’d even bought her reassurance: The man who is responsible for this will not bother you again.

“That lying bitch,” I said under my breath.

“Pardon?”

“I thought he was dead,” I said.

“Just tell us what you saw,” the lead detective said. I shook my head and ignored him. “Okay,” he said. “How about Rovil Gupta? Have you heard from him?”

“Rovil? Why?”

“He last checked in with us two days ago. He said he was driving home to New York, but he hasn’t arrived at work, and no one has heard from him.” He made his voice sound reasonable. “If he attacked the shooter, he’s not going to be in trouble. It was clearly self-defense.”