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improvising novel uses for the most obscure tools. The set was the best thing he’d ever bought on eBay.

He checked to see that he had film for the Polaroid camera (he’d never made the switch to digital, which was too clean, too
immediate
—he liked the slow evolution of the image on the Polaroid, the way the shapes gradually came into focus, the way a dark blur resolved itself into an open mouth, for example, the red deepening behind).

Satisfied that everything was in place, he headed for her room; it was time she learned what he would do to her.

She’d thought it would be easier. Even though her frame was slight, the space was too tight for her to crawl on her hands and knees as she’d hoped. Instead, she had to drag herself along, pulling herself forward with her elbows, and wriggling in a side-to-side motion, like some kind of lizard.

In the pitch-black, she had no sense of how far she had gone. Worse, with all the wriggling, and after changing direction to get around a large clay pipe, she’d become disoriented.

She lit her watch again, peering into the crawlspace ahead of her. The orange light didn’t reach far, dying into shadow a couple of feet ahead. She couldn’t see the next column, but assumed they’d be evenly spaced. She was a couple of feet in front of one column: if she moved straight forward, eventually she’d hit a wall.

Now her plan seemed like the worst plan in the world.

There wasn’t going to be a hole in the planks, the floor wasn’t going to give way and pitch her into the room below, and freedom. Instead, she would crawl under the floor for hours, maybe days, slowly dying of fatigue and hypothermia.

She imagined herself curled up in the fetal position to keep warm as the life slowly flickered out of her. Imagined her body, shriveled like an old leaf, being discovered a couple of
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years later when the building was torn down or gut-renovated during conversion into expensive lofts. Imagined her death depicted in a cutaway diagram in
USA Today,
her body a little cartoon outline in blue, buried in the floor.

Then she heard his footsteps, felt the floorboards sag as he walked across the floor—
over her body
. She lay still, flattening her belly into the dirt, right cheek down, listening, hiding as if he might see her. Her heart was banging so hard in her chest, she could barely hear.

The footsteps stopped, then receded back in the direction from which they’d come.

There was silence for a second, and then the footsteps again, slow this time, interspersed with a slow grating noise; he was dragging something across the floor.

He reached his destination, let the object down with a heavy thud, then was still for a second.

Then he walked back over her, sending little showers of filth onto her hair and back.

She knew where he was walking: he was heading in the direction she’d come from. He was going to her cell. He was coming for her.

Astonished, Farrar scanned the empty room again, the beam from his flashlight jumping around crazily.

Then he saw it: over by the wall, a small hole through the floorboards, about a foot and a half wide and ten inches deep. She must have been hiding it with the mattress.

The hole was small—too small for him—but there was no other way out. She had to have gone through it.

He thought it through, considering her options and probable outcomes as if she were an SAT question. He was surprisingly calm.

If she’d gone through the floor, she’d have to come out at some point. Where did she think she was going? He’d explored the factory pretty thoroughly: there were no other
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holes on this floor. He was pretty sure that the ceiling of the floor below was intact, but he would check. So she had two options: come back up out of this hole, or make a new hole.

But how had she made this one? He squatted to examine the floor. The boards were rotting in the area, and the nails had largely rusted away. Still, it couldn’t have been easy to get the planks up. Well, whatever: somehow she’d managed to get herself under the floor.

As he stood, he realized that there was also a third possible outcome: she could die under the floor.

The last one, of course, was an option for her, but not for him.

How could he get her to come out?

He remembered a biology class in fifth grade when they had walked onto the school’s back lawn and poured bleach onto the ground. Within minutes, dozens of worms were writhing on the earth, obscenely pink against the emerald grass, the glistening mucus of their surfaces foamy with ir-ritant secretions.

He could certainly do that. He’d downloaded recipes for making vesicant gases, chemicals he could release into the crawlspace to make her skin blister and bubble, leave her eyeballs opaque and leathery. But would he be able to control the gas? There would be a significant risk to him. And while gassing her might be satisfying, he wanted her beautiful for the transformation.

He relaxed. He had a full day to play with her: it would be like playing Whack-a-Mole at the fairground. He would use his new cast-iron spear—it was sharp and heavy enough to go right through the floorboards. And even if he did impale her, he could still use her.

He went into the main room and picked up the pole. He held it horizontally, loosely in both hands, bouncing it a little, feeling its mass. Where to begin?

He paused for a second, then ran across the room almost to the door of her cell and drove the bar into the floor with
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all his strength, as if he were pole-vaulting. The tip of the heavy rod slammed through the wood with a splintering crunch, and plunged into the subfloor.

There was a muffled moan of surprise and fear; he couldn’t pinpoint the origin, but the pathetic little shriek made him laugh out loud. He knew he hadn’t hit her.

Time to go again.

He sprinted diagonally across the large room, raised the pole to shoulder length, and brought it down in an arc to plunge through the floor.

He straightened and stood there, leaning on the pole as he ground it in the hole, smiling happily in the candlelight.

In the glow of Jun’s flashlight, Jenner squinted at Farrar’s painting, then peered down toward the river, a glinting black ribbon at the end of the derelict street.

They were there. To their left was the scaffolding and tarp material in the big lot where the Cortland Iron Building had been. None of the buildings on the street were visible in the painting, but the view of Manhattan across the East River—

up toward the Empire State Building on Thirty-fourth, now lit in Christmas red and green, the slender, hubcap-shoul-dered spire of the Chrysler Building on Forty-second, the slanted top of the Citicorp Building on Fifty-third—aligned neatly with those in the image, like a jungle treasure map in an old adventure serial.

Jenner felt his stomach tighten. They were well away from the houses and the tenements, with their warmth and light and people; the worn streets of the waterfront warehouse district were desolate and dark. In some areas, old cobble-stones poked through the battered road surfaces. The only light was back at the intersection, where a bare bulb in a protective wire cage dangled like a hanged man from a small plywood yardarm on the front of a small storage facility; as
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the breeze picked up, yellow light flickered weakly on the roadway, making the melting snow glisten.

Jenner looked down at the picture.

“Yes. I think this is the street.”

They stood together looking toward the water. Callyer’s Slip was a dark street of ramshackle warehouses, their leaking roofs covered with corrugated metal sheeting, closed off from passersby with roll-down steel security gates. Both sides of the street had been fenced off behind tall poles and barrier fencing, with coils of razor wire running along the top. In the middle of the block on their right was a vacant lot, a demilitarized zone between buildings that were derelict and those still clinging to life. Beyond the empty lot, opposite the remains of the Cortland Iron Building, Jenner could make out an enormous old warehouse, staggering on sinking foundations and sagging arches, its windows gaping black shadows in the rotting masonry; it seemed to reach all the way down the block to the river.

The wind picked up again, and he saw Jun was shivering.

“Hey, Jenner—you know, there aren’t any phones near here. Last one I saw, like, on Quay Street, about half a mile back, the phone was torn off.”

“It’s okay—I’ve got my cell phone.”

“Have you checked it? I’m not getting a signal down here.”

Jenner took it out and handed it to Jun. Jun flipped it open, shut it, and reopened it. “One bar.”

He put it to his ear. “No signal.”

It began to rain, a fine misting rain that chilled their skin and beaded on their clothes. Jun put his hood up. Jenner turned up his collar and said, “I think it’ll be down toward the end, one of those abandoned buildings by the river. It would be safe for him—most days, this street’s probably pretty dead by four p.m. Maybe we’ll get a signal nearer the water.”

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They started toward the river, their damp footsteps ringing off the corrugated metal sheeting covering the windows of an old garage.

Ana lay on her belly, panting, face flattened in the oily grime, feeling the pain howling in her thigh from where he’d speared her, feeling the stickiness of the blood soaking her pants.

How long had he been hunting her? An hour? It had to be more. It felt like forever.

He’d sliced across her right leg. She was so cold now that her wound was going numb.

How badly had he got her? She thought it was just shallow—surely it would have felt much worse had he got the spike deep in her. She wished she could look at it. Or maybe not.

He’d developed an attack pattern: before each strike, he’d talk to her, murmur things to her, things she couldn’t hear with both her hands pressed hard over her ears, blocking him out, trying not to make a sound. Then he’d take a couple of steps back, and sprint full speed across the room to slam the pole through the floor into the crawlspace.

At first, she’d panicked and scrambled away, but then she realized that, after each attack, he was staying stone silent, listening for her to betray her position. There’d be a pause, then again he’d come tearing across the room, and she couldn’t tell where he was coming from, where he was going to, and she didn’t know if she should move, didn’t know if he’d figured out where she was, and then there would be a horrible crash as the pole smashed into the crawlspace, spraying splinters and dirt everywhere.

Eventually he got her. She’d felt the weapon, sharp as a knife, heavy as lead, carve across her thigh and into the floor underneath her, felt the searing sting, felt the warmth of her blood spreading across her skin. Reached down her
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leg, touched her fingers to the hole in her pants, to the wet gash of torn skin and flesh underneath.

As she lay there smothering her sobs, he padded back to the other side of the room for his next run-up. She thought his strikes had been random: she’d been too quiet for him to figure out her position. She decided not to move, expecting his next strike would be well away from that spot.

But then she realized that her blood would be on the pole.

Would he see it? She imagined him getting ready to run, holding it up, and then spotting blood on the tip.

She had to move, but her body had lost the ability. Her muscles were exhausted, her legs wouldn’t budge. She forced herself to imagine the spear plunging into her, through her filthy shirt, through her skin, shattering ribs to impale her heart, imagined it as painful as sticking her fist into a deep fryer.

That was enough. She dug her elbows in, forced herself forward. She dragged her injured leg behind her, pulling it as if it were a bundle tied to her waist by a length of cloth.

And when she moved, she wasn’t numb anymore. It hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt.

She pitched forward, and for the first time let her face sink down fully into the layer of grime. She lay there. She felt her scalp tickling, and when she reached up to her hair, her hand came away wet and sticky.

Blood. She must have hit her head.

She closed her eyes, let her arm drop down. She lay still, panting.

Then she heard him taking his wind-up steps. He paced back a couple of paces, then . . . nothing.

She heard a dull, metallic thud, as he let the handle of the pole hit the ground.

He’d spotted the blood, of course. He was looking at her blood on his spear, knowing he’d hurt her.

She heard the steps again, getting closer. Walking over her. He was going to inspect the hole he’d made, see if he’d killed her.

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She willed herself to stop breathing.

Then, in the silence, she heard something strange, a dry, rhythmic sound. She closed her eyes tight and listened harder.

It came again. Little breathy puffs, repeated in short cycles.

And then she knew exactly what he was doing—she could almost see him lying there, body stretched out on the floor next to the hole he’d made when he’d hit her, poking his nose into the hole and sniffing. Sniffing at her blood, as if she were some kind of animal.

And once again, she told herself that she was going to live. She was going to live, if only to see this man die. She wouldn’t wait for others, she’d do it herself, she’d kill him herself. Kill him like the animal he was. She would kill him for taking her, for killing Andie, for killing Garcia, for killing Tony Roggetti and maybe Jenner, too.

She pushed herself up and began to pull her body forward.

For him, the smell of blood had the sort of warm, centering effect that the smell of baking bread had on others. He lay with his face near the spear hole, breathing in the smell, wet and primal, like rust-stained wood.