“We started a Pavulon drip with the morphine. It’s a paralytic. For surgery. So you don’t move or twitch when a doctor cuts you open and rearranges you. And the government uses it when they send murderers into the dark night. Can’t say I’d be that gentle.”

I can swallow. Breathe. Blink. I can do all the things a body does without thinking. But I can’t use my mouth to tell him to fuck off.

“Yes, yes. Prima, prima. It’s almost worth keeping you alive to watch you suffer over the thing you didn’t do first, hm? Or whatever you’re crying over. Prima, prima. I almost had the nurses tape your mouth shut.” He takes my face in both hands and turns it toward him. He’s got a long face, wide at the temples and pointed at the chin, with a thin brown moustache that has only flecks of the gray that he’s taken over most of the hair on his head. “I’ve been waiting so long to meet you, Mister Lucari. And now that you’re here”—he lets go and sits back, crossing ankle over knee—“and helpless, I’m a little frustrated that you’re so darn valuable to so many people. It limits me.”

He regards me, squinting his dark brown eyes and crossing his arms.

The stark concrete room is bright. The caged bulb above my head is one of three. The light hurts my eyes.

The room has one exit. A metal door with a square window. One bed. A panel of medical instruments. Cabinets with absorbent things next to sharp things.

The plaster on the wall to my left has a smoother rectangle in the center. They bricked in a window there, yet it’s freezing in here.

This is how Nico died. Cold.

“You don’t know where you are. Last thing you knew, your brother was in a box, your men were getting mowed like a lawn. So I heard. None of them made it back here.” He uncrosses his leg and leans his elbows on his knees. “Your brother came in after all our brave Colonia men. They almost forgot to get his body out of the back of the truck. Fucking morons.”

He shakes his head. My brother died sculpted from ice, and he’s irritated by the display of incompetence.

Connor. Danny. Remo. All dead. Have to be.

And Nico. They left his body in the back of a refrigerator truck.

I should have brought him home when Oria demanded it.

I wish the doc would scratch my nose, because my entire face has gotten itchy. My head is one big mosquito bite. It’s worse than pain.

The doctor stands.

Is he going to leave without telling me where Sarah is? I can deduce what happened to most everyone else, but he hasn’t dropped a single breadcrumb I can follow to her. I exhale past a tight tongue, making a long sss.

“What’s that?” He bends, hands on his knees to meet my gaze as one would a child. “You’re trying to say something?”