“Who wrote it?” McGowan asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Who could have written it?”

“Someone that works there…I guess. Someone who goes back there.”

A voice crackles through McGowan’s CB.

Another baller?

“Who do you work with?” she asks.

“A lot of people,” Zach says

“But not Peter Lords.”

“No.”

She heads for the warehouse exit, where, long ago, Samhattanites got off work, some of them worried for the safety of their children in the era of Daphne Vann.

“What the fuck,” Trina McDay calls out. “You can’t leave us here like this!”

McGowan pauses at the exit.

“You wanna be untied?” she asks.

They don’t answer. She didn’t think they would.

“Conjure Daphne. Maybe she can help you.”

Kit Lamb’s Journal—The Spirit of Samhattan

Hi, Jolly. Are you there? Do you only exist in the pages of a bound book? Or are you wherever I write?

How about on a huge rock? Do you exist here? The rock I write on?

They call this the Spirit of Samhattan. There must be hundreds of layers of paint. I bet the rock is actually only half the size, the rest…generations of joy. This rock is a record of wins. Good times. Celebration. Victory. Nobody goes to the Spirit of Samhattan when they lose. Nobody signs and dates the rock when they got their asses kicked.

And I’d bet nobody’s ever come here when they know they’re about to die either.

So, okay.

This is my will. A suicide note, though I won’t be killing myself. Not directly. Still, I WILL be doing it. I may not drive the knife in, but I’ve definitely extended the blade. After all, it is my fault I can’t stop thinking about her.

It is my fault she’s coming for me.

Here:

KIT LAMB, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD

SOON TO DIE

BY DAPHNE

The Spirit of Samhattan. Ironic name now, huh? Yeah. Here I am, trying to avoid the spirit of Samhattan so I go to the Spirit of Samhattan. I suppose I was drawn here for a reason.

Daphne.

Why hide it now? Someone will come read this rock when I’m dead. And they’ll see her name and they’ll start thinking about her and all this horribleness will start all over again. But what’s the point in hiding, right? She’s in us already.

And hey, don’t think she’ll stop with us.

Whoever reads this rock…Daphne’s sticking around. And if you think about her?

She’ll come

for

YOU

She’ll sleep inside the citizens of Samhattan like she has all these years. This giant seven-foot woman who arrives a victim, until you realize she’s not. Oh, did I mention that, Jolly? Yeah, Daphne’s no outsider. Nobody who had been unfairly shunned by the world would kill Kennedy Lichtenstein. No true outsider would hurt a hair on Melanie’s head. Because a true outsider respects the others she finds standing out of bounds.

Outsiders know empathy better than anybody else on the planet.