If her theory was correct, then it wouldn’t matter whether she hid behind this wall or tried to break Ash free or performed a waltz up and down the hall. She wouldn’t be caught because she hadn’t been caught.

She slipped down the hall like a shadow and knelt in front of Ash’s door, examining the lock. She had barely dropped to her knees when she heard a door open and close somewhere deeper inside the hotel.

She froze, ears pricked.

There—footsteps on the staircase, coming closer.

She ducked back behind the corner where she’d been hiding, frustrated.

What did that just prove? she wondered. If she had tried to break Ash out a minute earlier, would the footsteps have come a minute earlier, too? Were her own thoughts and actions catalysts that triggered other actions, and so on, forever?

She felt like she was on the verge of grasping some new idea, something that no one had thought of yet, but every time she came too close it burrowed itself deeper into her mind and was lost.

Mac appeared at the staircase before she could work this out one way or another, flanked by two Freaks whose faces Dorothy couldn’t see from her position around the corner. She held her breath, waiting for him to look her way, to hobble over to where she was hiding, but, of course, he did neither. He wouldn’t, she knew, because he hadn’t seen her the first time all this had happened. How far could she push this? she wondered. Would he still be unable to see her if she ran down the hallway screaming? Or would she be unable to do that because he hadn’t seen her?

It was enough to make her feel like her head might explode.

She watched silently as Mac dug a key out of his pocket and threw the door to Ash’s room open, and then she let her breath out in a rush. She leaned a little farther out into the hall, ears pricked.

Ash said something she couldn’t hear, and Mac responded with “I aim to please.”

A moment later, he and the Freaks stepped inside the room, pulling the door closed behind them.

Dorothy stayed crouched around the corner, alert, listening for any sounds or movement from the other side of the door. She heard muffled thumps, voices. And then—screaming. She closed her eyes the moment it began and forced herself to breathe through her nose.

Time was endless. It seemed that hours were passing, even though Dorothy knew it was only minutes. After a while, she sunk from her crouch to the floor, and leaned against the wall, legs stretched out before her. Waiting, waiting. With every minute that passed she thought that now, finally, Mac would grow bored, would leave. And yet he did not.