She turned on the bed so that she was facing me, her legs crossed at the knees, tucked against her, the sheet bunched at her waist. She kneaded it between her hands, and tilted her head and shook it so that her hair untangled some more and fell down her back.

“I keep seeing corpses in my dreams,” she said.

“I just see Evandro,” I admitted.

“What’s he doing?” She leaned forward a bit.

“Coming for us,” I said. “Steadily.”

“In my dreams, he’s already arrived.”

“So those corpses…”

“They’re ours.” Her hands clenched together in her lap and she looked at them as if she expected them to tear apart from each other on their own.

“I’m not ready to die, Patrick.”

I sat up against the headboard. “Neither am I.”

She leaned forward. With her hands clenched on her lap and her upper body leaning in toward me, her thick hair framing her face so that I could barely see it, she seemed conspiratorial, vested in secrets she might never share.

“If anyone can get to us—”

“That’s not going to happen.”

She leaned her forehead against mine. “Yes, it is.”

The house creaked, settling another hundredth of an inch closer to the earth.

“We’re ready if he comes for us.”

She laughed and it was a wet, strangled sound.

“We’re basket cases, Patrick. You know it, I know it, and he probably knows it. We haven’t eaten or slept decently in days. He’s screwed us emotionally and psychologically and just about every other way you can think of.” Her damp hands pressed against my cheeks. “If he chooses, he can bury us.”

I could feel tremors, like sudden jolts of electricity, explode under her palms. The heat and blood and tidal tuggings of her body pulsed through her T-shirt and I knew she was probably right.

If he wanted to, he’d bury us.

And that knowledge was so goddamned ugly, so polluted with the basest sort of self-awareness—that we were nothing, any of us, but a pile of organs and veins and muscle and valves hanging suspended in currents of blood within frail, uselessly vain exteriors. And that with a flick of a switch, Evandro could come along and shut us down, turn us off as easily as turning off a light, and our particular pile of organs and valves would cease to function, and the lights would go out and the darkness would be total.

“Remember what we talked about,” I said. “If we die, we’re taking him with us.”

“So what?” she said. “So fucking what, Patrick? I don’t want to take Evandro with me. I simply do not want to die. I want him to leave me alone.”

“Hey,” I said softly. “It’s okay. Come on.”

She smiled sadly at me. “I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s the dead of night and I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life and I’m not up to the tough-guy platitudes right now. They feel terribly hollow lately.”