The disappearance had been all the proof Zoe needed that God was a con man and people were suckers. She concluded that this was about the only thing that Karl Marx actually got right.

So now, cramped in the bowels of a warehouse in Zurich, Zoe fought her own hypocrisy: the urge to pray. There were no atheists in foxholes, the saying went. To her that meant desperation forced people into a faith of convenience that wrapped them in the false comfort of self-deception. Her desire to pray had surprised her at first, then she had recognized the urge for what it was and had resolved to maintain her own personal dignity and not surrender herself to begging for deliverance from a god that she had no faith in before.

She wished she believed in God so she could strike a deal.

Just get me out and I’ll believe in you; I’ll do whatever you want.

Zoe shook her head, ashamed of thinking the thoughts. What good was a god you could jerk around with the cheap deal of the moment?

“So hopeless,” she said quietly to herself. Thalia kept her energized and positive, but every night when they brought her back to the room, depression seemed to leak out of the shadows.

She turned slowly around, facing one by one the three solid concrete walls and a fourth broken only with a heavy metal door with a double-key deadbolt and hinges that had been spot-welded at one end to prevent the removal of the hinges. The ventilator fan was welded to the door over a hole barely large enough to put her head through. She looked at the concrete slab beneath her feet and then the ceiling boards above her. Over the cell’s ambient noise level she struggled to hear the faint tapping of footsteps from the office above.

The heavy void of hopelessness settled around her heart and became a dark pit that yawned to suck her in.

“You always have to assume there is a way.” Her father’s words startled Zoe. “And your task is to discover the solution, no matter how impossible it seems because there’s no profit in assuming failure.” She had not thought about the words for almost ten years. The sudden presence of his words, almost as clear as if he had just spoken them, startled her and made her skin feel as if it had caught fire.

In an instant, she vividly remembered the scene in his makeshift art studio. He had been working on a four-ton cube of steel for a sculpture that would be the centerpiece of his gallery opening. The sculpture was tided Mind Fire and the problem was getting a mass of steel heavier than a Chevy Suburban to look as if it were lighter than air.

Zoe continued to turn in a slow circle now, but what she saw was years beyond the concrete walls and half a world away.

“When the logical doesn’t work,” he had said, “look for answers in the illogical.”