“We don’t even know if—” For a split-second McPhee actually looked ready to continue the argument. Then his shoulders sagged a little. “Come along with me, then,” he said. “We’ll go down and get your car keys back.”

Sarah lifted Eli back into her arms. He weighed close to forty pounds, but right now she raised him up with an ease she hadn’t felt since carrying him home from the hospital just after he was born. His weight actually felt good, a confirmation of his substantiality and her own strength.

“Where’s Snow, Mommy?”

She shushed him.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“I don’t know.” She followed McPhee down the hall. An abnormal stillness seemed to surround them, the quivering, prefatory silence of fragile objects teetering on narrow shelves, a feeling remembered from childhood.

They turned right, away from the chapel, toward the cafeteria. Down the wide hallway, she could see the main lobby coming up, the part of the hospital that, with its big mahogany information desk, made her feel like she was entering some kind of grand hotel instead of a place where sick people went to either get better or die. Beyond it was the stairs they’d taken up from the ground floor.

“Stay close to me,” McPhee said, not looking back over his shoulder.

“Why? Do you think there’s—”

“Shh.” Having clipped the radio back onto his belt, he was walking with his right hand on the butt of his pistol, though he hadn’t drawn it from his holster.

Sarah realized her palms had started to sweat, her body already understanding what her mind had procrastinated over for too long. She looked at Eli. His expression of uncertainty and worry was now becoming flat-out terror. The lump on the side of his head made him look even more vulnerable, a child requiring comfort and reassurance that she had never felt less equipped to offer.

As they passed the information desk with its two empty swivel chairs facing the cavernous lobby, she looked ahead and saw that the door to the stairwell was slightly ajar, enough that she could see its rectangular wire-mesh window. McPhee must have seen it, too, because he stopped walking so suddenly that she almost ran into him.

“Mommy?” Eli whispered.

McPhee held up one hand and took another step toward the half-open door. Sarah saw that the gun, some kind of flat, standard-issue semiautomatic, had left his holster; now he was holding it upright with both hands at chest level. Seeing it exposed like that, its barrel glinting faintly under the lobby’s track lighting, elicited a sense of gut-level immediacy in her that nothing else up until now had generated. She wondered if this was how civilians in war zones felt. Nothing punctuates a moment like a weapon.

“Police,” McPhee announced, taking another step toward the half-open door. He’d begun a lateral move, crab-walking in a generous semicircle around the perimeter of the doorway, with his gun pointed out in front of him. “Who’s there?”

Sarah felt Eli’s arms tightening around her neck, making her aware of her own pulsing carotid. Hoisting him up higher to take the pressure off, she found herself moving backward in the direction of the information desk.