She looked across the lobby to the hall, the stairway door, at her purse on its side where she’d dropped it.

Their only way out was her own keys, the ones she’d left downstairs in MRI, and the only route there that she’d ever taken was the stairwell whose door she had just recently witnessed thudding with multiple unnatural impacts.

Still, they had to go.

Eli was shivering against her, little bird muscles trembling violently enough that they made his faint, tearful voice sound like he was stuttering. Her blouse was wet with his tears. “Muh-mommy? Whuh-what are we guhgonna do?”

“We need to get the car keys,” she said, holding him fast as she rose up to her full height.

“Now?”

She nodded. Abolishing all the reluctance she could from her mind, she started for the doorway. “Just cover your eyes, sweetie. Whatever you do, you just keep your eyes covered. You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Say, ‘I promise.’”

“I puh-promise.”

“All right.” She got to the door, picked up her purse, and hooked it over her shoulder. She pulled the handle. “Here we go.”

16.

Of the twenty minutes spent edging his way back down to the first floor of the hospital, clinging to the banister for balance, Mike Hughes remembered very little. A bitter charcoal-drip in the back of his throat, one untied shoelace, the dirty steps: a patchwork of impressions that didn’t add up. The only experience he could compare it with was the time he’d had pneumonia when he was nine and run a fever so high that his father had taken him out into the subzero winter night to drop his temperature.

It’s that smoke, he thought, descending the last flight of stairs to the first floor. His head was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst, and he had to stop every few minutes to gag and retch until his empty stomach could only dry heave. The smoke had been oily, acrid, and it clung like tar to the inside of his mucous membranes. No amount of coughing and spitting was going to dislodge the taste.

And there were other things to think about.

Snow, for instance.

Snow was out.

Mike did not know how he was so sure of this, only that it had to be true. Looping the recent series of events through his mind only confirmed it. Walker and Calhoun had whisked Snow into the room at the end of the hall, looking for a vent to open his airway, and that explosion—if that’s what it was—

Some kind of bomb? Had Snow smuggled something in, blown a hole in the wall, and escaped that way?

Impossible. Snow had looked weak, far too incapacitated to stage an escape attempt. Mike had seen his share of seizures, and the one Snow had thrown on the stretcher was an Oscar-class performance. Even if he’d somehow been faking respiratory arrest in the elevator, he would never have been able to bring explosives into the hospital, not with five cops guarding him. And if he had managed to jerry-rig some kind of incendiary device in that hidden room, a tank of oxygen or some sort of chemical, there hadn’t been time for him to use it. That door hadn’t been closed more than a few minutes before the screaming started.