Opening it, she saw spidery child’s handwriting, the same writing on the map that Snow had tried to smuggle into the hospital.

You have a choice. If you want to get out, do everything exactly as I say WITHOUT EXCEPTION and you’ll live to see daylight. Follow the signs and remember, I could have killed you already.

Follow the signs? She looked around, not expecting to see anything and at first she didn’t. She reread the note. Snow clearly must have stuck it in her pocket when she was unconscious, and left her here to find it. But where was Snow?

Follow the signs.

At the end of the hall, painted on the wall in three bright-red smeary letters that could only be one thing, was the single word:

OUT

with an arrow pointing to the right, down the back stairs.

A trap. It’s got to be.

But that didn’t make sense. Mad as it sounded, Snow was right: he could have already killed her, could have done whatever he wanted, including tying her up and torturing her, raping her. Instead he’d left her, unrestrained, fully clothed, relatively unmolested except for the cut inside her mouth and the note in her pocket. That had always been his trademark, she remembered, the notes. And the bargains.

Suppose he really was going to let her go free?

Jolie started walking toward the arrow.

CHAPTER 38

38.

Lights?

In the corner of the MRI suite, Sarah straightened her shoulders, feeling excruciatingly exposed, as if someone had yanked away a cloak that had been covering her. She’d been holding Eli on her lap in the near-darkness. He was fast asleep in her arms. When the power shuddered back on, her first thought was to look by the doorway, where she almost expected to see someone—Mike? Snow?—with one hand on the light switch.

But, of course, no one was there.

Why were the lights coming back on now, of all times?

She glanced at her cell phone. The screen told her it was midnight. There was still no signal. In her arms, Eli stirred but didn’t open his eyes, sweaty and mired in the slow-motion violence of the hopelessly exhausted. He was sticky and hot, the fabric of his shirt rippled against his skin, his hair matted to the sides of his face, dark with perspiration. Even though he was in deep unconsciousness, his hands clutched hers with furious dedication, and in his slumber he mouthed a word:

Snowman.

That was when she noticed the mark on the back of his neck.

It began just beneath the base of his skull. What she’d first taken as a patch of sweaty hair was actually a black line rising up from his collar. Sarah tugged his shirt open and looked at his skin.

Every inch of his body between waist and neck was covered in writing.