He saw the reception desk and the elevator. The fire extinguisher compartment was closed, looked untouched.

What are you waiting for?

He opened it. Inside, lodged next to the fire extinguisher, was a small bundle. Mike recognized the paper. It was another faded page of bootleg prison porn, like the one Snow had used to send him his first note back in MRI. The object wrapped inside the page was Jolie’s digital camera.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Flip it over.” Jolie pointed. “There’s something written here.”

Scrawled across the images of naked bodies, women and women, women and men, bare legs tangled together, dyed blond hair, painted lips, drug-dead eyes, were several slanting lines of writing:

Pick a position. Take a picture. You and Jolie. Deliver the camera up to the Six East nurse’s station, Pediatric Intensive Care, and leave it there on the desk. If your snapshot is good enough you’ll get out alive.

Mike shook his head. “This doesn’t…” Looking around for surveillance cameras, seeing none, he turned to her. “How did he know we would both be here?”

“He sent me back down here, remember?” Jolie pointed. “The arrows? He wanted me here with you when you found it.”

“This is crazy. He actually expects us to do this?”

She said nothing. Mike felt some numb part of him holding its breath, still expecting her to announce that somehow after all of this, she was kidding, ha-ha, it’s all a big joke. But she just gazed back at him with the dead eyes of a prison camp detainee, a face he didn’t want to look at. The only other place to direct his eyes was at the note written over the naked bodies and he definitely didn’t want to look at that, either.

“I don’t believe him,” he said finally. Next to him, she was already peeling off her scrub top. “Wait a second, what are you doing?”

“What he wants.” She jabbed one finger at the photos on the page, somehow even more garish and lurid for their worn-out condition, polished by hundreds of sets of hungry eyes. “That one, just do it and take the picture.”

“Jolie, I’m not—”

“Your wife already thinks we’re doing it anyway.”

“He can’t make us—”

“Yes he can!” she screamed and her hand swung out to slap him, hard, across the face. Mike felt the imprint of her palm rise over his cheek. She was crying, voice a rockslide of ugly black shale. “What, you’re so afraid of being humiliated? You know what he did to me? He shoved a fucking drill in my mouth and made me suck it! I thought I was going to die!”

“Jolie—”