“Don’t you get it yet?” She shoved him back against the wall. “I don’t care what your fucking wife and child think! If humiliating you gets me out of here, you’re doing it with me! You are doing this with me!”

It ended when Mike took the camera from her hand. She let him take it, but stared back at him with red-rimmed eyes, face grim and shining, expression set in stone.

CHAPTER 41

41.

The ER waiting room was a lake of blood. Eli, in her arms, was not awake to see it, a small mercy for which Sarah was still grateful. In the center, a stretcher lay on its side. She tried not to think about whose blood it might have been. But trying not to think about it didn’t do her much good in the end.

She went to the ER exit, tested it, already bracing for disappointment.

Still locked.

She listened for the clang of the flagpole outside, but she heard nothing other than the hospital’s climate-control systems doing their job, big ventilation fans playing catch-up, recycling the air now that the power was back on. Now more than ever she hated white noise. It wasn’t just noise pollution, it was sonic camouflage, hiding the sounds of who knew what?

She wondered if she’d misinterpreted Snow’s message. Was he simply tormenting her? The darkness may have conditioned her to follow his requests, but Frank Snow was undoubtedly crazy, and because he was crazy, his games could very easily amount to nothing, a gleeful series of clues that culminated with her careening straight off a cliff. In a way she actually preferred the darkness, where at least there was no illusion of structure or—

Then she saw it.

The colors caught her eye from twenty feet away, a miniature American flag like the kind they sold at the hospital gift shop. At first she thought it was just lying on the floor. Then, coming closer, getting a better angle, she saw its wooden stick was lodged in the doors of a waiting elevator. The doors tried to close on the stick, reopened, tried to close, reopened, over and over.

Follow the flag.

She carried Eli up the hall, nudged the wooden stick aside, craned her neck for a better look.

The elevator was empty.

Almost.

There was a pistol lying in the corner, like the one she’d seen McPhee carrying. Written above it, on the wall, in red:

For you

Sarah stepped inside. On the keypad, a red circle had been slashed around the number six.

She pushed it. The doors slid shut.

On the way up, she picked up the gun.

CHAPTER 42

42.

Calhoun saw everything. He glimpsed it only briefly, a landscape chiseled by a momentary flash of lightning, but the flash was revelatory, a coruscating moment of clarity.