The other, marked J, pointed left.

“I guess this is where we part company,” Jolie said.

“Maybe—” Mike began, and stopped. She was already turning left to follow her arrow up the hall, moving like a child’s idea of a robot, a stiff-jointed thing whose outward humanity only made it scary and sad. Halfway down the hall Mike saw her pause and look back with a forlorn glance. Then she pivoted to face a chair pushed up against the wall. There must have been something written there, some instruction waiting for her, because she abruptly turned again and sat down in the chair. That was the first time in this most recent visit to the sixth floor that Mike felt a deep dose of sensory distortion ripple through his vision. The air wobbled around him like heat on a desert highway: seasick. His mouth, bone-dry just a moment earlier, was now salivating so excessively he almost had to spit.

Instead he turned right and shambled on his way, feeling more than slightly unsteady on his feet. He could already tell he was breathing too quickly, not deep enough, and forced himself to pay attention to his respiration. He’d traveled only a dozen paces, perhaps less, when he stopped again.

Lying on the floor in front of him was a book. It looked very old, bound in leather or sheepskin with the stiff yellow pages bristling unevenly out the sides. It also looked heavy. There was no writing on the cover, nothing to indicate front from back.

A note protruded out of the top. He pulled it clear.

Take this to the hospital operators’ office. Turn on the hospital intercom and read the marked page aloud. Do this and you and your family will be allowed to live. Fail me and you will all die, starting with your wife.

Mike opened the book to where the note had been sticking out. Molecular chains of letters marched from one edge of the page to the other, definitely not English. Some of the letters he recognized but others were symbols, pictographs, somewhere between cave etchings and Cyrillic characters. They swam before his eyes. How the hell was he supposed to read this?

He looked again.

The page was in Latin.

He looked again.

The page was in runic.

He looked again.

The page was blank.

Except it wasn’t, quite. There were pictures, a view of a small boy in a hospital bed with a breathing tube in his throat. A man in a white coat stood over him, clutching something that went to work directly on Mike’s gnawed-down sanity.