“I’m getting out of here,” Calhoun said. “You try to stop me, I’ll shoot him. Give me any resistance, I’ll shoot him. We clear?” He had already scooped the sleeping boy up in one arm, the pistol barrel not budging as he walked back up the hall. Sarah followed, the smoke-damaged walls growing blacker and more intense around them, Hiroshima wallpaper that obviated any remaining institutional neutrality the place might have had. She felt her own thoughts shifting, becoming unfamiliar to her as some subtle outside presence took hold.

“Did he tell you to do this?” she asked. “Because you don’t have to do this. We can all get out of here together.”

Calhoun didn’t even look back. At the end of the hall, he stopped in front of a narrow doorway Sarah hadn’t noticed until they were right in front of it.

“I brought him like you asked.” Calhoun’s voice was drab and monochromatic as he spoke through the doorway to whoever was inside. “Now give me what’s mine.”

Sarah peered over Calhoun’s shoulder, into the depths of the room. At first all she saw was black—not darkness, but the scorched and peeling planks of the walls and ceiling. Every surface glowered with barely subdued heat. A burned stuffed animal lay in the corner, the charred remains of a child’s hospital bed off to one side. In the center of the room a ragged hole in the floor dropped down to nowhere.

Next to the hole, Dr. Walker was standing over a man in a prison uniform.

“Calhoun?” Walker jerked his head up at the security guard, then toward Sarah. He looked like a man whose worst fears were being confirmed before his very eyes. “What are you doing here?”

No one said anything. Having looked into the face of the man kneeling on the floor, Sarah discovered that she couldn’t avert her stare. It was Snow, she thought, it had to be. Adrift in his orange jumpsuit, he slouched on the floor in handcuffs, a partially melted wax model of menace. Blankness had made taxidermist’s marbles of his eyes. The only remaining trace of life in his face was his grin, but it was real enough, she thought, more than real, it was alive, seeming to quiver supernaturally in the air.

“You all need to get out of here, now.” Walker flicked a quick glance at Sarah. “Especially you. What’s happening here doesn’t concern you.”

“That’s fine.” Sarah looked at Calhoun. “Give me back my son.”

“No, see, that ain’t part of my deal.” Calhoun took a step back, moved the gun from Eli to Walker. “You took my keys, Doc. I want ’em back.”

Walker’s voice, high and trembling: “I don’t have—”

“Yeah? How about I shake your coat pockets, see what rattles out?”

“Don’t come any closer!”