“Clarity. About who you are.” Which I had none of. Clarity. I was just saying things through a mist that swept through like needles.

Hillman shrugged again. “Here’s one answer, but you won’t like it.”

Grunting, he turned my messed-up chair around until I was face-to-face with a bloody mask of a face, the body beneath it slouched in a torn dress shirt and black trousers. He had no shoes, just black socks.

It took a moment. But then I recognized him.

Alex. They’d interrogated Alex. He was breathing. I could tell because of the blood bubbles popping around his mouth. But I didn’t think he’d ever be able to see out of his left eye again.

“A kind of premonition, you think? A kind of prequel, you think?” Hillman said.

A kind of bloody sack of meat. Who’d known nothing.

Hillman opened his mouth to add something. But I never found out what he would’ve said next.

Because I’d sprung to my feet and bull-rushed him.

Maybe if I’d made a move for the door, he would’ve been ready. But I didn’t. So I plowed him under. Something snapped inside of Hillman and he screamed and his leg collapsed under him. And his collapse knocked Alex over.

Just as the goons came back into the room, struggling with a plastic tarp. One had had to put his gun down. The other had no clear line of sight.

By then I was lunging through the screen door to the balcony, breaking the mesh out of its frame.

I didn’t think. I hurled myself over the balcony, as another fucking mosquito of a bullet clipped me in the left arm. I went over the side snarling like an animal, feeling all my weight in the fall and trying in that split second to protect my vulnerable spots, hands still tied, entangled in pieces of chair, but most of it mercifully left behind at the balcony door.

Just a wrestling move. Just a dive and roll. Choreograph it in your head as you tumble. Something I’d practiced a hundred times.

The fall took forever. The fall took no time at all.

Did I care if I died this way?

I was going to die another way, if not.

Screaming from the heat of the smoldering salamander clenched in my hands.

But I would not let go.

[67]

My brother’s name was Ned. Yes, let’s call him “Ned.” We lived in the wildest part of, say, Oregon. That’s where the farm was: out in the boonies. The place that eventually gets broadband and chain stores and isn’t much different from the rest of the world. But people who don’t live there don’t understand that.