In that dome, too, was a kind of medical station, and more monitors—larger ones—along the left side. On the right side, built-in shelves housed books, but also technical equipment. Any odds and ends. Perhaps personal effects. A sliding ladder had been attached. The bookshelves weren’t painted. The raw wood and shoddy construction told me there’d been no time or no money to paint.

The silence here was profound. A kind of holy quality. The budget for soundproofing must have been unlimited. The soft blue light in that space soothed and suffused in such an unearthly yet pleasant way. The smell of stone rich with water. I could see in the near distance, where the stone lay exposed, the water glistening. Moss glistening. More cave than construction.

The muffling of so much, the vastness of the space and how that made so small what had been placed in it, made me not see everything at first.

But as I walked slowly forward, as my eyes adjusted to the scale … I came across a second body.

Slumped in a chair, in front of the medical station. Even at a distance, I could tell it had been there longer than Ronnie on the stairs.

I hesitated. Came closer. Lingered on details to avoid the larger question.

Clothed in a green jumpsuit, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were black, open, blood vessels exploded. Her hands gripped the chair like claws. There was to her aspect a kind of convulsion of purpose. A motion interrupted that encoded motion into the stillness.

Oh, Silvina, even so long dead, you had the aspect of someone who might return to life.

I approached her as if she were delicate and made of something breakable, that she would shatter at the slightest touch. But she’d never been fragile.

“To be a weakness that is a strength. To let the world breathe into you and out of you. To find a path through.”

Had no place to put this revelation. So casual, in its way. So terrible and casual. This dead body in an office chair, in a cavern with monitors. Under a mountain.

I tried to be coldhearted. To focus on the details. To make some sense of the incomprehensible.

But a horror had come over me, the more I examined the body. Never touching it, but circling it. A drowning, buried feeling crawling over my skin.

A sound left my mouth that was a keening. A sound I bit my tongue to stop. If it went on much longer, it would never end.

The terrible thought. The unthinkable.

That as Hellmouth Jack and I searched and searched and searched for this place atop the mountain … that Silvina had been down here, watching us. Observing us through the pebbles at our feet.