“All the more reason for Amy to go,” says Shirley. “For you to help us get her gone.”

Just then, guess who steps in?

“Speak of the devil,” says Kiko.

Seeing me there with Kiko and Shirley, whose forward-leaning, extractive postures must be familiar to her from the many times she herself has assumed that posture while trying to get someone to rat out a person near and dear, Amy stops in her tracks, gives me a heartbroken head tilt, sprints out of Dining.

Kiko raises her whistle and does a double toot, meaning not “Come all, kick away” but, rather, “Tate and/or Jacqueline, bring your Stunners, Stun Brian here, who seems inclined to get up and race after Amy.”

There follows the earsplitting sound of an All-Alert, and Ken DiRogini, over the P.A., says an unknown individual, female, possibly Amy, actually almost for sure Amy, has just shoved Al down and illegally entered the Egress Spout, bent, apparently, on escape to Above.

And here comes Jacqueline, with her Stunner.

Down I go.

How strange to wake in Clinic, burn marks on both temples, the taste and smell of Amy and the feel of her hand in my hand fresh in my mind, only to realize that she is not Above, not at all, but trapped in that creepy cave of the dead, mulling two options equally blah: (1) Come down, be kicked to death more energetically than usual, due to having admitted her guilt via fleeing, or (2) Stay up there among the creepy dead forever, sneaking down now and then at night to hit up Vending for food and water, which, one false move and—see (1), above.

Might I rise and join her? Make a life with her? Up there? Yes. Yes. As soon as I am not so pukey. And can stay awake somewhat.

But alas.

A third option I do not imagine: that night, here comes Amy, plummeting headfirst down the Spout, hitting the floor with the sound a person makes when he or she has fallen from a height it takes forty to fifty minutes to attain by ladder.

In her clenched hand: a note, to me, on a page from her Monitoring Pad, which I am handed the next morning, on the sly, in Clinic, by Carver D., Shy Suitor, VICTORIAN WEEKEND.

“Thanks, Carve,” I say.

“It is of no import to one such as I,” he says.

Dear Brian,

I’ve been waiting for you up here but no dice. I guess that would have been too much to ask. I get why you had to rat me out. I probably would have done the same. That is just how we are.