After she finished expelling her stomach’s scant contents, she leaned her head against the cool porcelain and closed her eyes.

At the exact same moment, hidden within the pit of the sculpture in Moundbuilders Park, Mr. Hands opened his eyes.

Shall there be mercy, then? he asked.

The words sliced into Lucy’s brain as easily as a scalpel in a skilled surgeon’s hands. She snapped up her head, gasping aloud as the memory of what she’d believed to be a dream played itself out.

Running through the park yet looking down at the treetops, filled with Purpose, with power, the rain and lightning, the roaring thunder urging on the Mission, then the structure, so easily was it torn open, and the Monster offering itself for sacrifice...

Lucy cowered against the bathtub, burying her face in her hands: No, no, no, no, no!

Within his hiding place, Mr. Hands smiled, children singing joyous songs within him. No mercy. So be it.

Lucy cried out as the memory of Timothy Beals’ death replayed itself.

Then she saw it again.

And again.

And one more time again.

And with this last repeat of the memory, she knew with profound certainty that she had, after all, handed down Beals’ death sentence.

I wish you could’ve bitten the head off the fucker...

Her wish, her order…but she’d been thinking of the monster who’d stolen Sarah, not Beals...

...but a dead monster is still a dead one, whispered the voice of Mr. Hands inside her brain.

Lucy sat very still, letting those words sink in.

A dead monster is still a dead one.

A dead monster is still dead.

Dead.

Shall there be mercy, then?

“Not for monsters like them, no.”

Under no circumstances?

“Absolutely not.”

So be it.

“So be it.”

It’s probably wrong to assume that madness is something born on a note of epiphany; sanity rarely ends amidst a glorious, cataclysmic, earth-shattering moment of Götterdämmerung; no: when a human mind can no longer maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting grasp on reason, when it begins to buckle, when it’s been confronted with too much horror, or grief, or confusion, or pressure, or fear, or a quietly crystallized combination of all five, sanity slowly grinds to a halt in a series of sputtering little agonies, flaking away in bits and pieces, flotsam of a refugee column casting off sad little remnants—a hope here, a fond memory there—on a road of defeat as a deeper and deeper darkness falls. And perhaps this is why so many madmen are found laughing in locked cells; at some point the only thing left them is their sense of humor, and it all becomes rather funny.

A dead monster is still a dead one.

Sitting there with closed eyes, almost—not quite, but almost—unaware of it, Lucy Thompson laughed.

Very softly.

Just for a moment.

Because something in her mind had just sputtered, broken free, and deserted her.

“So be it,” she whispered again, the last word rising slightly in pitch as her voice cracked.