Neil smiled the way he always would when women propositioned him: as though an obvious truth had been confirmed. He walked over to the bureau and reached for Gerard's automatic. Thomas tried to shout, coughed instead. He held out Sam's Glock; it seemed to rattle in his hand.

Neil paused, turned to his old friend.

'You're going to help me save my son,' Thomas said tightly. It sounded like a cry, a plea.

Neil blinked slowly. 'No. I'm going to help you save my son.' He picked up the gun, pressed it beneath his belt.

Since Princeton this had always been Neil's way of avoiding confrontations: pretending they didn't exist. He would stand in the spotlight of others' condemnation and simply act as though he remained backstage. 'People are allergic to conflict,' he used to say. 'I simply dare them to sneeze.'

He played the margins of fear and embarrassment to his own advantage. That was a symptom of psychopathy, wasn't it?

Thomas thought of Cynthia Powski masturbating with broken glass.

What am I doing? I can't trust him. He's not even—

'We have to move,' Neil said abruptly. 'They're probably on top of us already.'

Thomas shook his head. 'No one else knows you're here. I tricked them,' he said, nodding to the two bodies on the floor. 'I knew I couldn't trust them not to kill you, so I tricked them.'

'You found me?' Neil said.

'Only because you wanted me to.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You marked this place on my poster… Just like you put the web address on my lamp.'

'Poster? You mean that satellite poster of the earth?'

'Yeah. You marked Climax with an x.'

Neil shook his head. 'Wasn't me.'

'Right,' Thomas said skeptically. For a second it seemed they were simply older versions of themselves, griping and disagreeing in the same old way.

'You put that x there. Don't you remember? Back in the dorm, years ago. We had those two chicks lined up—what was it? Sandra and Ginny or Jenny or something—'

'Jenny,' Thomas said.

'You remember? You were going on about the "world being your pussy" or something.'

Thomas looked at him blankly.

'You remember?' Neil repeated.

So. It was all bullshit. Every square inch of his life.

Even his revelations.

For a time, all Thomas could do was sit and point his gun. When Neil vanished into another room, he would just sit and blink, aiming the gun at the chrome and linoleum spaces beyond the door frame, waiting for Neil to return. When he returned, sometimes bearing rucksacks, other times scuffed aluminum cases, Thomas would watch in wonder as the muzzle tracked him, feeling nothing of the threat it represented, even though tissue exploded again and again in his mind's eye.