The elegant woman left the doorway, came down the steps, and opened her arms in a sign of welcome. She had white hair with orangish streaks. Freckles all over her face. She’d been a redhead. The masked woman followed behind her. She limped. That’s my grandmother, thought Gaspar. She took off her mask before speaking to him. For a person with such a horrible mutilation, what she said could be understood quite clearly.

“I was the one who ordered your uncle’s death. Be still, you’re as savage as your father.”

Gaspar recognized his grandmother’s voice in spite of her slavering diction. Again, he didn’t hesitate and lunged at her, not caring if she was old or a woman or his family. She had just confessed without even being asked. He managed to throw her to the ground, managed to sit on her birdlike hips—it couldn’t be that hard to kill her. Before many hands—how many, he didn’t know—pulled him away from her, he managed to hit her in the face, to feel her nose give way under his knuckles, to hear her curse him. Then, a single expert blow from a bodyguard, a man who really knew how and where to punch, knocked him out, and the last thing he saw was the sun through the trees and a flash of river.

Going up in the lookout tower was one way to go. It might be in good condition, and if the stairs gave way, that was good too. Although falling down a collapsed staircase wasn’t a certain death—they could still rescue him, and he didn’t want to be rescued. They followed him constantly, but he could do it if he was fast. They couldn’t watch him all the time. He could also stop eating. That was another way to die that they couldn’t control. Escaping was impossible. He had tried all the obvious ways, the river, the night, the jungle, and they’d caught him every time. The beatings weren’t so much brutal as they were efficient. They knew how to torture, inflict pain, wound without damaging. He never got far. He couldn’t flee. What they wanted from him was demented, but demented things were possible in that house and with those people. But he couldn’t give it to them.

The women, especially, believed he could. He should stop calling them the women. Florence and Mercedes. His grandmother, Mercedes. The one without lips. Her teeth chattered all the time, as if she were shivering. She didn’t always use the mask, and never in front of him. She wanted him to see her.