“We know where they went,” Carlo mocked, his pimpled face red with excitement.

“Come closer and I’ll whisper it in your ear.” Tiberius’s smile was cruel. His beckoning finger sent ice down Serina’s spine. She hardened herself to the feral grins, the vulgar suggestions.

“They didn’t have keys. How did they escape?” she asked Val, forcing her voice not to shake through sheer will. “Could they come back for the others?”

“If Diego hadn’t gotten jumpy, Nero would’ve sprung us all.” Carlo winked grotesquely at Serina.

Val shook his head, his expression troubled. “Nero must have picked the locks. We searched their rooms, but we must have missed something. Nero’s a real piece of work. Quiet, sly… always has been. Women sometimes turned up dead during his shifts, and he had a way of watching you, squirreling things away.…”

Carlo and the others whooped and roared.

“Should we move the other guards?” Serina asked, trying to ignore the noise. Her pulse pounded in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Doll, and yet it felt like an additional betrayal to pretend she wasn’t there.

“There’s nowhere else we can reasonably secure them,” Val said, frowning. “Maybe the in-processing room, if we cleared it out and jammed the door somehow.…”

“That would take too long,” Serina said. “We need to find Diego, Hector, and Nero now. They could try to contact Bellaqua, or signal the boat.”

With a rumble of footsteps, Anika, Ember, and several other women arrived. They stopped in the doorway at the sight of the bodies.

“Val, let’s move the firearms and the rest of the food to Hotel Misery,” Serina said.

He nodded.

Serina unlocked the armory and handed one of the weapons out to Ember. “If they bother you, or the others come back, shoot them.”

Ember leaned against the wall opposite Carlo’s cell and stared him into silence. Her strip of red hair caught the dim light and shone like fresh blood.

Anika and the others helped Serina and Val carry the weapons and bodies. By the time they emerged from the compound, night had fallen with a great, garish splash of red. The sulfuric haze of the volcano had intensified. Serina choked on the darkness and the memories; the industrial weight of Lanos’s air had been like this, thick and strangling.

They laid Doll and Scorpion gently in the clearing before Hotel Misery, next to the other woman who’d been killed. Serina felt their deaths, even Scorpion’s, like stones on her chest, suffocating her.

Women milled uneasily around the broken fountain and the dead women, murmuring to themselves and glancing into the darkness nervously. More torches than usual were burning.