Across town, when the unknown car had vanished down the street and David turned back to his house, it no longer felt familiar to him: it was no longer safe. The aura of adult magic with which it had been imbued for the past two weeks had suddenly dissipated. The house seemed polluted to him, spoiled by the invasion, as if the structures that made it up—the extensive basement, the spotless living room, the expanding kitchen and back patio, his den of a bedroom, structures he’d once admired—had now come to betray him. All this time, and he had never even known the alarm codes. He put on pants—to do so he had to go back upstairs, to face his bedroom again, which now felt like a massive deception, a room where he’d been broken open and rifled around, come out with his insides rearranged. From the way Sarah had run to the car, he assumed she’d known the invaders somehow, that she had accepted his invitation to come over in order to distract him while her friends robbed the house. It was her revenge on him, revenge he undoubtedly deserved. Her forgotten or discarded shoes, her backpack lay by his desk. He knelt and unzipped it, poking through for a hint of her plans. He found her phone, which he couldn’t unlock, and then drew out a white pamphlet: the title, REDPRINT, above a stark black symbol. He had seen the symbol before. He turned the pamphlet over. On the back, an address and a proposition, or a command: ARE YOU ASKING THE SAME QUESTIONS.

David turned on all the lights in the top two stories of the house.

When he was finished, he stood at the point at which the three others had emerged. The door to the basement hung open, its darkness gaping up at him. He was vaguely aware that there was an emergency protocol he ought to be following, there was a system in place for things like this. He switched on the light at the top of the stairs, resigned to seeing what they’d stolen. On the wall to the right of the door, below the light switch, a bloody handprint—the moon-like heel of a palm, a blot from the base of the thumb. The same symbol. His stomach turned over. He had not known it was within him—to be cruel, to be calculating—but now it was. He couldn’t argue it: he had tried to trick Sarah, to take advantage of her, to assert some kind of control. How could he blame her for fighting back? Was that the question—THE SAME QUESTION? As he descended the stairs, dread building in his stomach, he felt like he was reentering a once-familiar place he hadn’t visited in years, as if the basement was some primitive part of his past, an ur-place from which the primordial David had evolved.