I turn and try to run back toward the elevator, but running seems like a reckless thing to do, so I walk until I’m at the elevator and then I wait patiently for it to arrive.

I ride down in smiling silence, listening to the jazz music growing louder as we get to the lobby. I exit and wonder why I’m there.

To stop Malachai from leaving, I think, and nod to myself.

I look to the hotel’s double doors, the ones that lead to the way out of Purgatory, and I see Malachai still standing there. I walk over to him.

“Malachai,” I say.

“Oh, Luka,” he replies. “Hello.”

“You’re planning on leaving?” I ask.

“I was … I think … I’m just looking at the patterns on this glass,” he says, pointing to the golden design of interwoven vines that adorns the glass. “So complicated.”

“It’s beautiful,” I tell him.

“Mmm,” he replies.

And we stand there for some time admiring the lines.

“Should we go and listen to the music?” I ask.

“The music, yes,” Malachai says, turning to me and smiling. “It really grows on you.”

And we wander off toward the bar, activating the receptionist as we pass, who welcomes us to the Purgatory Hotel and tells us that it’s a great place to stay.

Day 2

In a rare moment of clarity, I try to figure out how long Malachai and I have been in this place.

Time is a hard thing to track when you’re never tired, never hungry, and the sun never rises.

I’ve been speaking to this girl, Eloise, about how she joined the Missing six months before Happy sent the terrible, horrible chemicals down in the rain, and how they survived by being dead and in Purgatory, and how things seemed different back then, but she can’t remember how they were different and isn’t that funny? And it is funny. She had fought in the Battle of Midway Park, but that all seems so reckless now, and so futile and so silly and so dangerous.

Before that I was dancing with a boy named Alix who is nineteen and was a clone in the vault with Molly and Day and Shion, and he was saying that in the vault they talked about how they could destroy Happy and how they could win the war, and doesn’t that sound silly now? And it does sound silly. It’s clear now that the only way to win this war is not to fight this war.