She stirs. Moans. Her face a rictus of pain – like fingers pull at its edges, the skin tight against her skull. Here she looks small and weak. Once she would have played up that fragility to dupe him into helping her. But now it’s no ruse.

“Honey, please, god, Jesus, wake up.”

Her eyes flutter open. She sees him. Terror-struck. She swipes at him, tries weakly to push him away: “You monster, you’re a monster, get off me–”

“Honey, honey, we’re alive, but–”

“I hate you. I hate you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Her eyes roll unmoored in her eye sockets. Then they refocus. A small voice: “Daddy.”

“Nora. Sweetheart. I’m here.” He wipes hair from her brow. Feels the heat coming off her. “I’m going to go see if I can find a way out. I’m going to climb–”

“I didn’t do it.” Tears run down her cheeks.

“What? Sweetheart, just relax.”

“I didn’t kill Casimir. I loved him.” She blinks away tears, presses her face into his forearm. Damp and warm. “He and I were going to run away together and get married. And then work against his grandfather because, because he knew a lot about the Organization and he said, he said Konrad didn’t trust him or even like him and I loved him and…”

Her words dissolve under the onslaught of sadness. She sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry about all of it.”

All this has the whiff of the confessional. Mookie doesn’t like it.

“No,” he says. “No apologies. Not now. I have my own. Doesn’t matter. We’re gonna fix this, Nora. I’m gonna fix it. Stay here. Rest. I’m… I’ll be back.”

He kisses her on the brow. She’s burning up.

“Daddy, you never went to see Mom–” She starts babbling. “Werth is dead and Skelly is dead and I see Mom standing there next to you–”

It’s hell to turn away from her.

But he has to.

He walks, and then he climbs.

The walls are deeply pitted and pocked with chambers, almost like the eaves and pockets of a burial chamber – fortunately, that means he has plenty of handholds.

Unfortunately, one of his arms is broken and worthless.

–more useless than a pair of tits on a lawnmower–

Still, Mookie has to climb. There has to be a way out up here. A tunnel. A way up and through. Then maybe he can find a vein of Cerulean. The Blazes can’t cure Nora but they can forestall what’s coming. Buy them time.

A cruel voice asks, Time for what?

He can’t answer that. So he shoves the voice down in a dark hole.

He climbs.