Nora chokes back a sob. Kicks out with a foot, knocks over her coffee table. Everything feels like a rope slipping through her fingers, the frayed end almost in her hand and out of her grip.

All this time she thought she could go against her father, go against the Organization and control the Blue trade. What a joke. She had the money. She had no one or nothing holding her back. She played Mookie. Shot Werth. Bought some thugs. Got the Get-Em-Girls on her side. But she was David flinging stones at Goliath, and in this story, Goliath stomps David into a sticky puddle. The Organization came back on her like an ill-cracked whip. Her guys were bought back or killed. Her own Mole Men, executed down in the dark of the Underworld. Soon as those were gone, her territory was in the wind – the Organization soldiers took it right back. And then her Blue started to dry up.

She wants to bail. Get in a cab. On a train. Use the last bit of her money to hop a plane. Whatever, wherever. Just gone. Run away.

But then, another voice says: you need to calm the hell down, bee-yotch. Focus up. You can fix this. You’re already fixing this. The plan is the plan – you still need the gangs. You can still do this. Don’t be a spaz.

We do this right, we can still tear it all down and dance around in the rubble.

Then Daddy will listen. Then he’ll really know who I am.

Nora feels under her couch. Pulls out the .38 she once used to pop a bullet into James Werth’s hip when he caught her at her father’s bar last year.

She knows what she needs. Time to make the gangs listen. Time to pay for their attention in the only currency that really matters right now:

Nora needs more Blue.

You’re awesome, she thinks. You’re a righteous mean-ass smart-ass little bitch.

Nora flips the cylinder. Sees the shiny ends of six .38 shells gleaming.

Then it’s out the door to fix what’s fucked.

The tunnel is lit with striations of pulsing light from squirming fungus tucked in the pockets of the open jaws and eye sockets of all the skulls lining the walls, one skull after the other, rows and stacks, not merely stuck to the rock but married to it as if they have always been a part of this place. The Blazes are like that: the blue stuff doesn’t merely tear aside the façade to reveal the monsters, but when on it, the whole of the Underworld pulses with a different kind of energy. Like staring at the world under a blue light.