She fell back, hit the kitchen’s linoleum, twisted her head away. The pipe landed an inch from her ear with a dull thud.

Kimbra rose, panting, to one elbow. Browder still lay motionless. Joel, in the living room, gave her an exhausted thumbs-up. Even in the red light Kimbra could see that his face had gone very white. You didn’t have to be a doctor: the guy had lost an enormous amount of blood.

Kimbra stumbled along the length of the pipe, pulled her wrists free over its little cap of splintered wood and fumbled off the loop of tape that clung to her ankle. She checked Browder’s pockets—empty—and grabbed the long hunting knife from where it rested a few inches from his fingers. She carried it with her into the living room.

Someone rapped on the trailer’s shuttered back window. No sooner had she heard the sound than the trailer’s lights dimmed, died and shook back to life again.

“Joel?” said a muffled voice.

“Clark.” With his good hand, Joel tugged at the cuffs around his ankles that bound him to the floor.

Kimbra fumbled with the latch of the window shutter.

Officer Clark was outside, looking up at her through the bars over the window—because of course there would be bars over the window—while Jamal Reynolds and Whiskey Brazos—of all fucking people—stood trembling behind her. Kimbra raised her bleeding, cuffed wrists and said, “Joel’s hurt bad. We need keys.”

Clark fumbled at her belt, said, “Can you raise that window?”

It didn’t budge. Kimbra returned a moment later with a metal paddle the size of a fly swatter. She shattered the window with the butt of the paddle, swept the glass away with its business end. Clark raised an eyebrow, passed Kimbra a small ring of keys. “Hopefully those cuffs came from the department,” Clark said.

“Is KT with you?” Kimbra asked.

The stillness that settled over the three of them told her everything she needed to know.

Oh.

“Here.” Joel held out his hands. Kimbra uncuffed him first, let him take the keys and free her a moment later. Her wrists burned. KT was dead. “Are you alright?” Joel asked her, and she tried to smile. She honestly didn’t know the answer to that question.

“Dadders would say I’m better off,” she finally said, and touched her dry face as if she expected to find a tear there.

“What’s going on out front?” Clark asked, and as Joel worked at the cuffs on his ankles Kimbra crept to the trailer’s other window. She swung it open and took a quick breath. She was here, in dreamland.

Two guys she didn’t recognize stared at her—their mouths agape, their faces jaundiced with fear—from the windows of a red trailer on the other side of the circle. Directly across from her, past the tall triple-wide that had lorded over her all week in her sleep, Kimbra saw a boy slumped on a concrete porch outside an orange RV. The boy rose from a puddle of blood, reaching for the RV’s doorknob, and fell back down. It was Luke Evers, she realized, struggling but alive.