Weeks must have passed, months, maybe even years—I felt the exhaustion creep through me, wrapping itself like a heavy chain around my center. It was dark now; I couldn’t place the time of night, though I saw that it was a hotel room, and not a particularly good one. I was staring up at the ceiling, half buried under the covers, when a figure seemed to peel itself out from the shadows of the closet. It was fast, almost too much for me to keep up with. A man in a black mask, the metallic gleam of a gun—I threw my covers off of me and kicked my leg out, sending the attacker stumbling back. The shot went off from his gun with a combustion of light and little sound. The smell of it scorched my nostrils.

I was flipped onto my back, one of the man’s forearms braced against my neck, crushing the fragile rings of cartilage. My hands lashed out, hitting the rough carpet, the nightstand, and, finally his face. Not even the terror pulsing through every inch of me kept me from crashing into his mind.

STOP! I felt my lips form the word, but I couldn’t hear myself. STOP!

And the man did, with the blank look of someone whose skull had just been cracked open and exposed to freezing air. He sat back, his gun on the floor at his side.

I was coughing and hacking, trying to bring air into my lungs, but I grabbed the gun and stuffed it into the waistband of my pajamas. I stopped long enough to grab my winter coat from where it had been thrown across the room’s desk chair, and then I was outside, in the hallway, staring at the place where a man should have been posted outside my door to guard me. And I knew, I knew what was going on. I knew what would happen to me if someone were to find me alive in the morning.

I was running down the hotel’s stairs, out through the kitchens, out back past the Dumpsters and through the parking lot. Running, my chest on fire, hearing the sound of voices shouting after me, boots pounding on the pavement. Running for the trees, the darkness—

“Ruby—Ruby!”

I came back to myself in Clancy’s office bit by bit, with a headache severe enough that I had to put my face between my legs to avoid throwing up all over myself.

“They tried to kill you,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “Who?”

“Who do you think?” Clancy’s voice was dry. “That man was one of the Secret Service agents who were supposed to be guarding me.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut against the dizziness. “If they were carting you around and using you to explain the rehab program, then why…?”

“Because he figured out that I hadn’t been rehabbed at all,” he said. “My father, I mean. The only reason they let me out of Thurmond is because I made them think that I had been cured. But I got too ambitious. I tried to play my father by influencing him, and I got caught.” Clancy trailed off for a moment. “He was worried that the truth about the camps would get out, I’m sure, but he couldn’t just take me out of the public eye, not when he’d been the one to thrust me into it. No, I think in his mind, it was easier to just get rid of me altogether, before I could make trouble. I can only imagine what kind of spin he’d put on my murder to get back in the sympathetic graces of his fellow Americans.”