Sniffling, Nico wiped his eyes and said, “You can’t promise that. He’s got us here, and he can do whatever he wants to us, and—”

“I will shoot that motherfucker between the eyes if he so much as pokes his head in here again,” Somers said. “How does that sound?”

Nico sniffled a few more times. “Pretty good.”

“Damn right. Now, I need you to talk to me. What happened? How did you get down here?”

“What day is it?”

“Friday. Sometime between three and four in the afternoon.”

“I’ve been down here for two days? What the fuck?”

“Nico, you’ve got to understand, the police hadn’t even started looking for you. Nobody was sure you were really missing—nobody except Hazard and Marcus, to be fair. By now, Marcus will have filed a missing person’s report. They’ll be taking this seriously; you’ve been gone for too long. Once they start looking, they’ll be able to track you here. I did.”

“Well, where are they? Why aren’t they here with you?”

“I, um.” Somers was glad for the darkness as his face heated. “I’m kind of on the run.”

Nico stared at him for a moment. Then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard and for so long that he had to sit down on the steps, and then he kept laughing until it sounded more like sobs. Somers let him go for a while, watching, and then he turned and moved slowly through the closest area of the sub-basement.

On his last visit, Somers hadn’t really had time to pay attention to details. He remembered the luminous limestone under the beam of his flashlight. He remembered the moisture beading on top and glowing like exposed bone. He remembered the soft rise and fall of the bees’ murmuring. Now, though, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out details. New details. Details he was sure hadn’t been here in the weeks and months following their discovery of Phil, Rory, and Mitchell.

A camera, for one thing. A red light flashed steadily on the front of the camera, which was mounted twenty yards down the main corridor of the sub-basement. Somers tried to inspect it from different angles, but the light was too poor. He tried adjusting the camera, thinking to point it down and away—no reason in giving the Keeper voyeuristic pleasure or additional information—and was surprised when the camera came free from the wall. He found an adhesive strip on the mounting, tacky and slightly damp from the moisture on the stone.

“The other one came off just like that,” Nico said, his voice rough. He had to stoop more than Somers to stand in the sub-basement, and the pose exaggerated his lankiness, made him look even more than usual like a kid growing too fast. “I threw it in one of those rooms because I, uh, got mad.”

“There’s another?”

“They’re all over the place. Look down there.”

Somers stared into the darkness. “I guess I see one. My eyes must not be as good as yours.”