“We’re going to die, right?”

“I’m not planning on it. Are you?”

Nico said, “Fuck,” and then he put his face in his hands and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

In the hazy light that came under the door, Somers saw the raw and bloody ends of Nico’s fingers. He thought of the days in the dark, the disorientation, the panic settling into terror, the complete lack of training or knowledge about what to do.

He put an arm around Nico.

Nico sobbed once into his hands.

“You handled yourself really well,” Somers said, chafing Nico’s arm. “Most people would have been paralyzed, but you figured out the cameras were fake, you figured out the grenades were fake, you—hey, how’d you do that? With the grenades, I mean?”

“I pulled one and tried to blow up the door.”

Somers burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that he was shaking, and then he slid along the step, unable to keep himself upright. It wasn’t really that funny, but nerves and the tense exhaustion from the last few days had frayed his self-control, and now he couldn’t stop laughing. After a moment, Nico started laughing too, wiping his face as he cried and laughed and cried.

Eventually, Somers settled. “That was a pretty fucking terrible idea,” Somers said, grinning. “But holy shit it took guts.”

“Yeah, well,” Nico said with a shrug. He was leaning his head back again, his eyes half closed. “The worst part has been not sleeping. I took a dump in one of those stupid cells, and that was pretty terrible, but the worst part is not being able to close my eyes. I keep thinking he’s going to get me if I fall asleep. I have never in my entire life been this tired.”

“You can go to sleep now,” Somers said, applying light pressure until Nico rested his head against Somers’s side.

Nico resisted for a moment, and then he settled against Somers, his breathing already evening out. “I am sorry,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly a prince either,” Somers said. But Nico was already asleep by then.

Somers kept vigil in the flickering gray light that came under the door. Hours later, with Nico rumbling deep in sleep against him, he noticed a tiny hole in the wall above the door, and he started to wonder.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

JULY 6

SATURDAY

4:12 AM

HAZARD WOKE TO THE alarm he had set on the phone. The screen also displayed several missed calls, all from the same unknown number, and a voicemail. He blinked blearily, processed the unfamiliar surroundings into the back bench of the Odyssey, and remembered that he had slept in the minivan. He was thirsty and had an overwhelming need to piss; the car smelled like a closed-up space with a man who needed a shower, with a hint of apple and cinnamon from the breakfast cereal Evie liked to munch on.

He squeezed between the middle row of seats, let himself out of the van, and locked the doors. Then he jogged across the parking lot, thinking about the structure of transitional epithelial cells in the bladder, their remarkable ability to stretch, and the very real awareness that distracting himself was only going to work for a few more minutes because those poor epithelial cells had stretched to the point of rupturing. The sodium lamps in the parking lot hung a fluttering layer of light everywhere, dusty gray wings that wouldn’t stop trembling. It was another world, maybe, like that one in the show Somers had made him watch, with the child actors who were completely faking their knowledge of ham radios.