He began a full circuit of the building, looking for the best entrance. He found few options. On the warehouse side of the structure, the enormous metal doors were padlocked and rusted shut; a smaller door, obviously intended for employee use, was set into the brick a few yards away. It fit poorly in the frame, and Hazard could see that the bolt wasn’t set. He left it for the moment—it seemed like too easy of an invitation—and continued around the structure. His next choice was an iron fire escape, obviously added much later in response to evolving demands for workplace safety, and now rusted solid. When Hazard gave an experimental tug, the whole thing wobbled and clanged softly. He released it and pranced back a few steps, and then he let out a breath when it didn’t fall. The main entrance to the building featured glass double doors, and that also seemed like too much of an invitation. As Hazard had almost finished his loop, he spotted a coal chute; the door was almost as big as he was, obviously a concession to the vast amounts of fuel Empire Fruit had once needed, and the cast iron was pitted and brittle. He touched the handle and found that it turned easily.

For a moment, Hazard remembered the Haverford, but not in the panicked constellation of sensory input that he couldn’t integrate. Instead, this was a clear memory. A normal memory. He remembered, when he’d been about to enter the building through an alternate route, that he was going to lose because he was still playing the game that Mikey Grames had set up, and Mikey always cheated.

Hazard had the same sense now. The Keeper had taken months to plan this; he would have spent much of the time trying to predict Hazard’s movement and counter them. Hazard found himself playing out the possible variations of these mind games. The Keeper, whoever he was, had become active after the Haverford. To Hazard, it seemed impossible that the Keeper wouldn’t know exactly what Hazard had done on that horrible day. Until this point, the Keeper had shown an unnatural interest in Hazard; it only made sense that he would plan his final strategy around what he knew about him. He would expect Hazard to do the same thing again: to refuse to play by the rules, to attempt to level the playing field by changing the game entirely. And, Hazard realized with a thumping wariness, he would have put measures in place to make the result even more horrible.

The thought froze Hazard. If he played this the same way he had at the Haverford, he would lose. He didn’t know how, not yet—the Keeper would kill Somers, perhaps, as punishment—but he knew it was true. And he also knew that the Keeper was craving this. The Keeper wanted this. He wanted this confrontation because of the tremendous rush of the threat, of the danger, but also because it validated him. Hazard was the best, in the Keeper’s eyes at least, and by going toe to toe with the Keeper, Hazard implied that the Keeper was the best. The Keeper would have made it possible, if only barely, for Hazard to make it to the center of the maze because what the Keeper really wanted was a showdown. The whole thing was theatrical—an elaborate production of self-gratification. And the conclusion, of course, would be when the Keeper killed Hazard face to face, despite his promises.