So Ángel talked, describing what he could see of the town of Cascade in the pinkish glare of its streetlights. They’d been cut off by the time the DOR helicopter landed in the parking lot.

In a featureless office building in Atlanta, Ángel was questioned for hours by a team of DOR agents, led by Neil Jeremy, the red-haired man he’d first met in Jacksonville.

They didn’t seem angry. Ángel didn’t seem to be in trouble.

A medic had looked at his hand, and they’d given him dry clothes: socks, tighty-whities, a light-blue DOR T-shirt, and a navy sweat suit, all slightly too big. Under the soft clean clothes, his body was still dirty and rank with sweat and blood.

His mind felt frozen. He hadn’t been able to nap on the plane, and he was numb with exhaustion.

“How long were you on the snowmobile after you left Oberon’s estate?” asked Jeremy.

“I don’t know.” Ángel had answered this question already. Jeremy’s secretary had written it down. He’d already told them everything, everything. “I was really out of it. But I think it was around midnight when they caught me, and it was daylight when we got to the cabin. So it must have been several hours.”

The only thing he hadn’t told Jeremy was his reason for being outside in the middle of the night at Oberon’s estate. That last conversation with Oberon—Oberon had been so happy, and he, Ángel, so selfish—burned his memory.

He’d discuss that conversation with Oberon, and no one else.

“And you think you went south?”

He remembered the gold-and-flamingo sunrise filling the sky to his left. “At least some of the time we were going south.”

“But maybe not the whole time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me about the men again. Everything you can remember.”

He told them. He ratted out Logan the goon with relish, and put in a good word for Aaron the not-a-fag-killer. Jeremy seemed to think Ángel had some variety of Stockholm Syndrome when it came to Aaron, but what could he say? Aaron had tased him, had hoisted him over the wall, had put him in the shed to freeze, but he could have just shot him in the snow. He hadn’t.

“They were armed?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of guns were they carrying?”

“I . . . I didn’t see any guns. But they talked about shooting me, and they didn’t seem like they were fucking around.”

“You didn’t see the guns?”

Ángel closed his eyes. “No.”

“What kind of snowmobiles were they?”

“A single-man sled. Hold on.”

“Ángel? Did you notice the make of the snowmobiles?”

“No,” he said, not opening his eyes. He’d already told them he didn’t know anything about the snowmobiles.

“And what direction did you go?”

“Sleep,” he said. “I think we went south. I need to sleep.”