Evan thought of the Horizon Express, plowing along at twenty-three knots, a white furrow in the deep blue sea, and Alison Siegler somewhere aboard in one of thirty-five hundred containers, closing the distance to a fate nobody deserved.

And he thought of the boy’s voice over the phone line: You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.

“Yes,” he said. “It does seem inadequate.”

“What if you could make someone serve a thousand-year sentence in eight hours? Ten lifetimes of purgatory crammed into the span of a single workday?”

The tip of the needle neared. Evan’s fear mounted, threatened to overtake him.

“Can you imagine the horror?” René said, leaning in.

Evan struggled furiously against the straps, but they were designed for precisely this purpose. The needle slid into his arm.

René smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just going to give you a single dr—”

Evan felt a slight pressure in his vein and then watched René’s mouth continue to open more slowly than seemed conceivably possible, each millimeter taking an hour, two hours, and the end of the spoken word pulled out and out, stretched from a block of steel into a thin metal wire, a sound and a vibration, the endless tunnel of the o like a wormhole through the ages, and over the forever-gaping mouth René started to blink, but the movement of his eyelids was like the rise and fall of a lake’s watermark across the seasons, limitless microseconds crammed between microseconds, the creased skin around his eyes rearranging infinitesimally, a universe of motion contained in a single blink until at last, after a day’s grueling wait, Evan could see the thin blue veins etched in his closed lids and he knew it would be another day for them to open yet again, and the word was not yet completed, the wrinkled lips still closing the o into the p even as another sound overpowered the slow-motion hum of René’s voice, a buzz slowed to its constituent audio parts, and Evan pulled his gaze to the source, but the shifting of his eyeballs felt like altering the course of a freight ship, ligaments and muscles flexing and tugging to recalibrate his view excruciatingly, until at last he fixed upon the bottle flying airborne over René, its hairlike bristles waving sluggishly on its metallic green thorax, its wings flapping so gradually that Evan could see the quality of light alter through the semitransparent wings that were embellished with intricate patterns to put any stained-glass window to shame, and the whole horrifying, unfettered, attenuated time, Evan’s mind raced inside his skull at a real, frantic pace, alive and horror-filled, scrambling like a mouse trapped in a bowl of water, desperate, so desperate to get—