“Golf?” Ash remembered saying, frowning. He’d never golfed before, and it struck him as a strange, sort of fussy sport. His old man had liked football and boxing. Golf was for rich people and snobs.

He’d snorted, but Roman either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He’d tossed him the ball and jerked his head down the hallway. “C’mon,” he’d said. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

He’d taken Ash to a door at the end of the hall, and up several flights of stairs to the roof. Ash hadn’t realized how high the university building towered over the city until they’d walked out onto that roof. The whole of Seattle lay before them, gleaming with white light as ferries moved across Elliott Bay, office lights blazed from skyscrapers, and bars and restaurants stayed lit for the evening. He could make out the distant, blue-tinted light of the Space Needle, and the dizzying glow of the waterfront. It looked strange and futuristic and alien, and the only thing that felt familiar was the moon hanging above them, close enough that Ash almost thought he could reach up and pluck it out of the sky.

Roman had handed him a rusted golf club and nodded at a bucket of balls sitting beside the edge of the roof. “Aim for the Needle,” he’d said.

They’d spent the next few hours smacking golf balls off the roof, aiming at the tiny, blue prick of light in the distance that Ash knew was the Space Needle. They hadn’t spoken more than that, but Ash still remembered how grateful he’d been to Roman, that night, for giving him some sense of ease in this strange, new world.

They’d been friends before they were enemies. It was so easy to forget that, after everything that had happened.

Ash clenched his eyes shut a moment before the bullet hit him and threw himself backward off the building. He fell past the broken docks and crashed into the ice, hitting the hard, frozen surface of the water with a crack that moved through his whole body.

He blinked up at the sky and, for a moment, he saw nothing but swirling black darkness.

Then, he heard footsteps. Mac’s voice called to him from the darkness, “Go ahead and run, boy. I don’t think you’re going to find anything to help you out there.”

And then, cackling, he walked away.

Ash tried to stand, and collapsed, gasping. He was injured, and his first thought was of Mac’s gun, the bullet that had been speeding toward him a moment before he disappeared and wound up here. He clutched his side, gasping, but when he looked down he didn’t see blood oozing out from below his ribs but something else.

It was a milky, iridescent liquid. And then Ash blinked and it wasn’t liquid at all but a solid, steel spike protruding from his ribs. And then it was purple electricity prickling over his skin. And then something goopy and thick and a deep, bloody red.