Here, however, the floor is bare of toys.

In the corner of the room, above the mattress, are rows of grooves dug so deep into the concrete that the hollows lose the touch of light.

Is this where Daddy sleeps?

She thinks she hears footsteps. Quickly, she jerks away and runs back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She runs to her mattress and cowers in the corner, staring at the door, waiting for it to open.

It doesn’t.

She rests her hand on her mattress, feeling a solid lump under her palm. Her stethoscope. She picks it up and admires its strong structure of rubber and metal—the build she imagines her bones might look like, all wiry and joined together at the ends, breaking off into branches of functional limbs. Her daddy showed her not photographs of these structures but what he called “sketches.” Something he drew with graphite to exhibit their insides.

“How do you know this is what we look like on the inside?” she’d asked him.

“Do you want to see the sketch or not?”

“Yes!”

“Then don’t ask me silly questions.”

She slips the eartips into her ears and listens to the muffled hummm of her surroundings. The sound reminds her of being dipped deep into a bath. Relaxing yet so full of noise.

She fiddles with the drum in her hands, tapping on it to mimic the muted beat she so loves. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She lies down, staring at the ceiling for a moment before closing her eyes. She places the drum of the stethoscope on her stomach, drifting away from her thoughts. She slides the drum up to the center of her ribcage and stops tapping to allow the living thing inside of her chest to take over.

Nothing.

CHAPTER XIV

She will get hungry, he thinks. Time will tell if left unaddressed.

The Devil named Daddy, defeater of Death—christened name Victor—paces the room, his thoughts churning.

He can keep her hunger at bay with all the lollipops in the world—blood is a funny faculty like that, how it never ends—but it won’t be enough. Though he does so wish it could be enough. Eventually, she’ll need more. And more and more, until it takes her over. Until it is far too late for him to show her what will satisfy the craving and what she has to do to get there.

What the virus demands.

She’ll have to figure it out for herself. How to stop the bubbling hate swelling up inside of her before it takes control. To be thrown helplessly into the void of her own desperation, only for it to dawn on her before it’s too late. Before she reaches the brink. His poor, poor girl. How she will be torn apart from what she knows and what is. How else could she understand? How else could her innocent, pure self understand what is far beyond her? What her mind could not even begin to wrap itself around?