Anais could pull the hose up anytime she felt like it, of course, and drown them both. But there was no point in dwelling on that. Dana kept insisting that Jenna would never allow that to happen anyway. Violet didn’t say so, but she wasn’t so sure, though it was only Jenna’s intervention that had persuaded Anais to lock Dana and Violet up instead of murdering them outright.

It was Rachel who’d spied on Dana and who’d reported that Violet had slipped away to bring Luce the knife; Rachel, who’d always seemed so sweet and fragile, and who’d been one of Violet’s few friends. She couldn’t think of Rachel as a cruel person, but Violet knew the little nervous blonde was terrified of Anais. If Rachel did bad things sometimes, Violet told herself, then she did them out of cowardice rather than meanness. Who knew what Anais had said to pressure Rachel or to threaten her?

Violet sighed, pulled in a final inhalation, and gave the air back to Dana, who took the hose sleepily and rolled onto her side. The movement set off a small current in the confined space, and the curtains waved lethargically. At the bottom of the room the man’s skeleton seemed to shake its head as the current brushed against it.

That skeleton had once been Anais’s father, Violet knew. But she tried not to think about that too much.

She also tried not to look too closely. The tiny fishes and strange accordionlike orange worms had devoured most of the flesh, but in places gray-pink shreds still clung to the bones. Small sharp-toothed animals came to gnaw on them. Ribbons of what had once been a large green polo shirt and a pair of khakis hovered like awful plants around the rib cage and pelvis. Violet had seen human corpses before, of course. But she’d never spent so much time with one, and the longer she went on with this dead man as her cellmate the more she began to think about him: how he’d felt as he died and what serpentine dreams might still be wriggling through his empty skull. Sometimes she had to fight down an impulse to talk to him, maybe even to apologize.