WHEN WE REACHED the fourth floor, I had little recollection of where we had been held hostage. Lily was likewise unsure. Last time we’d come to this floor, I’d been unconscious and she’d been terrified and bound. I closed my eyes and conjured a dizzy picture of that room, the boys circled around us. In my memory there were streetlights outside the window.
“It has to be on the side of the building facing the street,” I said. We turned right, stepping lightly around rubble and ceiling plaster. This floor was in worse repair than others. Water damage from leaking pipes had caused a great collapse. Musky odors hung in the air, and mold grew along the walls. I walked with one hand outstretched, afraid of what I couldn’t see, despite the predawn sunlight trickling through several doorways. Room after room revealed disheveled furnishings and ripped window covers.
“They’ve been here,” Lily said.
“The children. They’ve been looking for us. Torn every room apart to find us.”
She was right. I marveled at my own pursuit. These Youngsters were more determined than I remembered ever having been. The fanaticism of one, one old enough to feel the danger of being untethered, of having removed his connection to the rest, was enough to drive them all.
We passed room after room, glanced in at floors covered with glass and plaster, paper and wood. Nothing remained to remind one of a hotel other than numbers on the doors. Above us thundered footsteps, raised voices shouting. Screwdriver was one floor up, and the chase was on.
“We have to hurry,” I told Lily. “If they catch him, it will take them just a few seconds to realize they have the wrong man.” We moved to the next room. It was there, among pieces of glass, that Lily found the tape. Her hand shook as she handed it to me.
I watched her try to hide her eyes. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Let’s go.” She left the room, and I followed.
Back through the wet halls we rushed. We’d almost reached the main stairs when voices called from behind us. Youngsters had spotted us. They squealed, as if it were a game, squealed and screamed and grinned like hungry dogs.
I grabbed Lily’s hand, and we ran.
Tripping down the stairs, we reached the third floor and rushed along a hallway. They’d expect me to try to get to the ground floor, I thought, not hide on the third. We ran past the Body’s room, which now stood open, the sheet on the floor, the Body abandoned and uncared for on the table. At the smaller staircase at the end of the hallway, I heard noises below us, calls of children, high on panic and power. Where was Screwdriver? I thought. Why hadn’t he been able to keep them away longer?
We headed upstairs, thinking to double back to the main stairway, but at the landing outside the fourth floor I heard voices, and we continued up. The light grew as we climbed. Lily leaned to look up. “If we reach the top, it ends there.”
Before I could ask what she meant, I heard footsteps below us. I leaned over the railing and peered down through the squared spiral of stairs. My shadow fell large before me, down the floors. In the center of it, looking back up at me, I saw myself. It was the Nose.
To Lily I whispered, “Get up and climb.” We made our way up the stairs, stumbling on glass and plaster, our footfalls mixing with those of the Nose behind us. He didn’t call out. He didn’t say anything. He worked to gain on us, his breathing fast and hard, and I heard the call of the gun he carried as it hit the handrail. My exhausted, hungover body burned with the effort. Lily and I tripped each other in our rush. My hand on her arm, I tried to balance her. Finally we reached the top, the penthouse landing. To our right yawned the mouth of the elevator, to our left the door of the apartment that I’d only ever been in once, twelve hours earlier. In the dark it had seemed deserted, but now I saw the unmistakable signs that someone had been living here. The floors were worn but clean, the drop cloths over the furniture a temporary protection. New drywall sheets lay on the floor, and a bucket of dried plaster with trowel sat near the door. Repairs were under way.
In the kitchen the service exit was painted shut. I quickly searched the rooms, looked out the windows. Outside, the fire escape still clung to the upper floors of the hotel. I ran back to the apartment’s entrance and found Lily looking down the stairs.
“He’s stopped,” she said. “I think he’s waiting for more of them.”
I tugged at Lily to follow. “Come on. We’ll go back down the fire escape.”
“It collapsed.”
“Not all of it. We can get down a floor or two.”
She looked from me to the stairs and back. “If he’s stopped, maybe he’s not that dangerous. Maybe we can talk to him.”
“He’s got a gun.”
“So do you.”
I tapped my leg with the revolver. “That’s different. I need it.”
“For what?”
“To keep him away from us.”
She reached out to brush my cheek. “You know, the only one who’s fired a gun around here is you. They haven’t—”
“Listen to me. They’re dangerous. They don’t know what’s at stake.”
“They saw the body.”
She was right. They had seen the Body. Their quest for answers had been transformed, the moment they found the Body, into something else. I tried to imagine what I would be thinking if as a child I’d been shown the cadaver I would become.
“Whether they’ve seen it or not is beside the point,” I said. “Things have spiraled out of control. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Footfalls echoed in the stairway. I grabbed her hand and pulled her through the main room. Dawn chose that moment to arrive, and direct sunlight coming through the wide windows blinded us. I moved on instinct, swinging the window into the room. I was leaning out to survey the fire escape when a loud snapping sound erupted from the kitchen. It could only be the painted door breaking open. My eyes still blurry from the bright sunlight, I saw my arm rise on its own, the gun suddenly weightless in my hand. I aimed at the dark gap of the kitchen doorway. For a terrible moment, nothing happened. When at last a figure stepped into view, I thumbed back the hammer. My eyes cleared enough to see the same gun in the other man’s hand.
“I’ll kill her,” he said.
I squeezed the trigger.
The gun sounded a double shot, though my hand jerked only once. I watched him collapse, watched him fold over at the waist like an empty suit. His head hit the floor hard, and he moaned as his body crashed down around him like a collection of parts. I wasn’t breathing. I realized that I was looking at the black suit I now wore, that the jacket I’d given to Screwdriver was on the floor, wrapped around the man I’d shot. I stepped toward him, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life, and grabbed a shoulder. I was sure it would be Screwdriver, but when I turned him over, the face was wrong—more haggard. A gash oozed blood at his temple at the same place the Inventor had struck me. Blood dripped from the whiskers of his chin, the bullet wound in his neck lost beneath the unruly beard, blood flowing down his front, dyeing his shirt. I gulped for air. I clutched at his collar and shook him, tried to make the empty, blank eyes focus on me, but they didn’t move. I felt his chest, and my bloodied hand came away without a heartbeat. It was the Drunk. In his hand was the pistol I also held, smoke twisting from the barrels of both. He had faced me, had aimed at me, yet his bullet had missed.
I turned to look at Lily and found her lying on the floor, a red-black puddle growing beneath her.
I think I screamed. I must have. I want to have done so.
I crawled to her, spreading blood across the floor in streaks. Her eyes were wet with tears.
“Take me home. I want to go home.” Her voice was thin and airless. I reached around her, found the exit wound at her back. I tried to hold it closed with my palm, my tears dripping onto her red dress. Behind me came footsteps. I turned around as Seventy and Yellow stepped into the suite from the hallway. Behind them was Screwdriver, my jacket in hand, face flushed and sweaty, masked in anguish. He knelt beside me. Lily looked up at me and sighed.
“Take me home,” she repeated.
Screwdriver started to lift her from me, and Yellow had to pull my hands away. He helped me to my feet but would not let me follow. Screwdriver paused as Lily said something to him. He nodded and turned around. I heard a tapping and realized that my hands were shaking, the gun knocking out a message against the floor. I tried to let go of it, but my fingers refused.
“She wants her things.”
Seventy waved him away. “We’ll bring it. You take her home.”
Screwdriver handed me the jacket, as if in payment for Lily, collected her against his chest, and left. Before me were the bloodied floorboards where she had lain.
Yellow turned his attention to the Drunk. “He’s dead.”
Seventy gave a withering look. “We knew he would be. Take him upstairs. We’ll send him to yesterday in my raft.”
Yellow nodded, hauled the Drunk into a sitting position, and then rolled the Drunk’s body over his shoulder. With great effort he rose into a crouch, bearing the body to the stairs, the Drunk’s feet dragging behind him. Seventy and I were alone in the penthouse living room, blood smeared across the floor. We listened as the sounds of Yellow’s struggle moved up. The roof door opened, and I was surprised that an alarm sounded, so like the one I’d heard when the elevator descended. It stopped after a moment. At my feet was the Drunk’s gun and in my hand my own. I knelt and picked up his, identical to mine but coated in dirt and missing one more bullet. I looked at my own gun and realized that the bullet in line to fire next would be the bullet to kill Lily. I was cold and shaking.
Seventy, his lined face tired, said, “Okay. Now that that’s over with, let’s get out of here.”
Seventy and I walked through the hotel halls. I lost track of where we were, and Seventy never said. I carried both revolvers, one in each hand, both warm as if ready for more shooting, as if there were anyone else here as dangerous as I was. We passed plaster holes and bared latticework, door after door, all identical. Somehow the Youngsters’ search had not come this way.
At last Seventy stopped in front of a door and handed me a key. “Open that up, will you?”
I shifted both guns to one hand and opened the door. It was the finished room, where I had watched the video on the miniature TV, where Lily had first kissed me. I tried to hand him the key, but he refused it.
“Keep it,” he said. He looked tired enough to fall. “Empty your pockets.” He sat on the bed, in the exact spot where I had earlier.
“Why?” I fought the urge to vomit on the floor and instead squeezed my eyes closed. Lily’s image lurked behind my eyelids, crumpled, bleeding.
“Empty your goddamned pockets. She’s dying.”
I put the guns on the bed first, followed by the twin timepieces, six months different, then used tissues and spare buttons. The tape was last, and the only thing he took.
“Keep the guns,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You better.”
I said, “I won’t. I can’t. Not after what—”
Seventy raised his silver-knobbed cane and pointed it at me, like a wand, as if his will might fly from it and turn me into a frog or a table lamp. “You take those guns with you when you leave here or I’ll beat you so you can’t chew snot.”
I took the guns from the bed and stuck one into my remaining jacket pocket, the other into my waistband at my back. I didn’t want to bear their weight.
Seventy stepped into the closet, out of my view. I stood next to the bed looking at the items I’d carried with me. Change from different eras. Buttons that had come with the suit. I’d traveled years beyond my lifetime, beyond the lifetimes of anyone I’d known as a child. I’d gone back to watch seeds planted and then moved forward to see centuries-old wood taken from the same spot. I’d met children who had no idea I’d later walk over their graves and the graves of their children’s children; I’d met them and watched them play games they thought would never end. And all I carried around were the buttons that came with the jacket I’d ruined. Nausea boiled inside me.
Seventy pulled the camera out of the closet and off the tripod and held it out to me. “Here, this is hers. She asked for it. Take it to her.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“The building across the alley, just next door. She lives there.”
I took the camera and held it at my side. “Why did she come here? Who invited her?”
Seventy stood beside the bed. “We did. I did. You. You will. She came because that’s what happened.”
Suddenly I was seeing the room through a dark circle at arm’s length, a hole the size of a plate. My breathing was too loud in my ears, and the walls moved around me. I needed to leave. I reached out with my free hand and felt for the door. Before I left, Seventy said, “You should hurry. She doesn’t have long.”
“What do I do now?”
“How about you stop her from coming here? How about you keep her the fuck away from this hotel?”
I left him in the room, standing next to the bed, heavy on his cane, with my buttons and ancient coins lying around him like treasure. Perhaps he’d remember where they came from. At that moment I had no idea.