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“If she is truly being targeted,” Lucien finishes, soft as a closing door, “the public will not wait for you to fail to save her. They will take it into their own hands. And forgive the discourtesy, with the CEO present—but your guards cannot protect her. We have proof. She would not have come within an inch of being sliced in half on your cafeteria floor if your precautions meant anything, nor would she be lying three floorsdown recovering from an overdose that your watch, your counts, and your cameras did precisely nothing to prevent.”

Neither man answers.

There is nothing to answer. We all know, in the particular silence that follows a true thing, that Doc is entirely right.

“Elaborate,” the CEO says at last, his voice careful now, “on what this freedom of yours actually delivers. She walks out of here and—what. She vanishes? Flees the country?”

“No,” I say, and I let the word sit, pleased to finally be useful. “She’d be barred from leaving the country regardless, seeing as she hasn’t got a passport to her name—it burned, I believe, along with the rest of her former life and the gentleman attached to it—so that particular nightmare is a non-starter. A useless assumption. We were clear, besides. She doesn’t walk anywhere alone. She is delivered, around the clock, into the custody of a temporary pack. She cannot so much as choose a breakfast without three sets of eyes on the cereal.”

I lean forward, lacing my pale fingers, and offer the suits the language they actually worship.

“And consider the economics, since I know they sing to you. Your guards draw a salary to stand in hallways and be magnificently outmaneuvered by a sedated woman and an unsupervised ceiling. They are paid, in essence, to breathe institute air. We are three specialists at a flat day rate who happen to be personally invested in the outcome. You would be downgrading from an expensive failure to a cheaper success. I’d have thought a man who runs a place like this could do that arithmetic in his sleep.”

Neither of them speaks, which I have learned is the sound men make when they’ve been insulted in a register too reasonable to object to.

It is, I’ll admit, one of my favorite sounds.

I collect them the way other men collect wine—the specific silence of a powerful person realizing he’s been outmaneuvered by someone he came in prepared to dismiss. There’s a vintage to each one.

Pryce’s is dry and affronted, the silence of wounded seniority. The CEO’s, even flattened through a screen, has a colder note underneath, the silence of a man recalculating. I file them both. One never knows when the precise shape of a man’s discomfort will prove useful, and I have built an entire second career on the principle that the powerful tell you everything about themselves in the half-second before they decide what to say.

“The location matters as much as the custody,” Lucien says, gathering the thread back into his patient hands. “I have a place in mind. Arch Hollow.”

He describes it, and I let the description build a little cathedral in my chest, because it is, in its own grim way, perfect.

A secluded valley town hours from anywhere, ringed in old stone arches gone soft with moss, a self-contained little world purpose-built to house a particular class of precious, incarcerated individual—the wealthy, the connected, the inconvenient, kept under gentle, total surveillance in a place pretty enough to photograph and remote enough to forget.

There is a market square. A chapel. Walks and gardens and the illusion of liberty stretched taut over a cage with very good landscaping.

I know Arch Hollow, though I don’t say so.

I’ve worked there—quietly, in the small hours, the way I work everywhere that matters. It is a beautiful place to die, which is the highest compliment I extend to any location, and a beautiful place to live too, I’m told, if living is what one has in mind. The arches are real, Roman bones the valley grew a town around, and at dawn the light comes through them in long gold bars and lays itself across the cobblestones like something holy.

I think of Vex standing in that light—out of the dead fluorescent hum of Blackthorn, out of the orange and the counts and the cameras-in-the-walls, her sugar-and-cake scent unspooling into clean valley air for the first time in nearly four years—and the image does something to me I have not let an image do in a very long time.

It makes me want. Plainly. Greedily. For her to have the light.

For me to be standing in it when she does.

“What makes it useful,” Lucien says, “is that it is small, and it is watched, and everyone in it knows everyone else by sundown. A stranger cannot pass through Arch Hollow unnoticed the way a stranger passes through your three hundred churning patients. If something is wrong in that town, the town knows before sunrise. Which makes it the ideal instrument for the only question that matters: is the killer hunting Genevieve, or hunting Blackthorn?”

“Remove her from these walls,” he continues, “and watch what the bodies do. If patients keep dying here after she’s gone, then the murders were never about her at all—they’re an assault on this institution’s foundation, and you have a far larger and more public problem than one Omega. But if the killing stops here and follows her there—if death walks into Arch Hollow behind our girl—then we are no longer looking at a serial killer. We are looking at a stalker. A single fixated hand. And a stalker,” he says, with the faint distant warmth of a man describing a solved equation, “is something we are exceptionally well equipped to handle.”

“By any means necessary,” Riot notes, calm as still water, and somehow that is the most frightening sentence spoken all afternoon.

I simply smile.

I am, I confess, already planning the flowers.

Not for Vex—never for Vex, her fate wasn’t meant to end and I’ve made my peace with the disappointment—but for whoever is foolish enough to follow her into a town where the three of us hold the only keys. I’m thinking hellebore. Something that blooms in the cold and means betrayal.

It would suit the occasion.

It is a strange thing, planning a funeral for a man who has not yet chosen to die. But planning ahead is simply courtesy, and I am, above all my other crimes, courteous. I have decorated the endings of statesmen and traffickers and three murdered girls who deserved far softer ones.

I would consider it a genuine, unhurried honor to arrange the last bouquet of the wretch who imagines he can reach into our keeping and take her. I will make him beautiful. It’s the cruelest thing I know how to do to a man—to make his ending lovelier than his life ever managed to be.

“And what,” the CEO asks, “does she get out of this? Why would a patient agree to be your experiment?”