Page 90 of Heartbreak Bay

Even saints fail.

I can’t take her hand, but I keep my palm pressed against her forehead. Just letting her feel the contact. “Penny, did he ask you to do anything else since that night?”

“It hurts,” she says, with a strange sort of surprise. She takes in a sharp breath. Her voice trembles as she says, “It’s hurting, can you make it stop? Please?”

“I will,” I tell her. It hurts to say it. “Did he ask you to do anything else, sweetheart?”

She’s crying. Her breath is coming raggedly now. Faster. “I can’t feel my arms. I can’t move them.”

“You’re okay,” I whisper, and stroke her forehead. “Can you answer my question?”

She blinks, gulps, and says, “I had to. There were two people that saw us on the road. Had to do it.” That’s the man and woman Kezia found dead. “I was just protecting us.”

“Did he ask you to do it?”

“He said—he just said it was a problem.It hurts, oh God—” Her voice is thin now. She’s breathing faster, more shallowly. Her skin is turning pale. The blood supply that was keeping her brain and organs oxygenated is leaving her fast. She’s bleeding out. “I didn’t want to. Ineededto. Or I’d lose everything.”

I don’t have the heart to ask her about Prester. About anyone or anything else. I feel nothing but horror and revulsion and a strange,awful compassion for her right now, a naked connection of human to human, when all I can do is stay and bear witness.

“Hold me,” she whispers. “Mommy—” She starts screaming uncontrollably. She’s trembling all over. It’s horrible, but I don’t hesitate; I rest her head on my lap, and I let my tears fall. I kiss her forehead and tell her it’ll be okay, okay, okay, until she’s no longer screaming, until it’s just ragged, convulsive whimpering. Until it slows to a whisper. Until she’s just ... gone.

It takes an eternity for her labored, wet breathing to finally hitch to a stop.

I sit there. Unmoving. There isn’t a sound except for the last of her blood dripping into the drain.

Jonathan’s voice says, “Crisis reveals character.” I hear locks unfastening at the door. “All choices have consequences.”

I find my voice, because I have to. I have no wish to speak to him ever again. “That wasn’t justice. That was cruelty. Do you even know the difference?”

No answer. I leave the body of a child-killer, a murderer—in the end, just a desperate, sad, frightened woman—and turn the doorknob. Maybe I’ll die when I walk out. Maybe I won’t.

I can’t really bring myself to care.

He’s laid bare horrors to me: The horror of a mother killing her children for personal gain. The horror of her own death. The horror of how relentlessly hollow and easy it is to sayshe deserved it. Maybe someone else can make that decision. I can’t.

There’s a hallway beyond. No traps. Nothing waiting.

Above me, an intercom engages, and I look up at the black metal screen. “We played a game in the car,” he says. “After she killed her children. It’s calledWould You Rather, do you know it?”

“No.”

“It starts out small. Would you rather have a nickel or a dime? Would you rather have a salad or an ice cream? But every question hasto get bigger. So I asked, at the end, would you rather get shot in the head and die, or lose all your arms and legs and stay alive? And this is what she chose, Gwen. I didn’t choose it. She did.”

I swallow a sick, horrible surge of bile. “It was agame.”

“Not really. There’s a pattern. Bad people will choose greed and personal gratification. If you do it right, when you ask them,Would you rather push a button and kill someone else, or say no and lose a million dollars, guess what they choose? People are things they sacrifice to their needs. I wasn’t surprised at how Sheryl chose. She was only surprised I was serious.”

It’s the logic of a child. The decision tree of a machine. I feel ill, hot, disconnected. I have to brace myself against the wall. The smell of blood and rot suddenly overwhelms me, and I nearly fall.I can’t do this. I can’t.

“There are more rooms if you want to see the choices they made,” he says. “Every one of them was a murderer, not just once but many times over. I thought you were one of them. But it’s all right, Gina. You surprised me. No one else ever has. It took real courage to do that. Or real sadism. I’m not really sure which you showed me.”

“I’m going to find you,” I tell him. “And you should be afraid of that.”

He says, “I haven’t been afraid since that day.”

I don’t ask which one. I know. At seventeen years old—the same age as my daughter, my God—he stopped being a person and started inhabiting a body on the day his sister died. This has been a long time coming.

“Maybe you will be,” I say. “Before this is done.”

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