“Wait,” I say, but my whisper doesn’t leave my mouth, like I’m in one of the bad dreams again. I could leave, run, but I’d be caught in the melee outside and have no idea who would believe me enough to come back to the hospital with me. I might get arrested or killed, or put into one of the rooms downstairs and tested on, before I can do anything.

I want to trust Theo because he’s come this far with me, but I don’t. I don’t trust anyone, or anything, except the fact that I have to end whatever is going on, and if I run now that won’t happen.

I start walking, too, steeling myself for whatever’s behind the door in this conference room. For the fact that just because Theo didn’t turn on me before doesn’t mean he won’t now.

“The rejuvenation is not going as smoothly as planned, but if it continues as it is, then by daylight we’ll have a new neighborhood under our umbrella.”

“Did we really have to be so blunt about it?” another man asks. “I still think we should have moved more subtly, like with the Williamsburg and Park Slope projects.”

Theo is standing beside the door now, his back to me.

“The carafe is empty,” someone mutters, and gets shushed.

“Subtlety is no longer necessary. This neighborhood is ours. We had to get ahead of the other developers trying to move in,” Kim’s father says, voice hard. “This is no time to get squeamish. Inching slowly toward rejuvenation isn’t an option anymore, and with the police, the media, and the government on our side, there’s nothing to worry about. Even with any destruction and bribes, the cost of getting this over and done quickly is negligible.”

A woman’s voice cuts in, her tone glib. I recognize it from when she threatened to call the cops on me. “When you add the incentives we’re getting from the city, this latest project will gain us billions of dollars to get back land that we could have paid untold amounts of money for otherwise. We totally pulled a Stuyvesant.”

She laughs.

“Well, hopefully we manage things a bit better than our forebear,” her father says. “On the next slide are the projected earnings for the eventual addiction cure. Methadone has such a negative connotation, and the new drug crisis sweeping the country calls for a hipper, funkier product. Something that can appeal to a family in the heartland and an urban millennial family.”

“Our online monitoring teams have started to spot stories linking our production of opioids and our getting paid to find the solution, but nothing is sticking so far,” a deeper voice chimes in, the brownnosing in his tone apparent. “They’re mostly getting written off as crackpot conspiracy theorists.”

Multiple voices laugh at that.

“Good. Make sure to plant some additional stories, and also even more embellished ones, like we’re growing babies in tanks or something. Hell, dredge up the mole people thing, that seems to get good play.”

“Speaking of vermin,” someone else says, “as for the cure itself, while it’s effective in mice, most of our human test subjects haven’t fared as well. This one was promising, but was compromised.”

“We’re trying to eat here,” another man says in annoyance.

I tug at Theo’s shirt, but he ignores me and steps inside the room. The chatter abruptly stops.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

We were supposed to have the element of surprise, but not to just walk in and stare at them.

I grasp my gun and very carefully peek inside. Theo is standing there like a dummy, partially blocking my view. After everything that’s happened, I expect the room to be filled with monsters, but no. Just a bunch of normal-looking people in rumpled suits, mostly men, mostly white. But not entirely. Goddammit. I recognize the Black man who’s frozen with his napkin to his mouth, ready to bolt—a politician who’s been on the scene for years. An older Asian man has his head turned toward Theo, eyebrows raised.

They’re all sitting at an oval table with paper cups, plates, and stacks of documents scattered across it. A PowerPoint presentation is being projected onto a screen. It could be any old meeting, at any old company, except the slide on the screen shows a picture of Kavaughn, eyes bulging and blood crusting both nostrils. Greenish spittle has dripped from the corner of his mouth and down to his neck.

I pull my head away, press my back against the wall next to the door, and try to calm my stomach, my nerves, my soul. They killed Kavaughn. And Drea. They want to do this to all of us.

“You told us he was dead, Kimberly,” her father says.

“Don’t blame this on me! Erik told me—”

“Hey,” Theo says sharply. “Enough. This is it. You’ve been caught. It’s over.”

“What? Oh, you really thought you would stop us?” It’s the incredulous laughter in her voice that stomps all my emotions flat except for one—rage.

“You always tried to be so smart, when you’re nothing but trailer trash,” she says, and the tone is so similar to how Marcus would calmly tell me I was nothing. “Did you think you would waltz in here and tell us to stop and we would? Is that how this played out in your head? You really didn’t pay attention at all when you met my family and their friends, did you? All the lawyers, and CEOs, and politicians?”

“You can’t stop us. This is too big, and there’s too much money on the line,” her father says calmly. “We own the jails, shithead. They’re not for people like us.”

Kim’s father is right. In the best-case scenario, there are some good cops in this mess, and some clean lawyers, and a jury that does the right thing. However it plays out, maybe he goes to a white-collar prison for a few years. Maybe.

I make the sign of the cross, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager, and then whirl and take a step into the room beside Theo. I don’t just stand there though—they’ve already said that nothing we can do within the bounds of the law will stop them. I get the motherfucker standing with a smug smile in front of the room’s heart in my sight, and pull the trigger until the chamber is empty.

I watch his eyes, see the smug light fade from them, but I feel nothing this time. Not with Kavaughn’s face up on that screen, though now it’s splattered with the old man’s blood.

Shocked silence fills the room. Kim, dressed in a bootleg Hillary Clinton pantsuit, jumps to her feet and stares at me.

“You—you—”

“You can see me now, can’t you, bitch? Funny how that works.”

I point the gun at her and pull the trigger, forgetting I’m out of bullets in my rage. She dives under the table, and pandemonium ensues. The people who’ve been sitting around the table in shock start to run, knocking over chairs and scattering, and Kim’s father’s words play in my head.

“You can’t stop us. We own the jails.”

I don’t have time to reload. I pull the Glock I took from the cop, fumble with the safety, and start firing. This is a higher-caliber gun; the shape of it in my hand feels wrong and hitting a running target is way more difficult than hitting one standing in front of you—about a third of the people go down, but the rest of them run out of the room.

Shit!

The gun jams and I shake it, like that will fix anything, but it’s messed up. I don’t know what to do, so I drop it on the floor, pull out Mommy’s trusty .22, and fumble for the baggie of bullets in my pocket.

The cries and shuffling of the people I clipped fills the room, and even that’s muffled by the loudness of my heartbeat and my breathing and the ringing of my ears.

Bullets are spilling on the floor when I hear a gun cock next to my head.

Theo.

“Don’t,” he says in a barely recognizable voice. “Don’t even think about it.”

I thought I couldn’t feel anything but rage, but sadness slices through me in a million tiny blades, like everything I’ve been trying not to feel compressed and then exploded inside of me. I have no one.

No one.

I see the muzzle of the gun in my peripheral vision. It’s shaking almost uncontrollably, and when Theo steps past me, I follow where the gun is pointed. While I was busy reloading, Kim had stood from behind the table with a gun of her own.

“Kim, it’s over for real this time,” Theo says.

Her expression suddenly softens, eyes filling with tenderness even though she’s pointing a weapon. “Can you really shoot me, babe? Really?”

“Do it, Theo,” I urge. “She’s going to kill us. She’s hurt so many people.”

Kim tilts her head and smiles. “You know, I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Why?” Theo asks sadly, still just standing there. I can’t seem to get the bullets into my gun, because my own hands are shaking, too, my body too overwhelmed by what’s happening even if my mind is still hanging in there.

“Theo, please,” I plead as more bullets drop to the ground.

“Because you’ve finally done something useful. I’ve been waiting for my dad to drop dead. Now I’m in charge.” She grins, releases the safety on her gun. “You’re big and strong, but so what? You’re just a soft little mama’s boy.”

“Howdy Doody!” I yell at Theo. “Howdy fucking Doody!”