“I don’t want to . . .” I was unable to go on for the tightening of my throat. Tears blurred my vision. All I could see was my own body, my very self, marred forever, made into a living nightmare. No one would ever be able to stand to look at me. I would have to spend the rest of my life covered, concealed, ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror. I would never have a boyfriend, never get married.

I sobbed. I sat down on the tile floor, my back against hard kitchen cupboards, and sobbed into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that, feeling hopeless, so absolutely hopeless. I had not cried like that since my father died. I was lost. I was destroyed.

After a while the wracking sobs stopped, though the tears kept coming in waves, lessening, renewing, seemingly endless. I just didn’t care if Messenger heard me or saw me. I didn’t care because I was nothing. I was a stupid girl without a memory, weeping on the floor of a kitchen in which I did not belong.

Only when I was drained of not only tears but hope and self-respect, did the slightest glimmer of anything that was not black appear at the ragged edge of my thoughts.

He had survived it.

Messenger had been the Messenger of Fear for . . . I had no idea how long. But his chest, his stomach, his shoulders and back and tapered torso, had all been covered with tattoos of vile tortures, each the equal of mine, and perhaps the rest of him as well, and yet he lived. Yet he had not lost all humanity, I thought. Yet he still longed for his Ariadne.

Somehow the boy in black had survived, and, I was sure, still had hope.

Having hated him, raged at him, believed every foul thing about him, I nevertheless knew that he had hope. And I knew this because he had shown me. That was why he had taken me with him to Carcassonne. To show me that despite all the inconceivable fear he had witnessed and necessarily felt, still, he hoped.

My knees were stiff, my muscles sore, as I stood. Messenger was gone, but I knew I would find him.

I ate my cold toast, barely tasting it. I cannot say it restored all my strength, but it helped. Then I walked to the kitchen door, put my hand on the brass knob, took a shaky breath, twisted it, and stepped through to find myself once more outside Samantha Early’s home, where Messenger waited for me.

“You have something to tell me,” I said. “You’ve been preparing me.”

For just a second, so brief that I could never have sworn it was real, though I wished fervently to believe that it was, he seemed to feel sorry for me. It was gone in an instant, replaced by his more usual expression. But the sense that he had pitied me, that he knew what was coming and pitied me, scared me.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“Then . . . I’m ready.”

THE END CAME DESPITE WELL-MEANING EFFORTS to stop it. One of the parents heard about what was happening to Samantha at school and called Samantha’s mother.

We were there at the aftermath, Messenger and me. Samantha’s mother, a woman with thinning red hair and a weary, put-upon expression, found Samantha in the garage. The garage was like so many, a mess of folded lawn furniture, plastic bins of papers and old books, slumping cardboard boxes, a once organized, now haphazard peg board of tools. There was no car; the garage had obviously been turned over to use for storage.

A washer and dryer piled high with laundry.

Against one wall was a metal locker, red, closed with a combination lock.

“What are you doing in here, honey?”

Samantha looked up guiltily from the cardboard box she had been rummaging through. A small pile of objects sat on a table that had obviously once been used for arts and crafts, as it was spattered with paint and globs of dried glue and even scraps of tissue paper stuck in place. The objects included a tiny silver cup inscribed with words I could not see from where I stood. And there was what looked like a grammar school project, a storybook covered in construction paper and decorated with crayon drawings of a girl and a dog.

“Oh, I’m just, you know, looking for some stuff for my room,” Samantha said, pushing the storybook aside self-consciously.

“I heard you’re having some issues at school,” the mother said.

“Issues?”

“Sam, are you being bullied?”

Samantha shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

“One of the mothers called me. Mrs. Jepson. She seemed to think you were being picked on.”

“No, Mom, I would tell you.”

“Would you? Because I can help.”

“I’m fine, I’m just, you know, redecorating my room.” She gestured at the stuff on the table. “I was looking for Miss Pooky.”

“Who?”

“Nothing.”

“Was that your bear? From when you were little?”

Samantha was embarrassed. “Yeah, I think so, wasn’t it? Did you want something else?” Her eyes pleaded for her mother to go away. Her mother’s eyes were worried but vague, and I saw the slight shrug and the surrender that signified the mother’s acceptance of her dismissal.

After the mother was gone, Samantha searched for a while longer, before giving up on finding her bear. She went to the metal cabinet. She spun the combination, mouthing the numbers to herself as she did. The lock snapped open and, with a steadying breath, Samantha opened the metal door.

Inside, resting on their stocks, were a rifle and a shotgun. On a shelf at the top of the cabinet was a soft, deerskin zipper bag and several greasy cardboard boxes of shells.

Samantha glanced anxiously toward the door through which her mother had emerged. She took the deerskin bag to the table, unzipped it, and folded it open, revealing the blued-steel gun within. She fetched a box of ammunition. It was a bit like a large matchbox, with an inner tray that slid open to reveal neatly stacked cartridges, brass and lead and smelling of oil and sulfur.