Brittney had no warning of the wire that went around her throat. No time even to flinch as the wire cut into her neck, severed the empty, bloodless arteries, and stopped tightening only when it had closed around her upper spine.

“Wish it was Drake, not you, Britt,” Brianna said.

Then Brianna put her foot on Brittney’s back and heaved as hard as she could. The wire sliced through cartilage and nerve tissue, making a sound like a knife cutting gristle, and suddenly Brittney’s head rolled free and landed in the dirt with a thump.

Brittney could not move her head, but she had rolled to an angle where she could see Brianna. Brianna was sweating from exertion. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. The garrote—a two-foot-long piece of piano wire strung between steel grips that had once been part of someone’s home gym—hung from her free hand.

Brianna looked down at her, quite satisfied, and said, “Now I’m going to chop you into little bits and spread the pieces all over the place. See if you or Drake can reassemble yourself then.”

Brittney was not dead. Aside from no longer being attached to her body she didn’t feel any difference, just a dull pain in her neck. When she strained her eyes upward, she could see her body. The body was attempting to stand up all by itself.

But when Brittney tried to speak, she found she could only whisper, and the sound of her whisper was partly drowned out by the gasping noise of air sucked into her severed esophagus.

“You can’t kill us,” Brittney whispered.

“Maybe not. But I’m sure going to try.”

Brianna carried a sawed-off shotgun in her specially adapted runner’s backpack, and a machete, also slung over her back. She pulled out the machete and swung it so fast Brittney couldn’t see the blade move. She just saw the fact that her body was now minus a leg, which caused it to topple over.

Whump!

There was a whir of movement that raised the dust, and a sound of chopping, a rapid-fire whap! whap! whap! whap! and what had been Brittney’s body was in pieces—arms cut off and then cut in two. Legs off and then chopped into three pieces. Torso hacked into random chunks. There was no blood. It was as if Brianna were chopping up an embalmed corpse.

That thought bothered Brittney. How could she be alive with no blood? What was she?

“Want to watch?” Brianna asked.

She grabbed Brittney’s hair, lifted her up, and set her on a flat rock. The first effort failed, and Brittney’s head rolled off. But Brianna was finally able to settle Brittney’s head atop the rock so that Brittney could see her body lying in a couple dozen bloodless pieces.

The pieces were already twitching toward one another, extending tentacles, attempting to rejoin. And things that had been female were becoming male as Drake slowly reemerged to discover he was in very bad shape.

With a look of distaste Brianna began to pick the pieces up and toss them a distance away. “I can’t have you putting yourself back together, Brittney . . . Ah! Wait, is that Drake coming back?”

Brianna performed a short happy dance and stepped—perhaps accidentally—on a piece of flesh that Drake would miss.

“Perfect. So much better this way. Hello, Drake. So glad you could make it. I’m just going to start moving your pieces farther apart. Much farther apart. Then I’ll have Sam go around and fry each piece. And then I believe that’ll be it for you, Brittney slash Drake. I believe we’ll have seen the end of both of you. And your little whip, too.” She patted Drake on the head. Then she picked up a foot and a shoulder section, one in each hand. With a wink she was gone, leaving a trail of dust.

Quinn was rowing back to shore. It was a point of pride for him that he always carried his share of the hard work, in fact more than his fair share, because if you were boss, you started off by setting a good example. So even though he had gotten a hook caught in the back of his arm and had had to cut it out and as a consequence was bleeding through a salt water–soaked bandage held with a strip of duct tape, he pulled at the oars.

No one on his crews ever claimed Quinn was lording it over them or saddling them with too much work. Well, sometimes they did, but it was in the nature of long-running jokes.

“You’re pulling to your left, Captain,” Amber said.

“At least I’m pulling,” Quinn said, and the two of them lifted the oars, leaned forward, dipped the oars, and pulled in long-practiced unison.

“You know, if you’re feeling weak you could let Cathy take over,” Amber said, grunting with the effort. “What with your boo-boo and all.”

“I’d have to be missing an arm before I rowed as weak and spastic as Cathy,” Quinn teased.

For her part, Cathy, seated in the stern and guiding the tiller, said, “Just a good thing we didn’t catch much or we’d never make the marina.”

“Yeah, a good thing,” Quinn said, unable to keep the worry from his voice. “Barely enough to feed us, let alone the whole town.”

He glanced up at a cabin cruiser in the out there. He was a long way from getting used to the fact that he could see the outside. It was weird. Nothing had changed in his daily life except for the fact that he could now see out of his prison. Still a prison, but now the prison had a view.

Two women in bikinis were on the bow, and two much older guys were in the stern of the cabin cruiser, with their fishing rods in rod holders, chilling with bottles of beer. The captain seemed to be of a different breed, a thirtysomething man with salt-bleached clumpy hair and red skin and wraparound glasses. He was watching Quinn’s boats with interest.