When I emerged from the darkened staircase into a half-finished, dimly lit room, I saw Uncle Bob lying on his back, his tie loose and hanging to one side, his white button-down stained a dark crimson. Blood pooled beneath him, spreading slowly as though there wasn’t much of it left. I didn’t take the time to look for Sylvia. I rushed headlong toward him.

“Uncle Bob,” I whispered, sliding next to him to examine his bindings. Sylvia had bound his wrists behind his back, but Reyes was right: He’d also been shot. And he was unconscious. “Uncle Bob,” I said again, my gaze blurring with wetness. His short brown hair and the left side of his face had dried blood like she’d hit him with something. Surely not to subdue him. Unless she hit him very, very hard, knocking him out would not have been easy.

I cradled his head in my lap and patted his cheek, leaning over and whispering into his ear. “Please, Uncle Bob. Please be okay.”

The fact that he was warm registered in the back of my mind, sending a glimmer of hope spiraling up my spine. I felt for a pulse on his neck. Strong as a mule, and just as stubborn. I kissed his forehead.

As I was about to check the wound that seemed to be centered along the right side of his rib cage, I felt a sharp sting at my neck. Reflexively, I slowed time and flung my arm back, dislodging the needle. I could only hope that whatever she’d injected me with wasn’t lethal. Time bounced back before it had a chance to stop completely. But everything else slowed.

I spun around to look at my attacker, and even she slowed. Or, well, blurred.

Sylvia Starr stumbled back when I knocked her arm away. She immediately went for the syringe again as I grabbed Uncle Bob under the shoulders and tried to drag him to the stairs. But the world toppled to the left. I adjusted, trying to topple with it, to keep myself upright. It just kept toppling, the floor beneath me tilting until it stood completely vertical. It rested against my shoulder and cheek, and I couldn’t help but wonder how gravity had maneuvered itself that way. We would all fall off the Earth if this kept up. Then where would we be?

I felt a sharp tug on my hair and then cold metal resting against my temple.

“You don’t understand,” she said, talking as though we’d been having a conversation the whole time. “He put you there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You went to prison because of him.”

“I’ve never been to prison,” I argued. “Not as an inmate, anyway. There was this one time —”

“Don’t do this, Ms. Rhammar.” It was Uncle Bob. Maybe my poking and prodding had awakened him.

“My name is Sylvia Starr,” she said, hissing at him. Then her voice changed to a pleading whine. “If he hadn’t arrested you in the first place, you would never have spent ten years in that hellhole.”

“And what do you know of hell?”

It was Reyes. He’d come for me! “Hold on!” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth as I pointed to the floor at my ear. “We’re going to fall off. Grab on to something!” How we were not sliding down the floor, I’d never know.

“They convicted you of a crime you didn’t commit,” Sylvia said.

I looked up at Reyes, baffled. “I’ve never been convicted of a crime. Well, not one I didn’t commit.”

“I told them.” She pressed the metal into my temple. A long lock of her dark hair fell into my eyes. It was very painful. I tried to swipe at it as she continued. “I told them you were innocent, and they ignored me. Treated me like I was an idiot.”

“You are an idiot.”

“They convicted you. You went to prison for killing a man who was still alive!”

I started to argue with her and explain once again that I’d never been convicted of any crime aside from that little breaking and entering gig, which was wiped from my record when I turned eighteen – but then I realized she wasn’t talking to me.

Reyes stood there, his clothes saturated in crimson, a bored expression on his face, as though he were completely unimpressed with her. I, on the other hand, was completely impressed with her ability to remain perpendicular without falling over.

“I knew all along you were innocent. But they treated me like shit.”

The emotion I felt radiate off him was not what he was presenting to Sylvia. He crossed his arms over his chest, his expression passive, but an anger welled within him, deep and turbulent and violent.

Uncle Bob spoke then. “Ms. Starr,” he said, his voice hoarse and cracked, “Charley was not on that jury. If you hurt her —”

“What?” she asked, jamming the cold metal against my skull even harder. Poor Fred. “What will happen to me?”

Uncle Bob! I’d forgotten he was shot. I’d been drugged. Ubie was shot!

I couldn’t decide which one of us needed my most immediate attention. I fought the effects of whatever she’d injected me with, struggled to right the world and see it for what it was: a big blue ball that had not toppled over, and we were not going to slide off it. Knowing that theoretically and knowing that instinctually were two different beasts. I was having a hard time marrying the two with the more logical side of Barbara, my brain, when Sylvia jerked my head back and scraped the metal along my temple until it brought forth blood.

Uncle Bob lurched, but with his hands bound could to little more than that. “Put it down,” he said, his voice even.

“Shut up!” she shouted at him before turning back to Reyes. “I had to get retribution for you.”