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Voices. Far down, muffled by stone. Men talking in the easy way men talk when they've been somewhere a long time and gotten bored. A laugh. Under it, so faint I almost miss it, a girl crying, high and hopeless and tired, like she's been crying for hours and forgotten how to stop.

I go down the stairs one at a time along the wall where the treads won't creak.

The boiler room is lit now, a work light clamped to a pipe, throwing hard shadows behind the black iron hulk. The steel door behind the boiler stands half open. Light comes up out of it, yellow and warm, from the hurricane lamp I saw on the little table by the chair. The voices are louder here.

"—telling you, he ain't coming. Man's been dead six years."

"Then who's been cutting up deacons all week?"

"That Price girl. Crazy bitch threw Malcolm off a balcony in front of three hundred people. You think a girl like that needs help?"

"I think Judah don't pull two candle girls out of a lock-in the night before unless he's scared of something bigger than a girl."

A third voice, older and flatter, one I know. "Both of you shut up."

I stop on the stair.

I haven't heard that voice in six years. Before that, I heard it every day of my life from the time I was eight years old. Roy Arcement. His daddy cranked the sluice gates for thirty years. The old man took us both out to the Sawyer barn the same summer and sat us up in the rafters side by side, and Roy threw up the first time and I didn't, and that was the difference that made one of us a hand and the other one a weapon. We learned to track in the same woods. We learned to drown a man in the same water. He carried the lantern at my first gathering.

I left him alive the night I killed nine. He was in Lafayette at a cockfight. I've thought about that more than once.

I take the Glock out, thumb the safety, and go down the last flight.

The red room hasn't changed since Monday. The lamp on the table. The choir chair. The names on the walls glittering in the lamplight like frost. The difference is the girls.

They're chained to the rings in the floor on the east side, the side where Delilah's name is cut into the stone, sitting on the concrete with their backs to the wall and their wrists in the leather cuffs. Nellie's in her pajamas, a pink flannel set with cartoon cats on it, and one sock. Beside her a smaller girl with red hair in braids, fifteen at most, has her knees drawn up and her face buried in them, sobbing.

Three men. Tyler Guidry is sitting on an overturned bucket by the drain, playing something on his phone. His brother Beau, the neckless one from the Bentley, has the choir chair tipped back on two legs with his boots on the table beside the lamp and a pump shotgun across his lap. And Roy Arcement is standing against the far wall with his arms crossed, a big, gray-bearded man gone soft in the middle, a pistol on his hip, looking at the girls with no expression at all.

Nellie sees me first.

Her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens. I put a finger to my lips from the shadow of the doorway, and to her everlasting credit she closes it again and drops her gaze to the floor.

I take Beau first because he has the shotgun.

Two shots, fast, center of the chest, and the choir chair goes over backward with him in it. The sound in that stone room is enormous. It slaps off every wall at once, and the girls scream. and Tyler comes up off the bucket fumbling at his belt, and I put two in him before he's all the way standing. He sits back down hard on the bucket and topples sideways into the drain groove.

Roy doesn't reach for his gun. He comes straight at me.

He's faster than he looks and closer than I thought, and he knew me before the first shot, knew me from the shape in the door, because he's already moving when I swing the Glock toward him. He gets both hands on my wrist and drives it into the stone doorframe. My fingers open. The pistol clatters away across the concrete toward the girls.

"Silas," he grunts into my face.

That's all. Just my name, and for half a second I'm not in the red room. I'm in the Sawyer barn rafters with a boy beside me throwing up into the hay.

Half a second is long enough.

His knife comes up out of his belt and goes into my side below the ribs on the left, low, under the word CLEANSED. It doesn't hurt. That's always the first thing. It's pressure, a punch, a deep cold push, and then heat, spreading.

He pulls the knife back to go again.

I've got the blade taped to my forearm. I rip it free with my right hand and bring it up under his jaw, into the soft place behind the chin, and push, and keep pushing. His eyes go wide an inch from mine. His hand with the knife in it drops to his side. He sags against me the way men do, all at once, like a coat sliding off a hook, and I let him slide down the doorframe onto the floor of the room where his daddy cranked the water for thirty years.

The only sound is the girls. Lacey is screaming, a long thin wail, over and over. Nellie is saying my name. I don't know how she knows it. Maybe Evie told her. Maybe she heard Roy.

I put my palm against my side. It comes away black in the lamplight.

Not now.