“I’m sorry I lied to you before, but it couldn’t be helped. The first settlers who came here weren’t refugees. They were children. The train brought them here, from where exactly we don’t know. They were going to hide in Yucca Mountain, in the tunnels inside it. But Babcock was already here. That was when the dream began. Some say it’s a memory from a time before he became a viral, when he was still a man. But once you’ve killed the woman in the dream, you belong to him. You belong to the ring.”

“The hotel, with the blocked streets,” Hollis ventured. “It’s a trap, isn’t it?”

Olson nodded. “For many years we sent out patrols, to bring in as many more as we could. A few just wandered through. Others were left there by the virals for us to find. Like you, Sara.”

Sara shook her head. “I still don’t remember what happened.”

“No one ever does. The trauma is simply too great.” Olson looked imploringly at Peter again. “You must understand. We’ve lived this way always. It was our only way to survive. For most, the ring seems a small price to pay.”

“Well, it’s a lousy deal, if you ask me,” Alicia cut in. Her face was hardened with anger. “I’ve heard enough. These people are collaborators. They’re like pets.”

Something darkened in Olson’s expression-though his tone, when he continued, was still almost eerily calm. “Call us what you like. You can’t say anything I haven’t said to myself a thousand times. Mira was not my only child. I had a son, too. He would be about your age if he had lived. When he was chosen, his mother objected. In the end, Jude sent her into the ring with him.”

His own son, Peter thought. Olson had sent his own son to die.

“Why Jude?”

Olson shrugged. “It’s who he is. There has always been Jude.” He shook his head again. “I would explain it better if I could. But none of that matters now. What’s past is past, or so I tell myself. There’s a group of us who’ve been preparing for this day for years. To get away, to live our lives as people. But unless we kill Babcock, he’ll call the Many. With these weapons we have a chance.”

“So who’s in the ring?”

“We don’t know. Jude wouldn’t say.”

“What about Maus and Amy?”

“I told you, we don’t know where they are.”

Peter turned to Alicia. “It’s them.”

“We don’t know that,” Olson objected. “And Mausami is pregnant. Jude wouldn’t choose her.”

Peter was unconvinced. Even more: everything Olson had said made him believe that Maus and Amy were the ones in the ring.

“Is there another way inside?”

That was when Olson explained the layout, the ducts above the catwalks, kneeling on the floor of the garage to draw in the dust. “It will be pitch-black for the first part,” he warned, as his men were passing out rifles and pistols from the cache taken from the Humvee. “Just follow the sound of the crowd.”

“How many more men do you have inside?” Hollis asked. He was filling his pockets with magazines. Kneeling by an open crate, Caleb and Sara were both loading rifles.

“The seven of us, plus another four in the balconies.”

“That’s all?” Peter said. The odds, not good to begin with, were suddenly much worse than he’d thought. “How many does Jude have?”

Olson frowned. “I thought you understood. He has all of them.”

When Peter said nothing, Olson continued: “Babcock is stronger than any viral you’ve ever seen, and the crowd won’t be on our side. Killing him won’t be easy.”

“Has anyone ever tried?”

“Once.” He hestitated. “A small group, like us. It was many years ago.”

Peter was about to ask what had happened. But he heard, in Olson’s silence, the answer to this question.

“You should have told us.”

A look of abject resignation came into Olson’s face. Peter realized that what he was seeing there was a burden far heavier than sorrow or grief. It was guilt.

“Peter. What would you have said?”

He didn’t answer; he didn’t know. Probably he wouldn’t have believed him. He wasn’t sure what he believed now. But Amy was inside the ring, of that he was certain; he felt it in his bones. He popped the clip from his pistol to blow it clean, then reinserted it into the handle and pulled the slide. He looked toward Alicia, who nodded. Everyone was ready.

“We’re here to get our friends,” he said to Olson. “The rest is up to you.”

But Olson shook his head. “Make no mistake. Once you’re in the ring, our fights are the same. Babcock has to die. Unless we kill him, he’ll call the Many. The train will make no difference.”

New moon: Babcock felt the hunger uncoiling inside him. And he stretched out his mind from This Place, the Place of Return, saying:

It is time.

It is time, Jude.

Babcock was up. Babcock was flying. Soaring over the desert floor in leaps and bounds, the great joyful hunger coursing through him.

Bring them to me. Bring me one and then another. Bring them that you should live in this way and no other.

There was blood in the air. He could smell it, taste it, feel its essence coursing through him. First would come the blood of the beasts, a living sweetness. And then his Best and Special, his Jude, who dreamed the dream better than all the others since the Time of Becoming, whose mind lived with him in the dream like a brother, would bring the ones of blood that Babcock would drink and be filled by it.

He mounted the wall in a single jump.

I am here.

I am Babcock.

We are Babcock.

He descended. He heard the gasps of the crowd. Around him, the fires blazed up. Behind the flames were the men, come to watch and know. And through the gap he saw the beasts approaching, driven on the whip, their eyes fearless and unknowing, and the hunger lifted him up in a wave and he was sailing down upon them, tearing and ripping, first one and then the other, each in its turn, a glorious fulfillment.

We are Babcock.

He could hear the voices now. The chant of the crowds in their cages, behind the ring of flames; and the voice of his One, his Jude, standing on the catwalk above, leading them, as if in song.

“Bring them to me! Bring me one and then another! Bring them that we should live… ”

A wall of sound, ascending in fierce unison: “… in this way and no other!”

A pair of figures appeared in the gap. They stumbled forward, pushed by men who quickly stepped away. The flames rose again behind them, a door of fire, sealing them inside for the taking.

The crowd roared.

“Ring! Ring! Ring!”

A stampede of feet. The air shuddering, hammering.

“Ring! Ring! Ring!”

And that was when he felt her. In a bright and terrible burst, Babcock felt her. The shadow behind the shadow, the tear in the fabric of night. The one who carried the seed of forever but was not of his blood, was not of the Twelve or the Zero.

The one called Amy.

Peter heard it all from the ventilation shaft. The chanting, the panicked cries of the cattle, and then the silence-of bated breath, of some terrible spectacle about to unfold-and then the explosion of cheers. Heat was rising in waves to his belly and, with it, the choking fumes of diesel smoke. The shaft was just wide enough for a single person crawling on his elbows. Somewhere below him, gathering in the tunnel that connected the ring to the prison’s main entrance, were Olson’s men. There was no way to coordinate their arrivals, nor to communicate with the others stationed in the crowd. They would simply have to guess.

Peter saw an opening ahead: a metal grate in the floor of the duct. He pressed his face against it, gazing downward. Below the grate he could see the slats of the catwalk and farther still, another twenty meters, the floor of the ring, wrapped by a trench of burning fuel.

The floor was covered in blood.

On the balconies, the crowd had taken up its chanting again. Ring! Ring! Ring! Ring! Peter guessed he and the others were positioned over the east end of the room now. They would have to cross the catwalk in full view of the crowd to reach the stairs to the floor below. He glanced back to Hollis, who nodded, and lifted the grate free, pushing it to the side. Then he freed the safety on his pistol and crawled forward so that his feet straddled the vent.