“I’ll be able to live with them?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t know how it started; suddenly, she was gasping, and then the gasps hurt so much that she couldn’t get around them, or around her own air, which somehow seemed to be pressing into her. A nurse rushed in and her two visitors stepped back. She could only hear her own gasps, feel her own feelings, but the last thing Summer saw before she sank heavily into unconsciousness was O’Connor mouthing the words: You’re safe now, it’s okay. You’re safe now, it’s okay...

  * * *

  After her mother died, Summer’s body had been physically free of the compound, but her mind had stayed trapped behind its walls. For a while, her grandparents tried to get Summer to work with a specialist who dealt with former cult members, but she’d refused to speak to him, saying it wasn’t her who’d been part of the cult but her mother. She’d only been a kid. She’d screamed this at the grief counselor until he’d smiled and said they were finally getting somewhere. When her free counseling ended, her grandparents shifted her from therapist to therapist, trying to find someone to coax her out of her depression. But no one could understand what she was feeling, and she didn’t want them to. It was her private hurt.

  Her therapist suggested she get a part-time job, and her grandparents latched on to the idea, citing all the opportunities that came with having a job. They also offered to buy her a used car to get to and from work, which was the only reason she agreed. A car meant freedom, and that was a precious commodity. She got a job at a local restaurant, busing tables and then later working as a server. The tips were good and she had nothing to spend her money on, so she saved it. What else was there to do? Summer had gone over the options, things like cheerleading and chess club, and the sport that must not be named—softball. She had no interest in doing things that normal kids did; nothing brought her joy. In the morning, she’d drive to school, and after school she’d drive to work, from work it was home: easy-peasy.

  On nights when she didn’t work, she sat between Mark and Gilda as they watched their shows: the news (so they could bemoan the wickedness of the younger generations), The 700 Club (Pat Robertson was her grandma’s crush) and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns. It was her favorite time and not because she enjoyed the content. No, Summer daydreamed during those hours, hands pressed between her knees, her eyes glazed over. She thought of who she was going to be next, and where she was going next, and most importantly, she thought of all the things she wanted to do to Taured to punish him for killing her mother. She used whatever they were watching on TV to come up with her fantasy: if Pat Robertson was talking about the fires of hell, that’s where Summer would send him. If Sully was bitten by a rattlesnake, Summer would have Taured bitten by one, as well, but instead of saving him, as the brave Dr. Quinn would have, she’d watch him die, writhing on the floor in pain. It was nice, better therapy than the therapy, if she were honest.

  After the shows, she’d fall into her mother’s old bed and sleep deep and heavy, momentarily sated with revenge. And that’s how it went.

  When Summer graduated high school, she legally changed her name to Lorraine Ives—her mother’s maiden name, which she shortened to Rainy—and moved to New York. Her grandparents wrote to her regularly, folding a religious tract into each card or letter they sent. Rainy kept every piece of Christian propaganda in a shoebox in her closet because she thought her mom would find that funny. Shortly after her graduation, Mark and Gilda died, within eight months of each other.

  She enrolled in art school after a year of working the New York restaurant scene, using the money from the sale of her grandparents’ house for her first year’s tuition. Rainy was not an artist; Taured had cared about educating the young ones with his skewed view of the Bible, art falling very low on his list of accepted activities. But art was the way people gave voice to truly important things. When she’d walked through MoMA for the first time, she’d felt like every cell in her body had come to life. You could say anything you wanted to—anything at all, and hide its meaning between layers of paint, or in the bend of metal, or in the folds of performance art. During her visit, Rainy had overheard two friends discussing an exhibit, which consisted of a piece of linen wrapped around a rope.

  “I swear to God I can’t wait until this class is over. What the hell does Campsey want us to say about this. I cannot...” The taller of the two unhooked her arm from her friend’s and went over to examine the display, getting so close Rainy swore her nose brushed against the rope.

  “It says nothing. I hate it.” The girl backed up, joining her friend, who was draped over her phone, not even looking.

  Rainy couldn’t disagree with her more. Both the rope and the linen had been created from the same fabric, yet each was woven into a distinct texture, and then they had been wound around each other. She’d gone back to the room she rented and Googled Professor Campsey on her laptop as she ate pickle chips from a bag. Daniel Campsey taught at NYU. In his photo on the college website, he had a round face with two rosy spots high on his cheeks that made it look like he was wearing blush. He looked like a shaved Santa Claus, and she wanted to take one of his classes. It was a gut feeling, and since she was living on those lately, she licked her fingers clean of pickle crumbs and filled out an online application.

  When Rainy found out that she was accepted, there was no one to tell. She wrote a letter to Taured detailing her life after the loss of her mother. The letter was six pages long; she burned it in the kitchen sink after she reread it, ashamed both of how weak she sounded and that her first instinct had been to write him at all. She didn’t want to send Taured a letter detailing her hurt; she wanted to make him hurt back.

  There had indeed been an investigation into her mother’s death, but Taured’s people had protected him, backing up the story that her mother was mentally ill and had overdosed on drugs, either accidentally or on purpose. There was no way to prove that she had been injected against her will. The community was asked why they hadn’t contacted anyone for help about Lorraine’s drug addition, and Taured had said that they hadn’t known; Lorraine had taken great pains to hide it from everyone. Her death had been ruled an accident, and Taured got away with it—all of it. The only thing he didn’t get was Rainy herself: the courts had ruled that she would stay with her grandparents. He’d never gotten her back. She knew how enraged that would make him.

  She took classes slowly, while working forty hours a week at a sports bar, serving beer and burgers to the late-night crowd. Nothing fit quite like the feel of welding iron. At first, the idea of spitting fire at metal seemed like hot, heavy work. But despite her reservations, she’d loved it, and had taken more classes, choosing metal sculpture for her senior project, a depiction of inner self using an outer medium. She chose to make a full-body sculpture of herself as an old woman, using reclaimed metal. She wanted to show not who she was in her current state, but who she would be. It took her months just to find the pieces of metal she wanted to work with, scouring junkyards and old construction sites. She hoarded scrap metal for months, stacking it against the wall in her bedroom.

  When it was finally time to start working, she sketched drawings of herself as she thought she’d be in fifty years. Nothing was working, and she couldn’t get it right until one day she realized that she needed to go deeper than skin. She stripped her sculpture of its topical flesh and started making a figure out of muscle. She hadn’t wanted to make something beautiful, as so many of her classmates had; rather, she wanted to make something so ugly it was a warning. At the end of a grueling ten months of work, Rainy submitted her piece: a five-foot-five statue of her seventy-year-old self, her back rigidly straight, but the muscles on her arms sagging low in hammocks of flesh as she gripped a walking stick that looked like a baseball bat.

  Her senior project made it into the school’s yearly art show and a reporter was there to do a write-up. He’d interviewed her and asked to take a photo of her standing next to her work; when she’d refused to be in the photo, he’d taken one of her hand touching the hand of the sculpture instead. He called the piece A Millennial View of Self and put the photo of Rainy’s hand reaching for her sculptures alongside the article.

  She never could pinpoint what it was about the piece that captured the art world so suddenly, and she didn’t have time to think on it. Suddenly, Rainy’s sculpture was on the front page of the art section in the Times and interview requests began to pour in. Her first commission after she graduated was for the public library and was put directly in the vast lobby with a plaque with her name on it. Caught Up in Books is what she called it: a ten-foot tornado of books hurtling in every direction. It was a whirlwind of fame and acclaim that could never be attached to her real name or her face. She’d never allowed a photo of herself to be taken, in case he were to see it. What would he do after all these years if he saw her photo in some magazine? But still, she lived in fear, walking in the shadows in case he noticed her. How angry it made her on some days that she had to live her life both without her mother and constantly looking over her shoulder. But she wasn’t angry enough to not be scared.

  24

  Now

  Rainy stared out the window at the gaudy lights and the silent desert beyond. Beside her, on the seat, sat her phone.

  I’m going to kill her. You’d better come if you want to save her, the text had read.

  She looked up at the cabdriver. “If you could drop me off a couple blocks away, I’d appreciate it.” She looked down at her hands as they shook in her lap, the chipped red nail polish reminding her of her mother.

  A brief nod from the driver and the car veered sideways. It was too early for the city to be beautiful; Vegas was a moon child, and under the sun’s microscope, she looked like costume jewelry. Hands pressed between her knees, she stared at the Bellum, the crawl of it toward the sky. A vertical tomb.

  Go to the Bellum Hotel. Wear dark leggings and a yoga top, no bra. Tight clothes with no pockets. I don’t want to have to pat you down.

  Her dread was feasting on her thoughts, a dark dive into all the ways this could go wrong. She’d bought the top on the strip: sleeveless, with a high neck. I don’t want to have to pat you down. He liked to toy with women, hurt them, but what he was doing wasn’t sexual, she was convinced of that. Rainy—Summer—knew the verbal cues of a sexual predator; the way interaction with them made you feel violated and probed without ever being touched. She’d always got that feeling from Taured; that’s why her gut told her this wasn’t him. Nothing about Paul gave her pervert vibes; no, he was creatively angry. She had a theory, and she’d checked the articles about Sara and Feena on her laptop from the hotel: neither of them had been sexually assaulted. He wasn’t a rapist, he was a murderer.

  The car reached the curb.

  Overthinking is not a practical thing for an impulsive person to do. Fifteen years of therapy had trained the impulse to ask permission, to wait in a corner like an eager but well-trained dog. But for fifteen years, her fury had been closing in, and now there was nowhere to go but into the impulse.

  Rainy slid cash through the window slot.

  “No change.”

  The driver held up his hand in thanks and she slipped out, dragging her duffel with her.

  She looked down at her phone, at the last text he’d sent her.

  At seven p.m., go to the buffet at the Greenery. There you’ll find a room key. You’ll know it when you see it. Go into the room, drink what I’ve left you, then lie on the bed. If anything happens to me, no one will be able to find Braithe in time to save her life. So before you act, remember that you’re not the one in control. One wrong move and she’s dead. I am the only one with access to Braithe.

  She was breathing through her mouth: in and out, trying to calm herself. Paul, Paul—the name bothered her. Had she known a Paul at the compound? But again...there was no way he was using his real name. She supposed Taured could still be behind all of this, luring her here with one of his guys, but somehow, it didn’t feel that way to Rainy. Paul was acting on his own anger, playing his own game. The men who did Taured’s bidding weren’t witty or explosive: they were reliable soldiers.

  She stopped at a Quick Mart two blocks away, gathering what she needed and dropping it on the counter in front of a stoop-shouldered woman whose name tag read Susan and who looked bored. At the last minute, she ran back to the fridge to get water and an energy drink. The bottle with the yellow label caught her eye—the one the bartender had shown her. Something was loosening in her memory, but she couldn’t quite grasp it yet. Grabbing the bottle of coffee syrup, she carried it to the register with her drinks. “I’ll have a pack of Capris, a lighter and that phone,” Rainy said, pointing, and pulling out her cash. Sad-looking Susan turned to grab the cigarettes and phone from the back wall. She looked at the coffee syrup with interest before sliding it into the bag with the box of Band-Aids, the phone and the drinks.

  “Want these out?” She held up the cigarettes and lighter and Rainy nodded.

  “I don’t actually want to buy the coffee syrup. I just have kind of a weird question about it. And do you get a lot of regulars over here from the hotel staff?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She looked over at Rainy and annoyance lined her face just as much as the sun had. “They treat this place like it’s their lunchroom. It’s cheaper to buy stuff over here, you know? So they stop on the way in and on the way out.”

  Rainy pursed her lips, nodding slowly. “Anyone come in here to buy this coffee syrup on the regular?” Rainy had that feeling again: it was the mist that kept showing up in her head, the mist she couldn’t see through. The bartender hadn’t been the only guy she’d known who drank that syrup. The compound had been a mecca for weirdos from all over America, and one of those weirdos had that bottle at the compound.

  “Yeah, there are a couple guys who love that stuff. Say you can’t find that brand anywhere else around here.”

  “Yeah? The guys ever heard of Amazon?”

  Susan found that remark hilarious and her face didn’t look so sad anymore. She winked at Rainy before slipping the lighter into the paper bag without ringing it up. Rainy could be generous, too. And since they were playing that game...

  “Hey, do you happen to know their names? The guys who buy the syrup.”

  Susan frowned as she studied the lotto tickets thoughtfully. “They come in here separately. I don’t think they know each other.”

  “Oh,” Rainy said.

  Susan was looking at her differently now, eyeing her almost regretfully. She was sad Susan again. Rainy was disappointing her.

  “I’m not a cop or anything,” Rainy added.

  “Yeah, like I haven’t heard that one before.” Susan looked put off, so Rainy slid over the fifty dollars she’d been palming, the bill she’d marked. It was like the movies, but with no promise of the outcome: Susan could spit in her face. To her relief, the money disappeared beneath Susan’s palm.

  “There’s, like, four restaurants in there. Don’t know which one he’s at. He never stops talking. Told me he’s using the stuff in some of the drinks he makes. The other one doesn’t say much, just buys a couple things—the syrup, energy drinks and candy bars—and is on his way. Happy?”

  “Not yet.” Rainy stepped aside to let a family carrying chips and sodas check out. “What does the other guy—the one who’s not the bartender—look like?”

  The father of the chip-and-soda family side-eyed her as he swiped his card and his wife said something to him in a language Rainy thought might be Russian. She glanced at Rainy before ushering her children out the doors to wait for their father.

  Susan waited for the man to leave before her head snapped toward Rainy. She wasn’t in friendly mode anymore.

  “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

  “Then answer fast and I’ll be on my way.”

  She shrugged. “He’s, like, a few inches taller than you. White like a vampire. Black hair, light eyes. He’s just a guy.” The look on her face said, Get the fuck outta here.

  But Rainy couldn’t do that just yet. This was an information-gathering mission. If she didn’t get enough of it, or get it right, she’d die.

  “Anything special about him?”

  Susan blew air out of her mouth with a pffft sound.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He drinks that coffee syrup.”

  Rainy smirked. “What about any tattoos?”

  That got a little pause. “No,” she said finally. “No tattoos. But his roots were showing like he hadn’t dyed his hair in a bit...and they were light.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Rainy said. She ducked out of the store. That would have to be enough.

  Her duffel slung across her back, Rainy lit a cigarette and walked along the shrubbery-lined walk that led to the back alley of the Bellum. She hadn’t smoked since New York—she’d given it up for Grant—but the rush of acrid smoke filling her lungs had a dangerous welcome home quality. Slipping through the gap in the fence that divided the gas station from the hotel, she noticed a couple strands of blond hair clinging to one of the fence prongs. She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the shortcut advantage. She wondered if Paul went to work this way, buying his coffee syrup and slinking off to stalk women. She choked down smoke as she surveyed the back end of the grand Bellum Hotel; like everything in Vegas, it was garish, hideous in the daylight. Without the night and the oozing neons to disguise the ugly, the sun revealed it for everything it was—loading docks, the stench of trash rotting in the heat, and construction. Rainy smoked two cigarettes before she kicked off from the wall, spitting down a grate as she walked over it. That was the part she hated: the trash-mouth aftertaste. Slowing down, she realized that people were coming and going from the docks; she caught a glimpse of a long hallway as a woman slipped outside through a service door and pulled a pack of Marlboroughs from her apron pocket.