Dryden turned back.
Sandra was holding his SIG SAUER out to him. The magazine had been reloaded into the grip.
“All you’ve done for Rachel,” she said, “we can’t tell you what it means to us. The least we can do is trust you.”
Dryden took the pistol, checked the safety, and stuffed it in his waistband.
*
The apartment’s size and layout were surreal. The living room opened to the kitchen and dining room, merging into a vast space that extended to the southwest corner of the level.
The rest of the floorplan formed a giant rectangular doughnut, centered on the building’s core. Among the other rooms were a library that spanned most of the northern stretch, and three bedrooms filling out the east end. The bedrooms were more or less equal in size, which was to say that each was huge. The room at the southeast corner was Rachel’s. She led Dryden inside. He was briefly surprised by the casual state it was in—it looked as if it had seen regular use up until this very moment.
“The whole apartment was like this when we got here this morning,” Rachel said. “Cups on the counter, left sitting there for two months. Audrey and Sandra were afraid to stay here while Gaul had me captive. In case he got this location from me.”
She went to the bed, its covers lying askew. A stuffed blue triceratops lay on its side there, half obscured by the comforter.
“I keep thinking some of this stuff might help me remember,” Rachel said.
She pulled the dinosaur free and hugged it to her chest.
“Sandra told me it has a name,” she said. “I can almost feel it wanting to come back to me.”
She stared at the thing, and for a moment something rose in her eyes. Some fragile hope. Then her shoulders sagged. She set the dinosaur back on the bed.
“Give it time,” Dryden said.
Rachel nodded but looked unsettled about something.
“What is it?” Dryden said.
Rachel exhaled softly. “You’ll see.”
*
“When I was twenty-two,” Sandra said, “I went to prison. I’m not going to say what for.”
The four of them were seated at the dining room table, near the southwest corner of the residence. Outside, the day had become cloudy. Ragged knots of mist slipped among the tops of the towers. Whenever one enveloped the Hancock, the city briefly vanished into a whiteout.
“In part because of priors, my sentence was sixteen years. I could be paroled in twelve if I was lucky. I’d been in for a month when a man visited me. Not in the room with the glass partition and the phones. Right in my cell, in the middle of the night. The chief of the guards came in and stood with him, and looked very pissed, but didn’t say anything. The visitor said I could leave the prison that night, if I wanted. I could leave with him, right then, and live in a much nicer place, and I’d only have to serve two years there. Then I’d be free to go. This other place was a kind of dormitory, he said, where the army did medical trials. Like the FDA, but the military version of it. The deal was simple: I’d be given three injections of a new drug—an RNA-interference drug, he called it—in the first two weeks. After that, nothing. I could just relax, live there, watch TV, do anything I wanted. They would monitor me to see if the drug had any effect, but whatever it did, I’d be free after the two years were up. Free to start my life over, and not screw it up this time. I’d only be twenty-four years old when I got out. Or I could stay there in prison until my midthirties. That first month inside, I’d already been sexually assaulted twice. It was going to keep happening, too. No question about it. ‘Think it over,’ the guy said, but I’ll be honest—I didn’t really have to. I thought even if the medical trial killed me, that might be better than another twelve years in that place.”
“My experience was more or less the same,” Audrey said. “My decision process was the same.”