A shard of ice trailed down the length of Violet’s spine.
"You’ll be okay right here?" Matthew asked.
"Yeah."
"Look, you’re welcome to stay tonight, but—"
"No, I understand. You’ve been very gracious."
The pillow smelled like spoiled cabbage, so she rested her head in the crook of her arm, facing the oil drum for the heat that radiated off the metal. Through tiny perforations, she could see the glow of the coals, pinpoints of sun-colored brilliance in the dark.
She closed her eyes.
Cold creeping in from every side except where the heat lapped at her face.
His voice came through the earpiece: "Violet? You asleep? Violet..."
"I’m awake," she whispered.
"You sound tired, but I’m afraid your night isn’t even close to over. You handled yourself well up on the tower. That was fun to watch, but in all fairness, purely self-defense. Kill or be killed. Tonight, I want to see another facet of Violet King, specifically, just how cold your blood runs."
"What are you talking about?"
"I’m talking about the knife, Violet. I’m talking about Matthew. About you killing him while he sleeps."
"No."
"No?"
"I can’t, Luther."
"Matthew reminds me of a dear, departed friend."
"Luther, please."
"My mentor. A man named Orson, who, very much like Matthew, escaped into homelessness to find himself."
"I do not have that in me."
"Well, that is very bad news for Andy and little Max. Andy you there?"
"Violet?" Andy’s voice.
"Andy."
"Luther, please," Andy said.
"Would everyone stop begging me already? I didn’t bring you into this, Andy, for you to plead for me not to do what has to be done."
"Then what?"
"I just thought you might advise Violet. You’ve been in this situation before, right? You’ve murdered an innocent to save yourself and others. Tell us, Andy, did it change you?"
"Fuck you, Luther."
"Tell us, Andy, did it change you?"
"Fuck you."
The wail of a baby filled Violet’s earpiece.
"Andy stop!" she whispered.
"Yes, Luther, it changed me."
"For the better?"
"Hardly."
"You still think about them?"
"Sometimes."
"And this pains you?"
"They were some of the worst moments in a life filled with bad ones."
"That’s because you’re weak, Andy. I never understood what Orson saw in you. You should’ve emerged from that experience stronger. Harder. A pure human being."
"So that’s what you’re holding yourself out as, Luther? A pure human being?"
"Violet," Luther said as she wept softly into the sleeve of her tracksuit. "Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not rushing you. We’re going to leave you now, so you can have this moment. Please believe me when I say that it can be revolutionary. Life-changing. If you let it be. If you’re strong enough."
"And if I don’t?"
"Aren’t we past the threats, my love?"
Andy screamed something and then the line went dead.
She could hear the freezing rain coming down again, feel the shudder of her heart against the filthy floor. She lay there in the dark and the cold. Waiting. For something to change. For reality to break through and end this nightmare.
But the rain kept falling and the fire dwindling and the cold sinking in.
After awhile, she came to her feet. The knife blade reflected the firelight. She stared at it, then picked it up.
"Throw some wood on the fire," Matthew grumbled from his cardboard box.
"Sure."
Violet walked over to the scrap wood heap, grabbed several pieces of crown molding flaking off dark paint, and tossed them into the oil drum.
"You were talking to yourself," Matthew said.
Violet moved slowly across the floor to the foot of the cardboard box and squatted down by the opening. As the new flames licked up out of the drum, she saw Matthew in the lowlight sprawled under sheets of old newspaper, lying on his back, his eyes open, blinking slowly—glassy from the wine.
"How do you live like this, Matthew?" she whispered.
"Always wanted to live in nature," he said. "Someplace pretty, you know? Now I do. This is my wilderness. I think the concrete barrens are beautiful like the desert is. Empty and quiet. Those abandoned buildings, that water tower...they’re my mountains. Sometimes, in the evening in the summertime, I’ll just go walking through the ruins. It reaches some part of me. Some itch I was never able to scratch."
"Don’t you miss your family?"
She saw his Adam’s apple roll. "The man I was when I was home was nothing I was proud of. So compromised." The corners of his eyes shone with wetness. He looked at Vi. "It’s hard, isn’t it?"
"Yeah."
She gripped the knife behind her back.
"Is it supposed to be so hard you think?"
She couldn’t see anything through the sheet of tears. "And sometimes harder."
Vi could feel the momentum building inside of her, the adrenaline push, lifting her toward something.
"I want to think," Matthew said, "that there’s some benefit to this road I’m on, you know? That I’m...gaining something. Something no one else has. That enlightenment is right around the corner."
"Something to make it all worthwhile."
"Exactly."
"Do you ever just..." Her hand sweating onto the leathered handle of the bowie. "...want it all to end?"
"Yes," he said. "God yes. Death is...all I think about."
He shut his eyes and he kept them closed as he continued to speak.
"Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal. A man awaits his end dreading and hoping all. Many times he died, many times rose again. A great man in his pride confronting murderous men casts derision upon supersession of breath. He knows death to the bone. Man has created death. Isn’t he lovely, Yeats?" His eyes were still closed.
Violet could scarcely breath. She was thinking of Max and nothing else, Matthew looking serene for the moment, and he was asking her if she had any poetry under memory that she might share with him, just a verse or two to rattle around in his head while he drifted off to sleep.
She told him that she did.
She was thinking of Max.
Her heart racing and her mouth running dry.
She started one she’d memorized in high school that had always stuck.
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."
Matthew whispered, "I love this one."
She brought the knife around, had intended to drive it straight down in a single, fluid motion, but seeing the blade poised over Matthew’s chest stopped her.
She kept telling herself do it do it do it do it, but nothing happened.
She couldn’t move.
A droplet of sweat fell from her brow and struck a piece of newsprint covering Matthew.
Several seconds had passed since she’d finished the line of poetry and any moment now his eyes—
Matthew’s eyes opened—a flicker of contended calm before he saw the knife and what must have been a visage of primal terror staring down at him.
Do it do it do it do it do it do it.
Matthew’s lips parted, as if to speak, but instead he started to sit up.
Violet stabbed him through the chest—the blade buried to the hilt, and she was on top of him and leaning all her weight into the knife, twisting, and she could feel his heart knocking frantically against the blade, the vibration traveling through the steel and leather up into her hand—four perceptible beats and then it stopped and Matthew let out a stunned gasped.
For a long time, she didn’t move.
Just stared down into Matthew’s eyes, watching the intensity of life recede into a glazed emptiness.