She places her fingers to his throat and feels what must be the last beats of his pulse.

The impact killed him.

Once she sees what he’s been guarding, maybe she’ll feel guilty. But she doubts it.

She crawls up onto the main kiln’s brick base, going for speed over silence, reminding herself of her main priority: eyes on Luke; eyes on this Milo fucker. Then unleash whatever hell necessary. The base has got one ruined entrance, but it’s filled with piles of bricks she’d have to crawl over, and the remaining frame of the entrance is too narrow for her to leap through without making a noisy impact.

One thing she can remember about that long-ago hike is that the main kiln’s chimney has the metal rungs of an old access ladder running up the side. Marty had yelled at some random kid who’d been about to climb the thing, and the kid’s parents had thanked him profusely.

The chimney’s steel wall is warm. The fire smells stronger now, which says the top of the chimney’s still open. Even better, the fire brings no strange or putrid smells; just woodsmoke, and some chemical smells that suggest accelerant. Nothing on the order of the stench that used to come from the Bannings’ incinerator when she was a little girl.

Nothing that might be the smell of burning flesh.

Milo’s sick, she hears that kid Tommy saying. You better hurry.

She climbs. A rung snaps off under her foot. She pushed too hard. She places the center of her palm flat against the rung overhead and pulls slightly. It does the work of a solid strong-armed grip.

She’s halfway up the chimney when the rungs suddenly stop altogether.

A few of them must have broken off over time. She places one hand against the steel and squeezes gently. There’s a low metallic whine, but nothing as loud as the noises she accidentally made in the culvert earlier that night. Within a few seconds, she’s made a handgrip in the steel, which she uses to throw her other arm up over her head. She repeats the process with her other hand. If whoever’s inside can hear her, maybe they’ll assume it’s just the metal responding to the heat from the fire inside. The kiln hasn’t been used in God knows how long.

When the rungs start to appear again, she’s relieved.

She grips the next one gently, tugs lightly, and swings her arm up to the one after. She keeps climbing until she’s got her feet lightly resting on the first rungs that showed up after the gap. The edge of the chimney’s roof is within reach, but if she tries to pull herself up the old-fashioned way, she could end up tearing a section of the roof away. So she balances her feet gently on the rungs, imagines that she’s floating underwater as she rests both palms delicately on top of the roof’s edge.

Heat blasting her face, she peers down the chimney’s opening.

The chimney’s about eight feet across, but most of what she can see below is fire. It fills what looks like a portable metal firepit. The pit looks too new to be part of the ruined kiln. They probably brought it in for just this purpose. An impossibly tall man in a black stocking cap feeds more fuel into it. One Duraflame log, followed by another, followed by another. Then he steps back, moving out of the frame offered by the chimney.

Luke’s been stripped down to his underwear and lassoed to some sort of hollow metal platform that’s raised off the ground vertically. It looks like a bed frame. The best she can see, it’s been upended, elevated, and attached to some wooden contraption that looks vaguely like the base you’d see on a catapult in a medieval fantasy epic.

The fact that she can see this much of Luke is a really bad sign; he’s as close to the fire as possible without being in the flames themselves. His wrists are tied to the top corners of the bed frame, his ankles to the bottom, and the frame’s got long struts running down its length that are probably being heated by the nearby fire.

She forces herself to breathe deeply. Panic isn’t likely in her given state, but rage is. And the real gift of Zypraxon isn’t just strength, it’s the clear focus that comes from knowing you have it. She can’t waste that gift. Not right now.

She tries to adjust so she can get a better look at the wooden platform. There’s a winch on one side, and with churning in her gut, she realizes what it’s for. It’s attached to a wheel hidden inside the wood that can lower the metal frame, and Luke, across a ninety-degree axis until he’s facedown, right over the fire. Or in the fire, depending on how far it goes.

She knows it’s a bad idea, knows it won’t help her swiftly end this, but she can’t help it. She looks at Luke’s face.

His face and chest are bruising in an orderly pattern that suggests his beating was methodical and precise, and his eyes are slits. Is he actually crying, or is it just the heat making his eyes tear up? His expression makes him look like he’s trying to retrieve a lost thought or he just took a bite of something strange that fell into his food by mistake. Pained, but distant. Like his mind’s left his body. Or it’s trying to.

Standing on the other side of the firepit, Luke’s captor holds up a photograph in one hand and lifts a hot poker in the other. He slams the side of the pit with the poker to get Luke’s attention. Then he drops the poker, holds up the photograph even higher, and mimes the universal signal for talk with his other hand.

Luke just stares at him. It’s a picture of Lacey Shannon.

His captor repeats the signal.

Slowly, in a halting voice, Luke says, “Is th-that the girl that broke your . . . your heart?”