The Crypts looks different from the way I remember it.

I’ve been here only once before, on a school trip in third grade. Weirdly, I don’t remember anything about the actual visit, only that Jen Finnegan threw up in the bus afterward, and the air stank like tuna fish, even after the bus driver opened all the windows.

The Crypts is situated at the northern border and backs up onto the Wilds and the Presumpscot River. That’s why so many prisoners were able to escape during the Incidents. The exploding shrapnel took out huge chunks of the border wall; the inmates who made it out of their cells just ran straight into the Wilds.

After the Incidents, the Crypts was rebuilt, and a new, modern wing was attached. The Crypts was always monstrously ugly, but now it is worse than ever: The steel-and-cement addition runs up awkwardly against the old building, made of blackened stone, with its hundreds of tiny barred windows. It’s a sunny day, and beyond the high roof, the sky is a vivid blue. The whole scene feels off to me: This is a place that should never see sunlight.

For a minute, I stand outside the gates, wondering whether I should turn around. I came by municipal bus, which took me all the way from downtown, emptying as we got closer and closer to this, its final destination. At last, I shared the bus with only the driver and a large, heavily made-up woman wearing nurse’s scrubs. As the bus rolled away, kicking up sprays of mud and exhaust, for a wild second I thought of running after it.

But I have to know. I must.

So I follow the nurse as she shuffles toward the guard hut just outside the gates and flashes her ID card. The guard’s eyes flick to me, and I wordlessly pass him a piece of paper.

He scans the photocopy. “Eleanor?”

I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak. In the photocopy, it’s impossible to make out many of her features, or distinguish the dishwater color of her hair. But if he looks too closely, he’ll see the details don’t line up: the height, the eye color.

Fortunately, he doesn’t. “What happened to the original?”

“Went through the dryer,” I reply promptly. “I had to apply to SVS for a replacement.”

He turns his gaze back to the photocopy. I hope he can’t hear my heart, which is beating loud and hard.

Getting the photocopy was no problem. A quick phone call to Mrs. Hargrove this morning, a proposed cup of tea, a twenty-minute chat, an expressed desire to use the bathroom—and then a two-minute detour to Fred’s study instead. I couldn’t risk being identified as Fred’s future wife. If Cassie is here, it’s possible that some of the wardens know Fred, too. And if Fred finds out I’ve been poking around the Crypts…

He has already told me I must not ask questions.

“Business?”

“Just…visiting.”

The guard grunts. He hands back my paper and waves me on as the gates begin to shudder open. “Check in at the visitors’ desk,” he grunts. The nurse gives me a curious look before scuttling ahead of me across the yard. I can’t imagine there are many visitors here.

That’s the whole point. Lock them up and let them rot.

I cross the yard and pass through a heavy, bolted steel door, and find myself in a claustrophobic entrance hall, dominated by a metal detector and several massive guards. By the time I get through the door, the nurse has already unloaded her purse onto the conveyor belt and is standing with her arms and legs spread as a guard moves over her body with a wand, checking her for weapons. She hardly seems to notice; she’s busy chatting with the woman manning the check-in desk to the right, which is situated behind bulletproof glass.

“Same as always,” she’s saying. “The baby kept me up all night. I’m telling you, if 2426 gives me more problems today, I’ll put his ass on lockdown.”

“Amen,” says the woman behind the desk. Then she turns her eyes to me. “ID?”

We repeat the procedure all over again: I slide the paper through the gap in the window, explain that the original was ruined.

“How can I help you?” she asks.

I’ve been crafting my story carefully for the past twenty-four hours, but still I find the words come haltingly. “I—I’m here to visit my aunt.”

“You know what ward she’s in?”

I shake my head. “No, see…I didn’t even know she was here. I mean, I just found out. For most of my life, I thought she was dead.” The woman shows no reaction to this statement. “Name?”

“Cassandra. Cassandra O’Donnell.” I squeeze my fists and focus on the pain running through my palms as she keys the name into her computer. I’m not sure whether I’m hoping her name will come up or not.

The woman shakes her head. She has watery blue eyes and a mass of frizzy blond hair, which in this light appears to be the same dull gray as the walls. “Nothing here. You got an intake month?”

How many years ago did Cassie disappear? I remember overhearing at Fred’s inauguration that he has been without a pair for three years.

I hazard a guess. “January or February. Three years ago.”

She sighs and hauls herself out of her chair. “Only went computerized last year.” She passes out of view, then returns with a large, leather-bound book, which she sets down on her side of the counter with a bang. She flips forward a few pages, then opens a window in the glass and slides the book out to me.

“January and February,” she says shortly. “It’s all organized by date—if she came through here, she’ll be there.”

The book is oversized, its pages crisscrossed with spidery writing, intake dates, prisoner names, and corresponding prisoner numbers. The period from January through February runs several pages, and I’m uncomfortably aware of the woman watching me impatiently as I move my finger slowly down the column of names.

There’s a tight feeling in my stomach. She’s not here. Of course, I might have the dates wrong—or I might have been wrong altogether. Maybe she never came to the Crypts at all.

I think of Fred laughing, saying, She doesn’t get much of an audience these days.

“Any luck?” the woman asks, without real interest.

“Just a second.” A bead of sweat rolls down my spine. I flip to April and continue my search.

Then I see a name that stops me: Melanea O.

Melanea. That was Cassandra’s middle name; I remember overhearing that at Fred’s inauguration, and seeing it on the letter I stole from Fred’s study.

“Here,” I say. It makes sense that Fred would not have entered her under her real name. The point, after all, was to make her disappear.

I push the book back through the plate-glass window. The woman’s eyes slide from Melanea O to the inmate number assigned to her: 2225. She keys this into the computer, repeating the number under her breath.

“Ward B,” she says. “New wing.” She types a few more commands into her keyboard, and a printer behind her shudders to life, regurgitating a small white sticker with VISITOR—WARD B printed neatly across it. She slides it through the window to me, along with another, thinner, leather-bound book. “Sign your name and date in the visitors’ log, and mark the name of the person you’re visiting. Place the sticker on your chest; it must be visible at all times. And you’ll have to wait for an escort. Go on through security and I’ll page someone down here to get you.”

She runs through this last speech quickly, tonelessly. I fish a pen from my bag and write Eleanor Latterly in the allotted position, praying she doesn’t ask to see my ID card. The visitor’s log is very slender. Only three visitors have come here in the past week.

My hands have begun to shake. I have trouble wrestling off my jacket after the security guards instruct me that it must go on the conveyor belt. My bag and shoes are also placed in trays for inspection, and I have to stand with my arms and legs spread, as the nurse did, as one of the men pats me down roughly, waving a wand between my legs and over my breasts.

“Clear,” he says, stepping aside to let me pass. Just past security is a small waiting area, outfitted with several cheap plastic chairs and a plastic table. Beyond that, I see various hallways branching, and signs pointing the way to different wards and portions of the complex. A TV is playing in the corner, muted: a political broadcast. I avert my eyes quickly, just in case Fred comes on the screen.

A nurse with tufts of black hair and a shiny, greasy face comes slapping down the hallway toward me, wearing blue hospital clogs and floral scrubs. Her name card reads JAN.

“You for Ward B?” she pants at me, when she comes close. I nod. Her perfume is vanilla, sickly sweet and too strong, but it still can’t completely conceal the other smells of the place: bleach, body odor.

“This way.” She pads in front of me to a heavy set of double doors, using a hip to bump them open.

Beyond the doors, the atmosphere changes. The hallway we’ve entered is sparkling white. This must be the new wing. The floors, walls, and even the ceiling are made of the same spotless paneling. Even the air smells different—cleaner and newer. It’s very quiet, but as we move down the hall, I hear the occasional sounds of muffled voices, the beeping of mechanical equipment, the slap-slap-slap of another nurse’s clogs down another hallway.

“Been here before?” Jan wheezes. I shake my head, and she shoots me a sidelong glance. “Thought not. We don’t get many visitors around here. What’s the point, I say.”

“I just found out that my aunt—”

She cuts me off. “Gonna have to leave your bag outside the ward.” Pant, pant, pant. “Even a nail file will do it in a pinch. And we’ll have to give you some slippers. Can’t have you wearin’ those laces in the ward. Last year one of our guys strung himself up to a pipe, quick as a flash, when he got hold of some laces. Dead as a doornail by the time we found him. Who’re you here for?”

She says all this so quickly, I can barely follow the thread of her conversation. An image flashes: someone swinging from the ceiling, laces knotted around the throat. In my mind, the person swings, revolving toward me. Weirdly, it’s Fred’s face I picture, huge and bulging and red.

“I’m here to see Melanea.” I watch the nurse’s face, see the name means nothing to her. “Number 2225,” I add.

Apparently, people go solely by their numbers in the Crypts, because the nurse lets out a noise of recognition. “She won’t give you no trouble,” she says conspiratorially, as though she’s sharing a great secret. “She’s quiet as a church mouse. Well, not always. I remember the first few months, she was shouting and shouting. ‘I don’t belong here! I’m not crazy!’” The nurse laughs. “’Course, that’s what they all say. And then you start listening, and they’ll run your ear off talking little green men and spiders.”

“She’s—she’s crazy then?” I say.

“Wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t, would she?” Jan says. She obviously doesn’t expect an answer. We’ve arrived at another set of double doors, this one marked with a sign that reads WARD B: PSYCHOSIS, NEUROSIS, HYSTERIA.

“Go on and grab yourself a pair of slippers,” she resumes cheerfully, pointing.

Outside the doors are a bench and a small wooden bookcase, on which several plastic-sheathed hospital slippers have been placed. The furniture is obviously old, and looks strange in the middle of all the gleaming whiteness. “Leave your shoes and your bag right here. Don’t worry; no one will take ’em. The criminals are in the old wards.” She laughs again.

I sit on the bench and fumble with my shoelaces, wishing I’d thought to wear boots or flats instead. My fingers feel clumsy.

“So she screamed?” I prompt. “When she first came, I mean.”

The nurse rolls her eyes. “Thought her husband was tryin’ to do her in. Shouted conspiracy to anyone who’d listen.”

My whole body goes cold. I swallow. “‘Do her in’? What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry.” Jan waves a hand. “She went quiet pretty soon. Most of ’em do. Takes her medicine regular-like, doesn’t give nobody no trouble.” She pats my shoulder. “Ready?”

I can only nod, although ready is the last thing I feel. My body is filled with a need to turn, to run. But instead I stand up and follow Jan through the double doors into another hallway, as spotlessly white as the one we have just passed through, lined on both sides with white, windowless doors. Each step seems to be harder than the last. I can feel the chilly bite of the floor through the slippers, which are tissue-thin, and every time I put a heel down, a shiver runs all the way up my spine.

Too soon, we reach a door marked 2225. Jan raps twice on the door, hard, but doesn’t seem to expect a response. She removes her key card from around her neck, holds it up to the scanner to the left of the door—“We got all new systems after the Incidents; neat, huh?”—and, when the lock slides open with a click, pushes the door open firmly.

“Got a visitor,” she calls cheerfully as she passes into the room. This last step is the hardest. For a second I think I won’t be able to do it. I have to practically throw myself forward, over the threshold, into the cell. As I do, the air leaves my chest.

She is sitting in the corner, in a plastic chair with rounded corners, staring out of a small window fitted with heavy iron bars. She doesn’t turn when we enter, although I can make out her profile, which is just touched with the light filtering in from outside: the small, ski-jump nose, the exquisite little mouth, the long fringe of lashes, her seashell-pink ear and the neat procedural scar just beneath it. Her hair is long and blond, and hangs loose, nearly to her waist. I estimate that she’s about thirty.

She is beautiful.

She looks like me.

My stomach lurches.

“Morning,” Jan says loudly, as if Cassandra won’t hear us otherwise, even though the room is tiny. It’s too small to contain all of us comfortably, and even though the space is bare except for a cot, a chair, a sink, and a toilet, it feels overcrowded. “Brought somebody to see you. Nice surprise, isn’t it?”

Cassandra doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even acknowledge us.

Jan rolls her eyes expressively, mouths I’m sorry to me. Out loud, she says, “Come on, now. Don’t be rude. Turn around and say hello like a good girl.”

Cassie does turn then, although her eyes pass over me completely and go directly to Jan. “May I have a tray, please? I missed breakfast this morning.”

Jan puts her hands on her hips and says, in an exaggerated tone of reproach—as though she is speaking to a child—“Now that was silly of you, wasn’t it?”

“I wasn’t hungry,” Cassie says simply.

Jan sighs. “You’re lucky I’m feeling nice today,” she says with a wink. “You okay here for a minute?” This question is directed to me.

“I—”

“Don’t worry,” Jan says. “She’s harmless.” She raises her voice and assumes the forced-cheerful tone. “Be right back. You be a good girl. Don’t make no trouble for your guest.” She turns once again to me. “Any problems, just hit the emergency button next to the door.”

Before I can respond, she bustles into the hallway again, closing the door behind her. I hear the lock slide into place. Fear stabs, sharp and clear, through the muffling effects of the cure.

For a moment there is silence as I try to remember what I came here to say. The fact that I have found her—the mysterious woman—is overwhelming, and I suddenly can’t think of what to ask her.

Her eyes click to mine. They are hazel, and very clear. Smart.

Not crazy.

“Who are you?” Now that Jan has left the room, her voice takes on an accusatory edge. “What are you doing here?”

“My name is Hana Tate,” I say. I suck in a deep breath. “I’m marrying Fred Hargrove next Saturday.”

Silence stretches between us. I feel her eyes sweeping over me and force myself to stand still. “His taste hasn’t changed,” she says neutrally. Then she turns back to the window.

“Please.” My voice cracks a little. I wish I had some water. “I’d like to know what happened.”

Her hands are still in her lap. She must have perfected this art over the years: sitting motionless. “I’m crazy,” she says tonelessly. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“I don’t believe it,” I say, and it’s true, I don’t. Now that I’m speaking to her, I know for a fact that she is sane. “I want the truth.”

“Why?” She turns back to me. “Why do you care?”

So it won’t happen to me; so I can stop it. That’s the true and selfish reason. But I can’t say that. She has no reason to help me. We are not made to care for strangers any longer.

Before I can think of anything to say, she laughs: a dry sound, as though her throat has been long in disuse. “You want to know what I did, don’t you? You want to be sure you don’t make the same mistake.”

“No,” I say, although of course she’s right. “That’s not what I—”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I understand.” A smile passes briefly across her face. She looks down at her hands. “I was paired with Fred when I was eighteen,” she says. “I didn’t go to university. He was older. They’d had trouble finding a match for him. He was picky—he was allowed to be picky, because of who his father was. Everyone said I was lucky.” She shrugs. “We were married for five years.”

That makes her younger than I thought. “What went wrong?” I ask.

“He got tired of me.” She states this firmly. Her eyes flick to mine momentarily. “And I was a liability. I knew too much.”

“What do you mean?” I want to sit down on the cot; my head feels strangely light, and my legs feel impossibly far away. But I’m afraid to move. I’m afraid even to breathe. At any second, she can order me out. She owes me nothing.

She doesn’t answer me directly. “Do you know what he liked to do when he was a little kid? He used to lure the neighborhood cats into his yard—feed them milk, give them tuna fish, earn their trust. And then he would poison them. He liked to watch them die.”

The room feels smaller than ever: stifling and airless.

She turns her gaze to me again. Her calm, steady stare disconcerts me. I will myself not to look away.

“He poisoned me, too,” she says. “I was sick for months and months. He told me, finally. Ricin in my coffee. Just enough to keep me sick, in bed, dependent. He told me so I would know what he was capable of.” She pauses. “He killed his own father, you know.”

For the first time I wonder if maybe, after all, she is crazy. Maybe the nurse was right—maybe she does belong here. The idea is a deliverance. “Fred’s father died during the Incidents,” I say. “He was killed by Invalids.”

She looks at me pityingly. “I know that.” As though she is reading my mind, she adds, “I have eyes and ears. The nurses talk. And of course I was in the old wing, when the bombs exploded.” She looks down at her hands. “Three hundred prisoners escaped. Another dozen were killed. I wasn’t lucky enough to be in either group.”

“But what has that got to do with Fred?” I ask. A whine has crept into my voice.

“Everything,” she says. Her tone turns sharp. “Fred wanted the Incidents to happen. He wanted the bombs to go off. He worked with the Invalids—he helped plan it.”

It can’t be true; I can’t believe her. I won’t. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. Fred must have planned it for years. He worked with the DFA; they had the same idea. Fred wanted his father proven wrong about the Invalids—and he wanted his father dead. That way, Fred would be right, and Fred would be mayor.”

A shock runs up my spine when she mentions the DFA. In March, at an enormous rally of Deliria-Free America in New York City, Invalids attacked, killing thirty citizens and injuring countless more. Everyone compared it to the Incidents, and for weeks, security everywhere was tightened: IDs scanned, vehicles searched, homes raided, and patrols on the streets doubled.

But there were other whispers too—some people said that Thomas Fineman, the DFA’s president, had known in advance what would happen, and had even allowed it. Then, two weeks later, Thomas Fineman was assasinated.

I don’t know what to believe. My chest is aching with a feeling I can’t remember how to name.

“I liked Mr. Hargrove,” Cassandra says. “He felt sorry for me. He knew what his son was. He used to visit every so often, after Fred had me locked up. Fred got people to testify that I was a lunatic. Friends. Doctors. They committed me to life in this place.” She gestures toward the small white room, her burial place. “But Mr. Hargrove knew I wasn’t crazy. He told me stories about the world outside. He found my mother and father a place to live in Deering Highlands. Fred wanted them silenced too. He must have thought I’d told them…he must have thought they knew what I knew.” She shakes her head. “But I hadn’t. They didn’t.”

So Cassie’s parents were forced into the Highlands, like Lena’s family.

“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think of, even though I know how flimsy it sounds.

Cassie doesn’t seem to hear me. “That day—when the bombs went off—Mr. Hargrove was visiting. He brought me chocolate.” She turns to the window. I wonder what she is thinking; she is perfectly still again, her profile just traced with dull sunlight. “I heard he died trying to restore order. Then I felt sorry for him. Funny, isn’t it? But I guess Fred got us both in the end.”

“Here I am! Better late than never!”

Jan’s voice makes me jump. I spin around; she is pushing through the door, carrying a plastic tray with a plastic cup of water and a small plastic bowl of lumpy oatmeal. I step out of the way as she plunks the tray down on the cot. I notice that the silverware is plastic, too. Of course, there would be no metal. No knives, either.

I think of the man swinging by his shoelaces, close my eyes, and think of the bay instead. The image breaks away on the waves. I open my eyes again.

“So what do you think?” Jan says brightly. “You want to tuck in now?”

“Actually, I think I’ll wait,” Cass says softly. Her gaze is still directed out the window. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Jan looks at me and rolls her eyes as though to say, Crazies.