Author's Preface
She stood up.
That was the first thing. The getting up off the pavement of the main street of Millhaven with her arm doing what it was doing and Chloe Verhoo on the ground behind her and Jacob Cain walking toward her from two hundred meters away and the sirens coming from somewhere that wasn't here yet.
She stood up and she looked at him and he looked at her and the main street of Millhaven was between them and it was a Tuesday morning and the October sky was the October sky and none of it had changed except everything.
He was walking and she was standing and the distance between them was closing the way it always closed when he walked and she stood because that was the mathematics of it — steady pace, open ground, no variables.
She thought about variables.
Detective Marsh's voice in her ear — units on the north end of the main street, units coming from the station, sixty seconds, stay where you are, do not engage, sixty seconds—
She looked at Jacob Cain.
She looked at the axe in his right hand dragging on the pavement.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
The sound carried on the empty main street in a way it hadn't carried anywhere else — the buildings on either side creating a kind of channel for it, amplifying it, bouncing it back off the shop fronts and the pavement and the ordinary Tuesday morning surfaces of a town that didn't know what to do with this sound any more than any other town had.
She looked at the bow in his left hand.
One arrow used. She didn't know how many he had. She didn't know where he'd found the compound bow or when or how he'd carried it through the town this morning without being seen. She'd been building his inventory for four days and she still didn't have the full picture and she was standing in the middle of it.
One hundred and fifty meters.
She looked at the shops on either side of the main street. The diner. The pharmacy. The letting agency that had closed last year — the one Officer Reeves had identified, the one where the plain clothes officers were positioned.
She looked at Page and Spine behind her. The door still open. The bookshop smell coming out of it into the morning air. The pyramid of books in the window.
She thought about what Detective Marsh had said. Stay behind the table. Don't improvise.
She looked at Jacob Cain.
One hundred meters.
She improvised.
She went left.
Not running — moving, the fast deliberate movement of someone who had decided on a direction and was committed to it. She went left across the pavement and into the gap between Page and Spine and the building next door, the narrow service alley that ran down the side of the bookshop toward the back.
She heard him change direction behind her. Felt the change in the quality of the main street — the particular way a space altered when the thing moving through it altered its course.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
Coming from behind her now. From the entrance to the alley.
She went down the alley. Narrow, dark, the particular smell of service alleys — old brick and damp and the bins that Greta put out on collection days. She went through it and came out the back of the building into the area behind the main street shops — the delivery access road, the yard spaces, the backs of the buildings showing their undecorated faces to each other.
She stopped.
She turned.
She looked at the entrance to the alley.
He came out of it.
The mask. The jacket. The axe. The bow. The two dark eye gaps finding her immediately, the particular way they moved across open space — not searching, just arriving. Like he'd always known where she was going to be.
She thought about sixty seconds. She thought about how long sixty seconds was.
She looked at what was around her.
The delivery road. The yard spaces. The backs of the buildings. A stack of wooden pallets against the wall of the building two doors down. A skip. The bins. And along the back of Page and Spine — the storage entrance, the one Officer Reeves had used, the one that was supposed to be secured from inside.
She looked at the storage entrance.
She looked at Jacob Cain.
He raised the bow.
She went sideways behind the skip as the arrow hit the brick wall where she'd been standing with a sound that was nothing like a plastic arrow in an improvised string and everything like what it was.
She was behind the skip. Crouched. Her arm screaming at her for the crouching. She looked at the gap between the skip and the wall and thought about what she could see and what he could see.
She could see his boots. The axe dragging on the delivery road. Moving toward her.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh.
She looked at the pallets. At the storage entrance. At the distance between where she was and where she needed to be.
She ran.
She came out from behind the skip going right — away from him, toward the pallets — and she heard him move behind her, heard the axe lift off the ground which meant he was moving faster, which meant she had less time than the sound suggested.
She got to the pallets.
She got behind them.
She could hear him on the delivery road. Not running — still not running — but the walk was faster than the outside theatre walk, faster than the garden walk, the particular acceleration of something that had decided the time for patience was narrowing.
She looked at the pallets. Heavy, wooden, stacked four high against the wall. She looked at the way they were stacked. She looked at what was above them.
A drainpipe. Running down the back of the building from the roof.
She looked at the drainpipe.
She looked at her bandaged arm.
She thought about what Doctor Fenwick had said. No structural damage. Significant bruising. Limited mobility for a couple of weeks.
She grabbed the drainpipe with both hands and she climbed.
Her arm made its feelings about this extremely clear and she acknowledged them and kept climbing. The drainpipe was old but bolted properly to the wall — someone had done this correctly, decades ago, and she was grateful for their thoroughness as she went up it hand over hand with one arm that worked and one that mostly worked and the delivery road getting further below her.
She heard the pallets move.
He'd reached them. She heard the particular sound of wood on concrete as he moved them — one handed, with the ease she'd seen in the garden, the ease that Lucas had warned her about.
She was at the roof.
She swung herself over the edge — the arm, again, expressing itself — and got onto the flat roof of the building behind the main street of Millhaven and lay there for a moment on the cold felt surface breathing.
She breathed.
Then she got up.
The roof ran the length of the building. Three structures combined into one from up here — flat, low-edged, vents and a water tank and the particular geography of a rooftop that had been used only by pigeons and maintenance workers for many years.
She walked to the front edge.
She looked down at the main street.
Three police vehicles. Officers. The particular controlled movement of people who had arrived at a situation and were working out its current geometry. Chloe on the pavement — she could see from up here that there were people around her, kneeling, working. Good.
She looked for Detective Marsh and found him at the edge of the bookshop, looking up, having apparently tracked her route.
She looked back at the roof.
Jacob Cain came over the back edge.
He came over it the way he'd gone over the Forzone garden fence — one motion, clean and effortless. Like the roof was just another surface. Like the climb up the drainpipe had been no more taxing than walking through a doorway.
He stood on the roof.
He looked at her.
She looked back.
The roof between them. Fifteen meters of flat felt and vents and a water tank and the October sky above and the main street of Millhaven below and a Tuesday morning that was going to be a Tuesday that people talked about for a long time.
He had the axe. The bow was gone — she'd heard it hit the delivery road when he moved the pallets, heard it in a way that suggested it had gone down hard and wasn't in his hand anymore. Just the axe.
She had nothing.
She looked at the water tank.
She looked at him.
She thought about the burning forest. About what the forest had given her and what she'd done with it and what it had cost. She thought about being in a situation with nothing and finding something anyway because finding something was what she did.
She looked at the roof.
The water tank. Old, metal, the kind that existed on the roofs of buildings in small towns — not enormous but substantial, mounted on a frame, connected to a pipe that ran down through the building.
She looked at the frame.
She looked at Jacob Cain.
She looked at the distance between him and the water tank and the distance between her and the water tank and the particular arithmetic of it.
She ran toward the water tank.
He moved at the same time — not running, that steady accelerated walk — and the geometry of it was wrong, the angles were wrong, she wasn't going to reach the tank before he reached her and she knew it and she ran anyway.
She reached the frame.
She grabbed the bracket that connected the frame to the roof — old bolts, old metal, the kind of thing that existed in a state of theoretical soundness that had never been properly tested.
She pulled.
One arm. Her right arm, the good one, everything she had in it.
The bracket held.
She pulled again.
He was five meters away. Four.
She pulled a third time with the specific desperate force of someone who was not going to have a fourth time and the bracket gave — not all the way, just enough, just the particular degree of give that changed the load on the frame and the frame shifted and the water tank shifted with it and the water inside it — hundreds of litres, the weight of it, the accumulated cold weight of a tank that had been full for months — moved.
The tank tipped.
It went sideways off the frame with a sound that was enormous on the small rooftop — metal on metal, the groan of the frame going, the particular rushing sound of water released all at once — and it came down between her and Jacob Cain in a wave of cold water and old metal and the frame and all the bolts and all of it at once.
She was already moving. Away from the tank, toward the front edge of the roof, the water hitting her from behind, cold and sudden and total — soaking her in a second, the particular shock of it, the cold of it in late October hitting every surface of her simultaneously.
She reached the front edge.
She looked down.
Detective Marsh was directly below. Looking up. She could see him processing what had just happened on the roof — the sound, the water coming over the edge in a cascade, the particular evidence of something significant.
She looked back.
Jacob Cain was on the roof.
Still on the roof. Still standing. The water had hit him and he was wet and the axe was in his hand and he was looking at her with the two dark eye gaps and he was still standing.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
The water was everywhere now — pooling on the flat roof, running over the edges, the particular sound of it draining and cascading. His jacket was dark with it. The burlap mask dark with it.
He took a step toward her.
She had nowhere to go. The front edge of the roof behind her. The drop to the main street below. The police below. The water and the wrecked frame between her and the back edge.
He took another step.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh.
The axe on the wet felt of the roof. Different sound here — muffled by the water, the felt absorbing the tap, just the drag audible, just the
Shhk.
Then the last one.
Kuh.
Eight meters.
Six.
She looked at the drop behind her. Twelve feet to the awning of the shop below. Then from the awning to the pavement. Survivable. Probably.
She looked at him.
She thought about the burning forest. About the arrow through the mask. About saying gotcha and meaning it.
She thought about what she had.
Nothing on the roof. No bow, no rope, no hook, no gun. Just the wet felt and the wrecked tank frame and the edge behind her.
She looked at the wrecked tank frame.
At the bracket she'd pulled loose. Still attached to the roof at one end, free at the other — a meter and a half of old metal bracket, solid, heavy, the particular weight of something that had been holding up a water tank for thirty years.
She picked it up.
It was heavy. Heavier than she'd expected. She held it in her right hand — the good hand — and looked at Jacob Cain four meters away.
He looked at the bracket.
He looked at her.
He took another step.
She swung.
Not at him — she wasn't close enough, the reach was wrong. She swung it at the axe. At the handle of it, the part he was holding, the connection between the blade and the hand. The bracket connected with a sound she felt in her shoulder and the axe went sideways — not out of his hand, he didn't drop it, his grip was what it was — but sideways, the angle of it changing, and his body adjusted to compensate and in the half second of that adjustment she moved.
She went right. Around him. Toward the back edge of the roof and the wrecked frame and the route back down.
He turned.
She was already at the frame.
She looked at the delivery road below. At the drop — further than the awning would have been, fifteen feet to the delivery road, concrete, not soft.
She looked at the frame.
At what was left of it. One section still attached to the roof mounting, the other end hanging over the edge. She looked at the angle of it. At the drainpipe she'd come up. At the distance.
She heard him behind her.
She went over the edge.
She caught the hanging section of the frame with both hands — her right hand holding properly, her left hand holding the way it held things now which was with the particular grip of an arm that had a harpoon hole in it and was not interested in being asked to do more than it was doing.
She went down.
The frame swung under her weight and she went with it, a controlled fall that was about sixty percent controlled and forty percent just falling, and she hit the delivery road with both feet and went to her knees and stayed there for a moment with her hands on the concrete and the world sorting itself out.
She got up.
She looked up at the roof.
Jacob Cain looked down at her.
He looked at the drop. He looked at the frame. He looked at the drainpipe.
She watched him make the calculation.
Then she ran.
She went through the alley and came out on the main street and ran directly toward the police vehicles and Detective Marsh who was moving toward her and said something she didn't fully hear and she said he's coming over the roof and Detective Marsh said something into his radio and the officers moved.
She stopped running.
She stood on the main street of Millhaven and put her hands on her knees and breathed.
In. Out.
She looked at Chloe on the pavement. The paramedics were there — she could see them working, the equipment, the focused efficiency of people doing what they did. She looked for the particular signs she'd learned to read across too many years of this and what she saw made her breathe slightly easier.
She looked at Page and Spine. At the window. At the books.
She looked at the end of the alley.
Jacob Cain came out of it.
He walked onto the main street with three police vehicles and eight officers and Detective Marsh and Detective Cole and Officer Reeves and the ordinary Tuesday morning main street of Millhaven around him and he walked the way he always walked and he looked at Indigo.
She looked back.
The officers moved. The particular choreography of a trained response — positions, angles, the specific geometry of containment. Detective Marsh's voice saying things that had the particular authority of someone who meant them.
Jacob Cain looked at the officers around him.
He looked at the vehicles.
He looked at the officers with their hands on the things at their belts.
He looked at Indigo.
She looked at him.
For a long moment nothing moved. The main street held its breath. The October morning held its breath. The town of Millhaven on a Tuesday held its breath.
Then he moved.
Not toward the officers. Not toward the vehicles. Toward her. Always toward her. The steady walk, the axe dragging, the sound of it on the main street pavement—
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
The officers moved with him, tracking him, voices raised now, the particular controlled urgency of a situation reaching its moment.
Indigo didn't move.
She stood on the main street of Millhaven and looked at Jacob Cain walking toward her and thought about everything she knew about him. Every version of him she'd encountered. Vicrock, the clearing, the gun and the rope. New York, the city, the corner store, the office building. The burning forest, the arrow, the gotcha.
He was different each time. Not fundamentally — the patience was always there, the stillness, the particular quality of something that had decided the outcome and was just completing it. But the edges of him had changed with each encounter. Vicrock he'd been professional and cold. New York he'd been obsessed and damaged. The burning forest he'd been desperate and singular.
Here he was something she hadn't encountered before.
He was grief.
She saw it now — in the walk, in the way he'd looked at Chloe on the pavement, in the particular quality of his movement across the main street. Not the grief of someone who felt things about people. The grief of someone who had lost the only thing they'd been organised around. His son, his daughter, his purpose, his plan — all of it on the pavement of this main street on this Tuesday morning.
All he had left was her.
She was the last thing he was organised around.
She understood that. She understood it in the particular way of someone who had spent enough time thinking about Jacob Cain to know him better than was comfortable or useful.
She stood her ground.
He was ten meters away when Detective Marsh made the call.
The shot went into Jacob Cain's right leg — placed, deliberate, the specific decision of someone who had been told to stop a man not kill him and had acted accordingly.
He went down.
Not all the way — he went to one knee, the right leg giving, the axe hand going to the pavement to catch himself. The officers moved immediately, the practiced convergence of a team doing what they'd prepared to do, and Jacob Cain on one knee on the main street of Millhaven with a bullet in his leg looked up at them and then looked past them.
At Indigo.
She looked back.
The officers reached him.
He did not fight them. That was the thing she registered and filed — he didn't fight, didn't use the axe, didn't use the inhuman strength that had thrown people across rooms and broken gates and climbed buildings. He let them take the axe and he let them restrain him and he went to the pavement and he looked at Indigo.
She looked at him.
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she turned away.
The next hour was the hour that came after things.
Paramedics. Statements. The particular administrative aftermath of a situation contained — forms and questions and the specific language of official processes working through what had happened in the order that official processes required.
Chloe was alive.
That was the first thing she established and the thing she held onto through all of it. The paramedics had said stable — the arrow had gone through the left side, had missed the things that needed missing, was serious and was being treated and stable meant what it said. Indigo had held onto that word — stable — and let it do its work.
Jacob Cain was in custody.
She'd watched them put him in the vehicle. Had watched the burlap mask come off — she hadn't been close enough to see his face properly, just the shape of it, the ordinary unremarkable face of a man in his forties who had spent the better part of a decade trying to kill her and had not managed it. She'd watched the vehicle doors close and the vehicle pull away and she'd stood on the main street of Millhaven and felt—
Nothing.
For a moment. Just nothing. The vast clean nothing that came after things when the things were finally done.
Then Detective Marsh was beside her.
"You should sit down," he said.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Ms Derby."
"I'm fine," she said again. In the tone that meant I'm fine and also I know I'm not entirely fine and also I'm not going to do anything about it right now.
He looked at her with the expression she'd been receiving from various detectives across various situations for eight years.
"Okay," he said.
She looked at the main street. At the bookshop. At the pyramid of books still visible in the window, slightly disrupted now — one or two copies knocked sideways in whatever had happened inside when the water came over the roof and the officers moved and the morning became what it became.
She looked at her face on the covers.
She looked at the tape marks on the glass where the envelope had been.
She took out her phone. She called Hannah.
Hannah answered before the first ring finished.
"Is it over," she said.
"He's in custody," Indigo said. "Chloe is stable. I'm on the main street."
A pause. She could hear Hannah breathing. Could hear the particular quality of relief arriving in someone who had been holding themselves very still for several hours.
"Are you okay," Hannah said.
Indigo looked at the main street of Millhaven. At the ordinary Tuesday morning that had been through something and was beginning, slowly, to return to itself around the edges. A face in the window of the diner. Someone standing in the door of the pharmacy. The ordinary world looking at what had happened in it and starting to process.
"Yes," she said.
"Actually okay or—"
"Actually okay," she said. "Come to the main street. Bring your dad."
A pause. Then: "Okay. We're coming."
She hung up.
She stood on the main street and put her phone in her pocket and looked at the bookshop and breathed.
In. Out.
She thought about eight years. About Vicrock and New York and the burning forest and Millhaven. About Elizabeth and Nico and Addison and Jett and Rebecca and Anastasia and Max and Lucas and Chloe and Matthew and Scott and Patricia Weller and Ben Kowalski and all the people who had been in the radius of this and had paid the cost of being in the radius of this.
She thought about all of them.
She stood with all of them for a long moment on the main street of Millhaven.
Then she looked at the bookshop window. At her face. At the title on the cover.
Survivors Guide.
She thought about the last line of the book.
I don't know what comes next. But I'm the one who gets to find out.
She thought about that for a moment.
Then she walked into Page and Spine and picked up a pen and sat down at the signing table and waited for whatever came next.
Hannah arrived first.
She came through the door of Page and Spine at twelve thirty seven with Tom two steps behind her and she stopped inside the entrance and looked at Indigo at the signing table and the look on her face was not the inventory-taking look. It was something more direct than that. Something that had put the cataloguing down for a moment and was just looking.
Indigo looked back.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," Hannah said.
Tom closed the door behind him. He looked at the shop — at the general state of things, the disruption of the morning visible in small ways, the books knocked slightly sideways, the tea things from Greta's station scattered slightly. He looked at Indigo's arm. At the general state of Indigo.
"You're soaking wet," he said.
"Water tank," she said.
He looked at her.
"There was a water tank," she said. "On the roof."
He looked at the ceiling. He looked back at her.
"Right," he said. "Okay."
He went to find Greta to ask if there was a towel.
Hannah crossed the shop and sat down in the chair across from the signing table. She looked at Indigo. The direct look.
"He's in custody," Indigo said. "Proper custody. They're transferring him to the county facility this afternoon."
"And Chloe," Hannah said.
"Stable. Hospital forty minutes away. Same one as your mum." She looked at her hands on the table. "She tried to stop it. At the end. She put her own name in a document where it could be found. She came to the bookshop this morning to—" She stopped. "She wanted it to be over."
Hannah looked at the table.
"She read the book," Indigo said. "The chapter about Lucas. She said he chose right."
Hannah was quiet for a moment.
"Did he," she said.
Indigo looked at her.
"Yes," she said. "He did."
Hannah nodded. She looked at the bookshop around her. At the shelves. At the window with its slightly disrupted pyramid of books and her cousin's face on the covers.
"What happens now," she said.
"Now you go and see your mum," Indigo said. "And your dad takes you there and you sit with her and she's okay and you tell her about the morning and she's going to say something about how she told everyone to stay in the house and she was right."
Hannah almost smiled.
"And you," she said. "What happens with you."
Indigo looked at the table. At the pen. At the stack of books.
"I finish the tour," she said.
Hannah looked at her.
"Six more stops," Indigo said. "Three more weeks. The book is real and people are reading it and I agreed to the tour and I'm going to finish it."
"After everything that just—"
"After everything that just happened," Indigo said. "Yes."
Hannah looked at her for a long moment with the inventory-taking eyes back in place doing their particular careful work.
"Okay," she said.
Tom came back with a towel that was too small to be particularly useful and handed it to Indigo with the practical helpfulness of someone who had identified a problem and addressed it to the best of his ability.
She took it and did what she could with it.
"Dinner," Tom said. "Tonight. When Daphne's— when we're back from the hospital. Come for dinner."
"Tom—"
"You're family," he said. "Come for dinner."
She looked at him. At the kind face doing the plain uncomplicated thing it did when it had decided something.
"Okay," she said.
He nodded. That was enough for him.
She sat at the signing table at Page and Spine for another hour after the Forzones left.
Greta moved around the shop doing the quiet work of putting things back in order — the books straightened, the tea things sorted, the particular restoration of a space that had been through something and was returning to what it was. She didn't ask Indigo to leave and Indigo didn't leave.
She sat at the table and looked at the window.
The pyramid of books. Her face. The October main street beyond it — the ordinary Tuesday afternoon beginning to happen now, the morning's events already being processed and absorbed into the town's understanding of itself, the way events always were. The diner was open. The pharmacy was open. A delivery van was parked outside the letting agency next door.
She looked at all of it.
She thought about the last line of the book.
I don't know what comes next. But I'm the one who gets to find out.
She picked up the pen.
She opened a copy of the book to the title page.
She wrote something she hadn't written in any of the previous signings. Not the usual message. Something different. Something that had arrived this morning on the roof of the building next to Page and Spine with a water tank and an axe and the particular focused clarity of a situation stripped down to its essentials.
She wrote:
Surviving isn't the end. It's the beginning of something you didn't ask for and get to choose what to do with. Choose well.
She looked at what she'd written.
She closed the book.
She put it on top of the stack.
She looked at the window.
Outside the main street of Millhaven went on being the main street of Millhaven. The ordinary Tuesday afternoon of a town that had been through something and was still here. Still doing what small towns did — people moving through it, the shops open, the particular stubborn continuity of a place that was not going to be defined by what had happened in it.
She sat with that for a while.
Then she stood up.
She put the pen down.
She walked to the door of Page and Spine.
She opened it.
The October afternoon hit her — cold, clean, the particular quality of the air at three o'clock on a Tuesday in late October in upstate New York. She stood in the doorway and breathed it in.
She looked at the main street.
She looked north. Toward the edge of town. Toward the road that ran seven miles to Vicrock Forest.
She stood there for a long time.
Then she looked south. Toward the hotel. Toward Clement Street. Toward the Forzone house and the dinner that was happening tonight and the hospital visit that was happening this afternoon and all the small practical next things that needed doing.
She looked south.
She started walking.
They found the lake at sunset.
Hannah had known about it — of course she had, she was sixteen and had grown up in Millhaven seven miles from Vicrock and the lake was the lake, the one on the eastern edge of the Vicrock site that the forum had mapped and discussed and that the Kill Count case files referenced in the section on physical evidence and geography.
Matthew's lake. The place where he'd been found.
Indigo hadn't planned to come here. It wasn't part of the dinner plan or the hospital plan or any of the plans. It was something that had happened the way things happened when you were in the right place and the right person said the right thing — Hannah saying after the hospital, there's somewhere I want to go, Indigo saying okay without asking what or where.
They stood at the edge of it at sunset.
The lake was small and still and the October sunset was doing something extraordinary with the water — the colours of it, the orange and the gold and the particular bruised purple of the sky at this hour reflected in the surface in a way that made the water look like something other than water. Like something more permanent. Like something that held things and didn't give them back.
She thought about Matthew Grader who had been seventeen and had been found not far from where she was standing.
She thought about the lake and what it held.
She looked at Hannah beside her.
Hannah was looking at the water with the inventory-taking eyes doing something different — not cataloguing, not processing. Just looking. Just being in the presence of the thing and letting it be what it was.
"He liked it here," Hannah said. "Matthew. He used to come here. He liked the way it was quiet."
Indigo looked at the water.
"It's a good place," she said.
Hannah looked at her. "You said that before. About Vicrock Forest. When you first got here."
"I know," Indigo said.
"You didn't mean it then."
"No," Indigo said. "I didn't."
She looked at the lake. At the sunset in it.
"I mean it now," she said.
Hannah looked at the water.
They stood there together at the edge of Matthew's lake at sunset in Millhaven seven miles from Vicrock and the water held its colours and the evening came in around them and neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then Indigo said "we should get back for dinner" and Hannah said "yeah" and they turned away from the lake and walked back through the evening toward the town.
Indigo walked and thought about six more stops and three more weeks and the particular shape of a life that kept going forward regardless of what it had been through.
She thought about what came next.
She was the one who got to find out.