A mustard field is where he drives her. She suspects she has visited it in dreams. The green speckled with yellow. So vibrant, so similar to her image of heaven that for all she knows she might already be dead.

He spins the cylinder of his revolver, clinks four shells inside, more than he'll probably need.

His truck quakes softly, the engine still rumbling.

"Get out," he says.

Her lips tighten to a hard line. "So you can drive off and leave me here?"

"Sure, that's it."

"You haven't taken the key out of the ignition, so you must be indecisive about killing me."

He takes the key out of the ignition.

"Awesome." Her lips untighten. "There goes that."

He studies the rearview mirror like a shard of a crystal ball framed in plastic.

"Out. Now."

She cracks open the passenger door. "Will it hurt?"

"What?"

"The bullet."

"I'll shoot you somewhere where it won't."

"So I'll die before I feel anything?"

"Exactly."

"How many seconds before?"

He brings his head down against the steering wheel. "Shut up."

Her toes tingle on the gravel as she slides out of his truck. He nods, as if her actions are a sentence he agrees with, and stiffly he exits his own side of the vehicle.

"Start walking into the field," he mutters.

The gravel succumbs to a moist and spongy loam under her shuffling feet, and the mustard plants tickle her as she submerges herself in them, wading as though in water. She flinches when she hears his gun cock behind her. His boots thud slowly, matching her cautious strides.

"Are you going to think about me after?" She plucks a yellow flower as she walks.

"No," he says.

"I doubt that." She raises the flower to her nose, and it smells similar to the clovers her mother used to grow.

He scoffs. "You don't know me, kid."

"I know that you care," she says, "even though you don't want to."

"I couldn't give two shits about you, kid."

"Are you leveling the gun at my head?"

"How did you know?"

An orange pus of a dawn seeps up from the horizon. She stops in her tracks and traces its skeins of light with her pinky. "We've gone fifty steps from your truck, well, you thirty because you're bigger than me. You snapped the safety of your gun on and off three times between then and now. You've sighed five times and—"

"Will you please stop counting?"

She feels the gun's barrel poke her nape.

"What will happen to Prisha?" she asks.

"The same thing that will happen to you," he answers.

"It was my fault we were out there." Her teeth chatter, though sweat glues her dress to her and she feels hotter than flames. "I deserve to be punished. I alone."

"It's not about deserving or not deserving." His voice, for all its grit, quavers. "You ought to know that better than anyone."

She does something risky next. She turns to stare down the barrel of his gun. "Prisha said that where you took her, there were girls in the walls. Is that true?"

"A good bit of things are true that shouldn't be."

"You have girls living in the walls, like corpses in a morgue?"

"Not just girls."

She blinks slowly. "Boys too."

"Whatever our customers have need for."

"You mean 'whomever.' "

"Whatever."

She counts the veins in his eyes, and then she counts the branches of the veins. "What do you think about God?"

The corners of his mouth twitch up. He scowls to conquer them. "I think he—"

"He?"

"Yes, he."

"Okay."

"I think he wishes to strike me dead."

She circles the barrel of the gun with the flower she plucked. "You think he will?"

"I don't think so, no. I'll just sort of go on, the way all bad men do." He lowers his revolver and glares intently at something down yonder. "Our headline world, kid, forgets sins as easily as fashion trends. It shuns its monsters only until they get normalized by its movies and TV shows. You're only a bad man until another man comes along and does something worse. And there'll always be worse, kid. There'll always be unspeakably, irreversibly worse."

He tramps back to his truck, thumps his way inside. She follows, a twiggy silhouette slinking across the yellow and the green and the backlight of dawn. Settling, jittery, in the seat beside him, she uses the stem of her flower to dig at the dirt under her fingernails.

"You didn't kill me," she reminds him.

"I guess I didn't." He fidgets with his gun. Clunk. Clank. Clack.

Light spills over the field, bronzing the soil and turning the flowers into jewels. She studies him in those few rays that stipple in through the grimy windshield. He jabs his key once more into the ignition, backs the truck onto the road, and drives off.

"But I do have to kill you." He pulls a lever and the dashboard begins to click. He steers left and the truck wobbles to realign itself with the road. "Just not in a field. I'll do it back at the Labyrinth. We'll make it decent, kid. I owe you that much."

She sinks in her seat. "Just swear it won't hurt."

"I already swore."

"No, you said it wouldn't hurt. You swore nothing."

"Would you really trust my word?"

She remembers Prisha's refusal to promise.

"Sure, I would."

"You're quite dumb, kid."

Dew collects on the truck's windows. The drops get heavy and trickle into each other and down, down, in a kind of miniature river system on the glass.

Her brain thrums in her, but its aching fades. "What's 14,400 multiplied by 1,164?"

Telephone poles jet by.

Must. Not. Count. Them.

Prithviraj pulls the lever again. Clicking ensues. He makes another turn. Wobble goes the truck. Straight goes the road.

"No clue," he says.

"That's what I thought," she says, and crushes the flower in her fist.