They returned the way they had come, silent except for their footsteps, which sounded large in the empty corridor. Jimmy began to hum a brooding, all-too familiar tune. Walter had never been a big fan of movies, but who alive didn't know the Darth Vader theme?

"Enough," Tim said.

"What's wrong with you today? Your boy keep you up all night again about the monsters under his bed?"

"We're adults here."

Jimmy blinked, as though confused. "Then why does Sir Hudgins give me naptime?" Regardless, he stopped humming. Walter had a good feeling that was as close as anyone could get to making Jimmy shut up without a fight. There were plenty of kids like him around when Walter grew up, boys who graduated from class clown to simply clown after high school. He should know. He had been one himself once. Sooner or later life would catch up to Jimmy Loft and bite his legs off at the knees, and he wouldn't feel so big or so funny anymore. Life always did.

They stopped at a small white door aligned with the main entrance across the lobby. Tim unlocked the door, then locked it promptly behind them. They stuffed into a small room, a room just crowded enough between the three of them that it was easy to imagine the light above going dim, so easy Walter had to fight to keep his thoughts from straying elsewhere. This space, he guessed, was likely here to provide an extra obstacle for an escapee. That, and to maintain the pristine, whitewash illusion of the lobby. The occasional visitor couldn't see the gate that Tim now unlocked: black corroded iron with steel hinges embedded in stone, the first glimpse of the other Harbrook Hill except for the bars on the windows. This may look like a hospital, but make no mistake. Had the paint job out front been given to the East and West Ward, which could hardly be glimpsed from the driveway, as well? Walter doubted it.

Past the gate was another corridor, running parallel to the hallway they had walked down to reach Mr. Hudgins' office. They turned to the right. A girl in white scrubs was walking toward them, red hair pulled into a pony tail. She started to giggle as she drew close, a flush warming the spaces between her freckles. Walter looked down and saw that Jimmy was making faces at her.

"Hey, Jimmy. Who's your new friend?"

"This here is Walter Hosler. You remember him, don't you? You remember good old Safe-Man." He said this last part as a statement, not a question.

An indrawn breath hollowed her cheeks. "Bye, Jimmy."

"I think she's scared of you, big guy," Jimmy said after she was well past. His voice clipped. "I don't blame her."

Tim walked on silently, his face aimed straight ahead. He wore a crew cut—obviously by his own choice, since Hudgins allowed Jimmy to hang shaggy blond curls down his forehead—and buttoned his uniform up to his Adam's apple. Walter knew his type, too. Military dad, perhaps ex-military himself. Tim was a professional.

A few guards were holding cards around a table further down the hall, now and then throwing what looked like gold dimes into piles. Jimmy must have seen Walter glance at them, or perhaps the game was simply something to talk about, the most available choice to keep from falling silent. "The doctors tried to set up a reinforcement system a little while back. Called it a token society, or something like that. If a patient is good, answers the questions in the right way or kisses the right behind at the right time, he gets a token. At the end of the month, that patient gets to buy a treat. Soda, chocolate bars, a pack of smokes, you name it. But then coins started disappearing and some shit started shining—hey, Stooley!"

A man whose gut was nearly bursting from his uniform looked up sharply, disturbing sweat from his brow. "What?"

"Looking fresh there, buddy. You just get out of the shower?"

"Oh, piss off." He sat up a little as he saw Walter. "Is that—?"

"This is he," said Jimmy. "In the flesh."

"Wait, I have something for him." Stooley reached under his armpit and pretended to search around. "Almost—almost—there it is," he said, and retrieved his damp middle finger. Laughter exploded at the table. A huge hand pounded Stooley on the back, and the sound made Walter think of raw meat on a butcher's slab. Someone's chips fell on the floor, and there was a scrambling between the lot to retrieve them. Tim tightened his grip around Walter's arm.

"I'll join you in a minute, boys." Jimmy sighed. He looked sideways at Walter. "I was supposed to get off at eight this morning. Do you see how much I sacrifice for you?"

They stopped in front of a door as Tim picked out another key. A window of safety glass above the large brass lock looked out on a courtyard. Had it not been for the stainless steel framing the view, Walter might not have connected the courtyard to the one photographed a century earlier. Where the group had gathered on concrete in the picture, a lawn was boxed within cobblestone pathways. Elms reached high and trembling along the chain link in the rear. Ten feet—or more—tipped in coils of barbwire separated the yard from the woods.

The woods were dense and deep and silent as the three of them stepped outside, a vast green shade poised like premature dusk beneath the sky. No, not quite silent. There was a faint rustling, leaves, or some stealthy movement in the underbrush. Then a dry snap, the crack of a branch. Walter held his breath. It was the closeness of the trees that amplified the noise, that made the branch sound larger than it was, not that whatever had stepped on it had been large too. A deer was stalking around out there, surely, nothing else. Plenty of animals must live on the property.

Jimmy swept his arm over the courtyard. "Behold the recreation area, where the inmates—excuse me, patients—come out for recess." He pointed at a large concrete barrier running from the administrative wing to the chain link fence. "And that right there is the Berlin Wall. Keeps the flavors from mixing. You here on the east side are, how do you say, a bit zestier than the folks over there." A shriek of laughter clawed up over the wall, as if in response. Jimmy grinned. "The west side does, however, have a much better sense of humor."

Walter turned his head to the East Ward. As he had suspected, the white out front was for visitors only. The East Ward was chipped and discolored, gray as the sky-background in places, closer to black in others where mold or elements had rot the stone. It was a tooth without enamel, a cavity poking from a gum of concrete. It was also impressive, perhaps more than anything else, impressive in how high it seemed to reach with only five stories and how alone it seemed to stand, each window empty, a lockbox with insides dimmed. There were 28 windows on this side by a quick bit of math, ignoring the first floor, which meant another 28 peered over the woods. Let his face the courtyard, not the wilderness. Let him have that at least, he prayed, though he hadn't seen much of God since sixteen when he struck it lucky with Alva at the Kolewood carnival. But then, considering how things had turned out, maybe it had been the devil that day.

The lobby of the East Ward smelled of rubbing alcohol and grease, and the checkered gray-white linoleum gleamed from a recent mopping. An old man pushed a cartload of laundry higher than himself toward a door that was breathing steam through the cracks. Someone hacked behind a pair of stainless steel swinging doors, and a woman's voice remarked on seasoning for the mashed potatoes. Tim steered Walter firmly to the right from the entrance, and soon it became apparent that the stairwell at the southern end of the lobby was their destination.

"Elevator is for food and wheelchairs only," Jimmy said as they walked past the bronze doors. "You and us, we get our exercise."

Walter had spent the last year confined in various cells and interrogation rooms, and he was breathing heavily by the time they reached floor five, his head spinning from the corkscrew of the flights. He saw one more series of stairs and turned automatically to walk up them, but the hands on his arms held him back.

"Not that way, big guy," Jimmy said. "That's the rooftop. Nothing lives up there."

At the top of the steps sat a door, small and peeling and red. Walter stared up at it. He was no longer breathing so fast. He was no longer breathing at all. As he turned away, he felt the door in the corner of his eye like a tiny drop of blood.

The fifth floor, unlike the lower levels, was barred. Tim stood still, a statue in slacks and a buttoned shirt, while the younger guard took a turn with the keys.

"You're under double-lock, old buddy," Jimmy said, and shoved the gate.

It groaned open on a long corridor lit by a single light bulb, which drooped from the ceiling like an inverted punchbowl. The walls and floor were a dull, beaten color. The doors gleamed with big brass bolts, buttons for steel jackets, and stood staggered on either side of the hall. Barred window-holes marked each door, none of which faced another. Halfway down a skinny arm dangled from a cell, fingers playing around the handle.

"What do you think you're doing, Miss Early?" Jimmy asked.

The arm withdrew through the bars like an eel, and a sweet, almost childlike, voice said, "Sorry."

"You want to tell Safe-Man here why we call you that?"

"Because I wake up."There was a pause as she drew in her breath. Then she sang, loudly, "Early in the morning."

Jimmy nodded. "You're going to like her."

"Early in the morning!"

"You shut your mouth!" said a second voice.

"No!" said a third.

"Damn it, Jimmy, see what you did?" Tim rapped his nightstick against the gate. The fifth floor went quiet, except for a husky breathing in one of the rooms. Tim glared at Jimmy, his arm still raised, but Jimmy only winked up at Walter.

"Are you ready to meet the family?"

The first cell was on the left, its bed empty and unmade. The number 501 was carved into the doorframe. "Cyrus Triska," said Jimmy , then Walter saw that the rumpling in the sheets was actually a man, so thin his legs and feet appeared wrinkles. On the right, 515. "Benjamin Palls." On the left, 502. "Alfred McSharry." Jimmy looked straight ahead, his speaking clipped, something in his step that had not been there before, something which felt both rigid and unconscious. Like habit, or the cold floor bleeding through Walter's slippers. "Kieth Stanwell, Rodger Fagundo, Darwin Huyard, Myles Puppe," who was pressing his palms into the dividing wall and weeping silently, "Eddy Watne, Adele Hereth, also known as Miss Early." Hair floated from her head in hoary wisps, a wreath surrounding pruned skin. "Bradley Hayes, Carey Zepp." The cell that capped the hallway was drawing closer, the windows on its door and outer wall aligned, their bars dissecting a gray square of sky. "Jeffrey Kingsley." The source of the husky breathing. He stood naked by his bed, pointing at them—but not with his finger. Jimmy paused briefly. "Want to know what we call him?"

"Jimmy," warned Tim.

But Jimmy was already rattling off the rest of the rooms. "Louis Pastel, 507. The Invisible Man, 508." Jimmy motioned into the cell at the end of the hall. It was truly empty, not even a mattress on the steel bed frame. "And then there's you," he said, turning to the last room on the right. Room 509. The side that faced the woods. A distant ache began to throb inside Walter's knees. He was five full stories above the ground, he told himself. The highest tree was far below, the ledges outside so narrow they might as well not exist—

Jimmy turned the key.

"Go down to laundry and grab his whites," Tim said, his hand tightening on Walter's arm as though Walter might try then, at the end, to run. Jimmy stared up at Walter, blocking the way. His face was straight, serious. His eyes, not quite.

"Talk to you later," he said, then slipped back down the hall.

The cell was roughly nine feet by six, but it felt smaller once the door had shut behind him. Walter swallowed, the sound of the deadbolt lodged like a lump inside his head, and surveyed the space. He had a small toilet, the bowl of which connected directly to the wall, but no sink to wash. He had a bed that would fit most of him. He had one vent, the window. Walter walked to it. The bars were wider apart than they had appeared from the ground. An arm—even a large arm—could fit between them easily. He glanced down at the mottled canopy of trees below, then reached up to shut the window. The pane of safety glass wouldn't budge. He gave it another tug before noticing a tiny-keyhole set in the window frame.

"We close them in the winter."

Walter turned around, heart in throat. Tim was still standing outside the cell, his gaze no longer watchful but pained. Walter understood then. He had read the guard's stiff posture and silence as signs of professionalism, and like Officer Rocher before with him, Walter had been mistaken. There were two types of people in Kolewood: those that worked in the schools, the way Walter's wife had, and those that worked in Harbrook Hill.

Everyone heard about the murder. Most treated Walter with disgust or contempt on principle alone. But this was different. This was no stranger uncut by Alva's death. This was an open wound. Tim knew Walter. And loathed him.

"Welcome home. Safe-Man."