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ran toward the waist-high iron fence between his house and the neighbor’s. If there was any route of escape it would be here.
    He vaulted the fence, landed with a skitter of stones, and sprinted across the narrow back lot—and the next one after that. When he reached the end of the third lot, he veered toward the lane and sprinted across the old cobbles.
    A shout issued from the alley less than twenty paces off. Rom ran through the narrow file between two houses on the other side of the lane, out to the opposite street. Past house lots, past a copse of stunted trees to a path at the edge of a tiny neighborhood park.
    The perennial clouds that obscured the sun by day obscured the moon most nights as well. But Rom would have found his way along this path in pitch darkness.
    He could think of only one person who might help him make sense of his predicament.
    Avra.
    It took him ten minutes at a steady jog to reach her neighborhood, where he ducked around the corner of a small outbuilding. Hearing no sound, he ran, bent low along the rear walk of several row houses, to the fifth one. When he’d made his way to the back of the building, he stopped midway at a heavy door with a combination lock and listened for any sign of pursuit.
    Nothing.
    He entered the code and let himself into the building, but he did not breathe any easier.
    Seeing his mother die so violently left him with no doubt as to his own fate. If they would kill her simply to put fear into his heart, they would think nothing of killing him.
    He saw it again—the obscene gush of blood, the slumping of Anna’s body, the way she had collapsed to the floor.
    In the Age of Chaos, before humanity had evolved out of its slavery to emotions, he might have suffered their debilitating effects. He remembered the word sorrow , whatever that was, and knew it might have rendered him a lump of useless flesh, in which case he would have been dead by now.
    Then again, fear had nearly incapacitated him. Now he would have to control that fear if he hoped to survive.
    He turned up a short staircase of decaying cement. The landing separated into two doorways. He entered the code into the left one and silently let himself in, wondering momentarily if he would enter another death scene.
    The kitchen and living room inside were quiet, dimly lit by a single lamp.
    “Avra?” His voice seemed too loud.
    He hurried past the kitchen to the hallway that led to the only bedroom on the floor. The door pushed open easily.
    “Avra?”
    She bolted up from her bed along the adjacent wall. A book fell with a thump to the floor.
    “Rom!” she breathed. “What are you doing scaring me like that?”
    For a moment, he told himself it was all untrue. That it had not happened—the murder of the old man or of his mother. Here in the familiar clutter of Avra’s bedroom, unchanged in all the years he had known her, he could almost believe it.
    But then he remembered the box in his hand, the ache in his fingers from his death grip around it.
    And its death grip on him.
    He would find no refuge here. They had found him at home; they would come to this place soon enough.
    “I need your help,” he said.
    She stared back with startled eyes so dark he couldn’t tell where the irises ended and the pupils began. At first glance one might mistake her for a girl younger than her twenty-three years. Lithe-framed and small-boned, she embodied youthful fragility, though she was stronger than anyone might guess.
    “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”
    They were running out of time. He looked around, found her shoes, and grabbed them. “We need to go. Quick. Put these on,” he said, dropping them before the bed. He blew out the lantern on the desk and then drew the curtain aside. “Hurry!”
    “Hurry why? You’re scaring me!”
    “We have to go.”
    “What? Why?”
    “My mother’s dead.” His voice was as empty as he felt.
    “What?” She blinked.
    He glanced at her from the