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into tears.
    She shouldn’t do it, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself from putting her arms around the little boy. And then Sean started crying as well, so the embrace was extended, and John was in there, too, and Mary heard herself saying of course, of course they could come back, just for today, just for a little while.

FOUR
    106 HOURS , 8 MINUTES
    COATES ACADEMY WAS quite a bit the worse for wear. Battles had damaged the façade of the main building. There was a hole in the whitewashed brick so big, you could see an entire second-story classroom, a cross-section of the floor beneath it, and a jagged gap that didn’t quite reach to the top of the first-story window below. Most of the glass in the windows was gone. The kids had made an effort to keep the elements out by duct-taping sheets of plastic over the holes, but the tape had loosened and now the plastic and the tape hung limp, stirring with the occasional breeze. The building looked as if it had been through a war. It had been.
    The grounds were a mess. Grass that had always been trimmed to obsessive perfection in the old days now grew wild in some areas and had gone yellow as hay in others. And weeds pushed up through the circular gravel driveway where once parents’ minivans and SUVs and luxury sedans had lined up.
    The plumbing was out in half the building, toilets overflowing and reeking. The smaller buildings, the art classroom, and the dormitories were in better shape, but Drake insisted on staying in the main building. He had occupied the office of the school shrink, a place where in the old days Drake had standing appointments for counseling and testing.
    Do you still dream of hurting animals, Drake?
    No, Doc, I dream of hurting you.
    The office was an armory now. Drake’s guns, nine of them, ranging from hunting rifles with scopes to handguns, were laid out on a table. He kept them unloaded, all but two, the guns he carried on him. He’d hidden the ammunition for the other guns: there was no one Drake trusted. The ammunition, never enough of it, to Drake’s thinking, rested behind the ceiling tiles and in air-conditioning vents.
    Drake sat watching a DVD on the plasma screen he’d stolen. The movie was Saw II . The sound effects were so great. Drake had the volume up high enough to rattle one of the few surviving panes of glass. So he didn’t at first hear Diana’s voice when she said, “He wants you.”
    Drake turned, sensing her presence. He flicked his tentacle arm, the arm that gave him his nickname, Whip Hand, and turned off the set. “What do you want?” he demanded with a scowl.
    “He wants you,” Diana repeated.
    Drake loved the fear in her eyes. Tough-chick Diana: snarky, sarcastic, superior Diana. Scared Diana. Scared of him and what he could do to her.
    “Who wants me?”
    “Caine. He’s up.”
    “He’s been up before,” Drake said.
    “He’s back. Mostly. He’s back and he wants you and Bug.”
    “Yeah? Well, I’ll get there when I get there.” He flicked his whip and turned the set back on. “Great, now I missed the best part. Where’s the remote? I can’t rewind without the remote.”
    “You want me to tell Caine to wait?” Diana asked innocently. “No problem. I’ll just go tell him you’re too busy to see him.”
    Drake took a deep breath and glared at her. Slowly the whip moved toward her, the end twitching with anticipation, wanting to wrap around her neck.
    “Go ahead, do it,” she challenged him. “Go on, Drake. Go ahead and defy Caine.”
    His cold eyes flinched, just a little, but he knew she’d seen it and it made him mad.
    Not today. Not yet. Not until Caine took care of Sam.
    Drake coiled the whip. He had a way of wrapping it sinuously around his waist. But the arm was never entirely still, so it always looked like a pink and gray anaconda squeezing him, always looked like Drake was its prey.
    “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Diana? Me fighting Caine. Sorry to disappoint