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face of some kind of beautiful monster—and her hands were out in front of her like claws.
    “I hate you,” she said, venom in her words. Then her eyes widened and she screamed, “I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU!”
    He smashed his hands against his ears and cried out as if he was being struck, because that’s how it felt.
    She was looking right at him. Did she see him? The light was behind her, but it wasn’t very bright, so he couldn’t be sure.
    With a single broad step, he slipped behind a cooler tower. Now peering through the falling water, he watched her as she turned once again toward the edge.
    For another long moment, she leaned out over the abyss.
    Then she straightened up. Turned around. Without looking again in his direction, without making a sound, she strode to the stairway door.
    Then she was gone, back into the building that was her home and, he now understood, her prison. He didn’t know if she would actually have jumped, not even if she’d been planning to. But he feared it.
    His heart went with her down the hard steel stairs to the luxury and torment of the fiftieth floor. In his mind was the image of her glowing in the moonlight, and another image, of her lying in the alley as his father had, arms spread, absolutely still.
    He slid into his space and closed his eyes. He stayed there a while. He lay listening, determined to stay alert in case she came back. But his thoughts went to those night-vision goggles.
    He got his rose and cradled it.
    The rose of life and the rose of happiness, he thought, and in that moment he made a decision. It was dangerous, he knew, and it was foolish, and it would take from him the thing he loved the most. But he also knew that his rose could bring Melody happiness, too, and maybe even help her somehow.
    He slipped into the electrical room through the hatch he’d made from his little space, then dropped down along the hot, humming cables and into the fiftieth-floor crawl space. There was rock music coming from 5052 and, from across the hall, a man and a woman arguing. Apartment 5050 was silent. He went out across the ceiling of the den and did something he never did when somebody was home.
    He put his hand on his hatch. Closed his fingers around the little latch he’d screwed into it and opened it.
    Silence below. Darkness. A faint odor of something sweet—perfume, he thought.
    He dropped down into the closet. Hardly breathing, he listened for movement in the room beyond.
    Not a sound.
    He stepped into the hallway, then stopped listening.
    All he could hear was his own thrashing heart.
    Why was he doing this? Was he crazy? But he had to. He wanted to give her the rose.
    He stood before her door, pressed his ear against it, listened, and heard nothing from inside. Was she asleep?
    Turning the handle carefully, he opened the door a crack. He waited. No sound. He opened it further. Her bed was a dark pool, her form on it a curled shadow.
    In three long, silent steps, he was beside her. He looked down at her face, shadowy and gorgeous, the full lips held in a line that suggested great sadness.
    Trembling, he laid a hand on her broad forehead, feeling fear and electric pleasure as he touched her for the first time. For a moment he was paralyzed, unable to break the connection.
    Then he took his rose from his pocket and placed it on the pillow beside her face.
    He stepped quickly out of the room and slipped ghostlike down the hall and through the den, drawing himself into the crawl space and closing his hatch behind him.
    He slipped into the darkness and hidden passages of the building, leaving behind, like a sacrifice and a talisman, the most precious thing he possessed.

C HAPTER 7

    F rank waited miserably in Mr. Szatson’s big office in his magnificent home. He wasn’t precisely sure why he’d been called to come here, but it couldn’t be good, that was certain.
    He stared out through the glass wall toward the beautiful swimming pool. A woman sat beside it