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friends, but they had us marked from the beginning. They knew all about us, everything in our files, all about our lives. We think they were planning to kidnap or kill us. That’s why we skipped from the Falls.”
    “You’re sure about this? It wasn’t just paranoia?”
    “It’s always paranoia, but yes, we’re sure.”
    “How did you escape?”
    “I fucked the guards. We got out.”
    Pace thought about how many attendants there were between the ward and the front gate. He counted four. “All of them? One after the other?”
    “Where’s the challenge in that? No. Collectively.”
    Jesus Christ. “Ernie? You screwed Ernie?”
    “I don’t know their names.”
    “I hate Ernie. And Brutus.”
    “I hated all of them. I have father and brother issues too. And men in general. Well, men and women.”
    Pace thought about it some more. “What about forensic evidence?”
    “From the guards?”
    “From the rape.”
    “There was no ejaculation,” Dr. Brandt said. “No sample of semen to test against your DNA.”
    “Then how do you know it even happened?”
    “Severe vaginal bruising. Rectal bleeding. Scratches, welts characteristic to sexual molestation.”
    “Who did she say raped her?”
    “She couldn’t say anything. The trauma sent her into a fugue state. Her father immediately had her taken back to Greece.”
    “How many patients were on the ward?”
    “Thirty-five,” she said.
    “So why were we singled out?”
    “We don’t know, except that it’s likely he considers you four the most likely suspects due to your histories.”
    “Hey,” Hayden said, “I never did any evil shit like that.”
    “Me neither,” Faust said.
    “I only fuck men,” Pia said.
    Rape? Pace wondered. Was he capable of even that?
    Hayden said, “You might’ve been getting it on with Cassandra, we don’t know, but if you were it wasn’t rape. You had a special relationship with her.”
    “I did?”
    “You’ll remember soon enough. But because of that bond you shared with her, Kaltzas thinks you might be responsible for what happened.”
    Dr. Brandt’s lovely face screwed up with anguish. Her shoulder muscles tightened. It had to be tough on her, being surrounded by her greatest failures. “No one on the ward is known for violent tendencies. Since you’re the only true cases of DID at Garden Falls, it cast greater doubt on you since one of your alternates may have been responsible for such brutality even if your primary personalities weren’t.”
    “It could’ve been one of the attendants.”
    “There were three on duty and two night nurses.” A hint of embarrassment crept into her voice. “They were busy playing strip poker together.”
    “They could be covering for each other.”
    “They’re too selfish to cover for anyone. They’ve all been summarily fired and have charges still pending.”
    The laughter was trying to work its way up Pace’s throat again. He turned to the faceless Faust and asked, “Why didn’t I go with you when you ran?”
    “You were supposedly in a straitjacket, shackled to your bed in a secured room. Solitary confinement. It’s where they put the tempestuous cases.”
    “He was there,” Dr. Brandt said. “He was having a bad reaction to his last medication. It was making him very manic. He struggled with the guards, broke one of their arms.”
    You had layers to your life, and within those layers were other strata. Levels and planes and tiers. You got a hold of one memory and it slipped away in a torrent. There was the person you were before the madness and then the one you became. The many you became.
    The man he was now meant nothing except in relation to the one he was an hour ago, and the one he’d be an hour from now. He felt ephemeral, tenuous as tissue paper.
    Pace looked at Dr. Brandt. “Four months ago I was shackled and today I walked out?”
    “You’re perfectly stable when you take your new medication.”
Okay, he wasn’t stable, but he was right enough to