That night the canyon filled with screaming, like floods of rain might fill a gorge—our own cries and the victims’ blended, fused, till there was nothing but this tapestry of sound. Now and again the flash of an image: Stitch running down a woman who’d broken out of the house somehow, closing on her across the yard, with the knife hammed in her fist like a long bloody tooth and the singleness of purpose of a hunting animal.

But all these things came to me in fragments. The shutter revolved over my vision, opening, closing it, opening again. Somewhere nearby in the room I could hear Creamy gasping in exhausted passion, frustrated that her victim wouldn’t die.

“Take me,” I heard the woman say, who faced me, hanging in the rope. She had fought hard, for a long time, but now she would surrender. Her head bowed. We had been in the house for a long time by then. It was surprising how much blood could spill out of a person, through how many wounds, and she still fight, cry out and live.

She had raised her head to speak, and for a moment I held her gaze, until her head flopped down again and I summoned frenzy to slam the knife into her a few more times, with my bruised hand and my sore arm.

It stays with me, her dying look—how finally, how absolutely she accepted Até, the suffering passed on to her through me.

Again the dark wing strokes across my sight and when it passes I see Laurel, crouched on her haunches, both hands streaming with blood, on her face a childishly rapt expression, with her fingertip writing higgledy-piggledy on the wall.