She didn’t make it more than a few feet before something snapped inside of her, whatever tenuous steel threads had been keeping her muscles tense and her body upright. Perhaps she’d simply realized she wasn’t in danger any longer, that I’d put Bella away and my hands were free of weapons, that Fletcher and her nightmare were no longer making her mind race with fear. Maybe she was just exhausted, ready to pass out where she stood. She stumbled, pulling down on my arm, and then began abruptly to sob.

It was a quiet sort of crying, but it shook her thin frame and I didn’t know how to stop it. “Hey,” I said quietly. I tried to steer her outside, but when we made it to the inside wall of the warehouse, she sagged against it to sit on the floor. “Hey,” I said again. It didn’t seem to be very effective. “No one’s trying to hurt you anymore. I promise I’m not.”

She hiccuped. “What’s—what’s going on? Who are you?”

“Well,” I said. I thought about my answer for a moment, and then I joined the girl in sitting on the ground. The cement was cold and gritty, with long grooves dug into it by moving boxes back and forth. “The answer to that first question’s tricky, kid.”

“That lady was trying…she wanted to kill me. Why?”

“Yeah, she was.” I reached into my pocket for a cigarette only to find I’d burned through the pack. I weighed the empty box between my fingers for a moment before tossing it off into the darkness. “You want to know? Okay. You were having a nightmare. Now you’ve been yanked to their damn city full of walking nightmares and there’s no getting back. And…if that all happened for the reasons I suspect, then she won’t be the last to want you dead. Even I didn’t land in that kind of mess,” I said, “if only cause nobody cared about the guy.”

She stared at me. “Never…getting back? I…no. That’s not true.” She placed her hands against the wall and stood shakily. “That’s not real. You’re saying things which aren’t real. I don’t know who you are.”

“Going to run off again? Good luck with that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then sit back down.” Her eyes darted to the door, then to the pocket where I’d stored Bella. She wiped a little of the blood from her neck and sat back down. “Cry yourself out—we won’t get anywhere if you’re doing that.” She sniffed, but her eyes seemed to have dried, even as bloodshot as they were. The side of her nose was crusted with snot but that was the least of her problems at the moment. “Let’s start from the beginning so it’s easier,” I said. “How long have you been here already? What do you remember?”

She frowned. “A…day. A day. I’m hungry.”

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“No, you’re not. You just think you should be. What about before that?”

She shook her head.

“What, nothing?”

She shook her head even more violently. “Why? Why don’t I…”

“You don’t remember anything?” Now I really wished I had a cigarette, if only to make processing this all a little easier. “It’s a rough trip here but it seems like you really are getting the worst of it, kid.”

“Don’t—don’t call me ‘kid’. I’m eleven.”

“Eleven? That’s still such a child.” And a child who wouldn’t be of much help, if she didn’t remember a thing about Chesnes’ murder. It was what I needed her to tell me; it was what Fletcher would have killed to stop her saying. “Alright, k—alright. Maybe we’re going about this all wrong. Maybe this isn’t the time while you’re still bloody and beaten up.” I sighed. “I’m Starling. What’s your name?”

It took longer than it should have for her to dredge it from her memory. It was a worrying problem—but she’d been falling from one nightmare to another, slinking scared around the sandbar before being subjected to Fletcher’s overpowering aura. I hoped she could find all the broken jigsaw pieces of her mind soon enough, for both our sakes. “Robin,” she said after a minute. “My name’s Robin. I remember that. The rest…” She placed a hand on her forehead, leaving a faint smear of blood there. “It’s all blurry. I know it’s there but I can’t find it.”

“Robin, huh? It’s a fine name.”

“I guess.” She didn’t offer up a surname and I didn’t press her on it. It wouldn’t matter anyway in the Outscape. “What are we going to do?”

“We? No.” It had been Fletcher who insisted on lumping us together. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave this miserable little warehouse and I’m going to walk back to my office and I’m going to hope I manage it without someone else trying to kill me. I’m going to dig out a goddamn cigarette from my desk and I’m going to enjoy it and I’m going to pass out as soon as I can get my shoes off. It’s been too long a day to do anything else.” My still-bruised legs protested as I levered myself to my feet, and I rolled my shoulders to clear the knots there.

Robin looked up at me. “What about me? I don’t want to stay here. I’m scared.” She pushed the words on me with a kind of desperation, as though I should have been sympathetic. “All the time I was outside, by the ocean…I saw more people like her. I felt them. You won’t…you wouldn’t leave…?”

“It’s not much of an office,” I said. “And I don’t know where you’ll sleep.”

“But you’ll take me there? With you?”

I wasn’t heartless. I wouldn’t really have left her here to fend for herself, not the linchpin in finding what’d really happened to Chesnes. But she was a dangerous commodity to be handling, and I didn’t want her to expect too much of me. “Just tonight,” I said. “You understand that? Just for tonight. After that we’re going to have a real conversation and we’ll figure out what to do with you.”

“Yeah,” she said. Robin walked over and grabbed onto the edge of my coat as if she was worried about losing me. I’d have been annoyed at the grubby state of her hands except that the coat really wasn’t much cleaner. “I know—I understand. But I’m not sure…if you’re being nice to me or not.”

I shrugged. “You can sleep on it. Isn’t a lot to dream about in the Outscape otherwise.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Don’t actually do that.”

“Okay.”

“You’re learning fast,” I told her. “Now come on. It’s too late for this.”

We walked back to the office. It was a long way there, hiking through the complex dreamlike streets, and Robin clung to me the entire time.