It was some time later. I didn’t know how long. There was no clock in the room and I didn’t trust myself to judge the seconds passing. Jabberwock had left me half-dizzy, my eyes taking too long to slide into focus against the tiled wall. I was worried about more than that. Jabberwock, too, had left me like an old existential philosopher, uncertain whether I was dreaming or not. Even in this damn city I’d never had to worry about it before. Now my circuits were crossed and my wires sparking, and I didn’t know when I’d get the taste of it off my tongue.

The door opened outward. I staggered to my feet, sliding a little on the ground, seeking a glimpse out into the hall beyond. Nothing. Nothing remarkable, at least. A grim cement corridor, stretching off in both directions. Colorless white light that betrayed only its artifice and not the time of day. Fletcher stepped neatly through, letting the door swing shut behind her and latch. “Starling,” she said. “So you woke up.”

She wore a white coat that was too big for her, hanging loose off her thin frame. On both sleeves was the asklepian symbol, the rod with a snake wrapped around it to signify medicine and healing. I knew it cause in one of his closets, Usher kept a baseball bat with a dead pit viper curled around it, and he’d been only too happy to explain it when I asked him why the hell he kept it. On Fletcher’s coat, the snake’s fangs were marred with scarlet thread and its beady eyes were alight with a rabid hunger that seemed to follow me wherever I looked.

“Evidently,” I said.

“You might not have,” she said. “And here you wanted to give it, untested, to that little girl dogging your heels. I hadn’t thought much of you, but that was well after my own heart and mind.”

I shivered. “Where is she?”

“And what makes you think you deserve to know that? I doubt she wants to see you.”

I was hardly listening to her. “No, no,” I said. “Jabberwock doesn’t need me. You’re after Robin and what she knows, and you’d just as soon see me dead and removed from the playing field—you tried it with Zamir and you almost damn well succeeded. But instead I’m enjoying your hospitality here…and that means you don’t have Robin.” The tight fury which crossed her face was all the confirmation I needed, and I almost laughed in relief. “I’m the runner-up prize, cause the one you wanted up and bolted before you could lay hands on her.”

“It was you she was running from,” Fletcher snapped. “You may try and gloat but it is you who lost her. You who should have controlled her.”

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“Glad I didn’t, then.”

“We will find her. There are only so many streets in the city, and we own them. Soon the time will come when no one else can pretend otherwise. And,” she said, with that cold singsong voice I’d heard her use that first night, ready to kill Robin where she stood, “it will be all the worse for her that she dared run. Jabberwock can be as painful as we wish it.”

“And me? Which do I get?”

Fletcher turned and knocked four times, a stutter-stop rhythm that must have been prearranged. The door opened again, and another nightmare stepped through, leaning back up against the frame so that the door remained cracked open. She was tall, with sharp short blond hair that could have been trimmed with a knife and a scowl that bared one serrated tooth. She wore a rich navy blue jacket with fur around its collar that seemed to bristle of its own accord. I’d never seen her face before, but somehow I knew it before she spoke, in a deep low purr. “Why,” she said, “the caged bird will sing for us.”

“Arcadia,” I growled. Standing there so smug, so self-assured, with the blood of my friend on her hands. “I’m not telling you a damn thing. The only thing you deserve from me is a bullet or six.”

To her right, Fletcher slowly backed away. I remembered what she’d said about Arcadia’s viciousness, that she was a nightmare even the others in Jabberwock were frightened of, that she’d earned her position as the outfit’s lieutenant through a path of blood. “I remember hearing the same thing,” she said. “From a friend of yours. It was so quick that Madeline Zamir broke.”

“She was a coward. Even I knew that.”

“Oh, yes.” Arcadia licked her lips. “And she took the coward’s way out.”

I was moving before I had the chance to think about it. Arcadia jerked back out of the way of my fist with inhuman speed, grabbing my arm before I could try a second time. Her nails were sharp, digging into my skin like claws. She dug them in a little deeper and I gasped in pain, pinpricks of blood welling up. “Do you want to know why you are really here?” Arcadia hissed. “Do you want to know why we let Fletcher play her little games? Do you want to know why you will tell us everything you know about the girl and the monster of these streets?”

With another flare of pain, I ripped my arm free of her grasp. Drops of blood fell onto the ground. “Maybe it’s fun,” I said, pressing my other hand against the puncture wounds. What kind of a nightmare was Arcadia, I wondered in the back of my mind. Why couldn’t I feel it? What kind of a nightmare had clawlike hands and sharpened teeth but no aura surrounding them? “Maybe it’s the change of scenery.”

“Because,” she said, “there’s no way out.”

“That’s it?”

“There is no poison you can swallow. There is no door to run out into the street. There are no shadows in which to hide. You may playact at boldness, you may try and pry your way free of these walls. But I am tired,” she said, “of prey that runs. I am tired of the chase. And once you believe that, once you know it for certain…then you will sing.”

She motioned for Fletcher to follow her out. With Arcadia’s back turned, Fletcher gave me an almost sympathetic look—better that I was on the receiving end of Arcadia’s cruelty than she was, it said. The door shut. It was just me and the walls and the last words of Arcadia still ringing between them. No way out to find or to run or to fly. No way out.