0001: That’s because your eyes are closed. OPEN THEM. When my children were killed, I changed like Niobe did. I walked through fire and it turned me to rock. That’s all you need to know about me. I cannot be destroyed. Do not test me.
0001 has left the private chat.
I stand up, my eyes fixed on the screen as the private message thread disappears, my breathing shallow. “Well, that didn’t go very well.”
Thinking about it now, I’m not sure what I expected to get out of 0001. She barely told me anything about herself back when I had her trust. Why should I expect her to identify herself to me now that I don’t?
I head into the bathroom, brush my teeth, take my nighttime meds, along with half a Xanax. I need to sleep. I need to escape, even if it’s only for a few hours.
I exit the Kaya page, so many women still on it, repeating those phrases that just a few days ago I used to find exhilarating. Make him pay. . . . Cut out his heart. . . . Give that bitch a death as miserable as my baby’s. . . . The comments used to feel like witches’ spells; they were that magical and empowering. But now they read like groupthink, the chants of cult members, 0001 the charismatic, invisible leader. Your eyes are closed, she had said to me. OPEN THEM.
And now that I’m remembering, she also said something else. . . .
0001 said she changed like Niobe did when her children were killed. Not child. Children. In the plural.
Of course, she could have just been trying to throw me off.
But she could also be a woman who has lost two sons. . . . Someone like Violet Langford—a sweet librarian with three cats whose mind immediately went to surveillance cameras when I introduced myself to her at her workplace. A woman whose eyes lit up when she spoke of killing, and who explained the act of taking part in a murder with such contagious energy, she sold me almost instantly. A woman who had described herself as having “walked through fire”—exactly the way 0001 just did.
Your eyes are closed. OPEN THEM. . . .
I do. And as I do, it strikes me that when I drove to Havenkill to talk to Violet, my car was chipped—same as it was when, motivated by a similar curiosity, I followed Edward Duval out of the train station. We’re not supposed to see other members in person unless specifically instructed. Yet while 0001 had been all over the Duval incident, she never mentioned my visit to Violet’s workplace.
OPEN THEM.
Other details are coming to me now—how both Violet and 0001 had referred to Ashley Shawger by his given first name of Richard, and how, of all the deaths I’d known of since joining the collective, none had been as baroque and intricate as Shawger’s had been—a collar bomb strapped to his body, detonated in his own house. As though 0001 saved the most theatrical revenge for herself . . .
Something explodes outside my window, making me dive for the floor and cover my head. It takes me time to register that it’s only the roar of an engine, a car winding up my road too fast, gunning it. It passes my house, and I calm down a little bit, but still. Still. There are a couple of houses past mine toward the top of the mountain, but they’re second homes—summer homes. Cars hardly ever drive by my house at this time of year, especially this late. It’s nearly midnight.
I can’t help but think it’s intended for me, how the driver leaned into the accelerator like that, like the punctuation at the end of an angry note.
I’m so alone in this old house. So isolated. It would be so easy to make me disappear.
Twenty
At eight in the morning I call Wendy on the burner phone. “Camille,” she says in a hushed, nervous voice. “I’m at work.”
“Okay. Well . . . can I talk to you? It won’t take long.”
“Wait a second,” she says. “Just hang on.”