BZRK

a small square called Madison Square Park. It was a rectangle not a square, and not much of a park. But it was a place you could be at night, at midnight just to be melodramatic, without worrying too much about your safety.
    She waited, by herself, with a scarf covering the bottom third of her face and a hat pulled down over her hair.
    There weren’t that many pictures of Sadie in circulation—Google turned up only three. But she was, if not famous, then certainly notorious now. The sole surviving McLure. A potential focus of the needs of a media currently still obsessing over the stadium tragedy. She wanted not to be recognized. And she wouldn’t be, not in an empty park at night with steam leaking through her scarf.
    She was cold. It was cold and the wind made her broken arm ache and her eyes run. She stood with one hand pushed deep into her coat pocket and the other hand—gloveless because she’d forgotten she would want gloves—sticking out of a sling.
    A boy came up. Handsome boy. No, a beautiful boy, and older than she, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Tall and slender, Mediterranean but with a nose and mouth and brow and expression that did not say, “descended from Spanish fishermen,” but rather, “descended from the sorts of people who once upon a distant time rode around on tall horses trampling peasants.”
    He came to her. Raised one eyebrow and looked down at her with disappointment and said, “Are you a friend of Vincent’s?”
    She disliked him immediately. Not the kind of dislike that might later give way to attraction. The kind of dislike that might, with some effort, remain mere dislike and not harden into contempt.
    In fact, he was Luis Aragon, the middle of three sons of a Spanish land developer who had once been shockingly rich but was now only rich. But Luis had left his name behind in trade for the name Renfield.
    “I suppose I am,” she said.
    “Follow me,” Renfield said.
    She made no move as he spun on his heel and walked away. It took him perhaps fifteen steps to realize he was walking alone. He came back at double speed. He seemed torn between bewilderment and anger.
    “Hey,” Sadie said, “I don’t take orders. Sometimes I take requests.”
    Renfield blinked. He drew himself up and back, the better to turn his long, straight nose into a sort of targeting device, lining his eyes up to look down at her.
    “You have a car? Or are we walking?” Sadie asked.
    The boy’s eyes went instinctively to a black Audi A8 idling and exuding exhaust smoke. She started walking. The boy hurried to keep up.
    “What’s your name?” Sadie asked.
    “You must call me Renfield. In the car you will be blindfolded. And you will be prevented from removing your blindfold. If you refuse, you will remain here. These are not suggestions: these are facts.”
    He had an accent. Yep. A definite cultured, eliding, peasant-trampling sort of accent with too many soft
th
sounds. Also, he had rolled the
r
in Renfield. Beyond that she had no idea where the accent came from, just that he was not American born.
    The urge to say GFY was overwhelming. Sadie was not in a happy or patient frame of mind. She’d gone from terror to loss to pain to this park and this arrogant snot of a human being. And if Renfield had been looking at her, he would have seen all of that, including an unpacked GFY, in her eyes.
    A liveried driver climbed out to get the door. Sadie was there before him, shot him a smile, and hopped in.
    Twenty dark minutes later the car stopped and the engine was turned off and the blindfold was removed and she was staring at a graffiti-tagged Dumpster. In a narrow alley courtyard, the kind of place where someone might have squeezed a couple of cars they didn’t love too much.
    She let the driver get the door. Climbed out. Still cold. Still New York. Sooty red brick and rusted-iron fire escapes all around and above and a smell of well-aged garbage.
    Renfield thumbed a text on his phone.
    “Where are we?” Sadie asked.
    Renfield refused to answer. A door opened without spilling much light. “Come on,” he said.
    Sadie followed Renfield into a warmer interior. The door closed. Someone was standing behind her and the hair on the nape of her neck tingled.
    A second door opened, and she stepped into bright lights and white walls and a space no larger than a small walk-in closet. Renfield was not with her. No one was with her. There was a stainless steel push-door slot on one wall.
    “Welcome,” a