The Age of Zeus

32. THE MINOTAUR

T he Resistenza Contru-Diu Corsu, to be honest, did very little actual resisting but talked a good fight and had made enough of a nuisance of itself to warrant the Olympians' interest and earn their antipathy.

That was principally on the strength of two incidents. The first took place during a diplomatic visit by Aphrodite to the island's capital Ajaccio, when the goddess of love came under fire from an RCDC member with an antiquated Kalashnikov. The sniper's accuracy was hampered by three things: the age of his rifle, the half bottle of cognac he had downed beforehand in order to steady his nerves, and the fact that, in his crosshairs, Aphrodite looked so lusciously, delectably beautiful that it seemed to him almost a crime to damage such magnificent female physical perfection in any way. All these factors conspired to make him miss her by a mile and instead wing his country's president and gravely wound the regional prefet, both of whom were sharing a podium with the Olympian as they bestowed on her the freedom of the island and a civic medal or some such meaningless official trinket.

Immediately, Aphrodite spoke over the PA system, calling for calm and asking the would-be assassin to step forward and show himself. This the man did, because there were few who could resist the call of Aphrodite's voice or the love that she exuded. He left his rooftop vantage point and walked through the crowd of startled onlookers to the podium, where he knelt submissively before the Olympian, telling her over and over how much he loved her and how sorry he was for trying to kill her. Aphrodite then invited the people from the crowd to come up and hit him. One by one they complied, gladly, with beatific smiles and any hard objects that came to hand. It took them half an hour to beat the man to death, and he relished every minute of his slow capital punishment with a smile no less beatific.

On the other occasion, Apollo dropped by with a view to hunting the indigenous Corsican red deer, an endangered species which he took closer to the brink of extinction by shooting great numbers of them in the Parc Naturel Regional with his bow and arrows. The RCDC, discovering a streak of conservationist concern within themselves that they'd never known they had, waxed indignant. To protect the poor deer they laced the nature reserve with tripwires attached to grenades which were in turn attached to tree trunks. Apollo, however, was too sharp-sighted to fail to spot the tripwires, and decided to make a sport of splitting them from a range of 100 metres or more and detonating the grenades. A couple of the red deer also sprang the traps, inadvertently, which somewhat undercut the whole purpose of laying them in the first place. So much for the RCDC's new-found green credentials. So much, too, for a number of RCDC members. Apollo elected to remain a little longer in Corsica and to hunt much more interesting game. His tally, by the end of his stay, stood at 52 deer, 9 men, 2 women, and one child. Of the twelve humans he bagged, seven definitely belonged to the RCDC, three were suspected of belonging, one had strong ties to the resistance, and one, the child, was simply an innocent bystander who happened to stray into the path of an arrow. Apollo claimed he deeply regretted the death of the last, although he added, with some pride at his own prowess, that his shaft passed clean through the little girl's head, from ear to ear, and continued onward to kill its intended target. A shot in a million, and a quick, instant death that had barely left a mark on the kid. To look at her, lying on the ground, you'd have thought she had just fallen asleep.

There were demonstrations, of course. Protest marches on the streets of Ajaccio, Bastia, Corte and other major towns. The girl, Ghjuvanna Venturini, became a martyr, her death leading countless hitherto unaligned Corsicans to rally to the RCDC's cause.

The Olympians' solution was the typical one: send in a monster. The Minotaur was relieved of its duties in Crete, where it had been busy stamping down on unrest in the aftermath of the tidal wave — the wave which took the lives of Deborah and Megan Chisholm among many others. The Cretans' anger had more or less run its course, so Hermes took the man-bull from its spiritual homeland and transported it northwest across the Mediterranean to the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte where, for almost a year now, it had been carrying out a similar function as it had on Crete. The mountains that occupied most of Corsica's interior were where the RCDC could be found. Heavily forested on their lower slopes, dotted with nigh-on inaccessible villages, riddled with clefts and caves and secret valleys, the mountains were a great place to hide. Through them wound a labyrinth of goat paths and narrow rocky defiles, the solution of which, if it had one, was known only to the locals.

The Minotaur, however, if legend was to be believed, had form when it came to things labyrinthine. No maze fazed it. It stomped along the mountain passes, trekking from village to village, and anyone who challenged it, anyone who got in its way, anyone who so much as looked at it funny, it attacked. No warning, no hesitation, the Minotaur just put its head down and charged. Few could outrun it. Fewer still could survive being tossed or gored by its horns.

Once or twice an RCDC member might manage to get off a lucky shot at the beast before, inevitably, becoming its next victim. Bullets, however, barely pierced the man-bull's thick black hide, and the sting of their impact was an irritant rather than a deterrent. A surefire way to get the Minotaur angry at you was to take a potshot at it.

Landesman told the Titans that this should be borne in mind when it came to killing the monster.

"Nothing short of a rocket or a coilgun is going to put the thing down," he said. "Lesser weapons will simply annoy it and draw its attention. You'd be waving a — No, I shan't say it. Too trite."

"A red rag to a bull?" said Barrington.

"I was so trying to avoid the simile."

"You want the obvious said, Landy old mate, you can always rely on me."

"I know, Dez. I know."

That was during the pre-op briefing. Now, two days later, five Titans were in the field — Tethys, Mnemosyne, Hyperion, Iapetus, Crius — and they had just spent a hot, dusty, and ultimately fruitless nine hours combing the area where the Minotaur had most recently been sighted. They'd found tracks that could only be Minotaur tracks, the imprints of bare human feet far larger than any normal human feet, but the monster itself had proved scarce.

Base camp was a half-dozen tents clustered around a van. Divested of their suits, the Titans gathered wood for a fire, and for their supper Tsang barbecued chicken breasts coated in a marinade that he had prepared specially for this cookout, a sticky, sinfully sweet concoction akin to toffee.

"An old family recipe," he said. "The trick is to boil the soy sauce down to the consistency of tar, then add the chilli, ginger and the other spices and ladle honey on like there's no tomorrow."

"Eat enough of it and there will be no tomorrow," said Mahmoud through a mouthful. "I can feel my arteries furring up."

"You won't be having second helpings then?"

She held out her plate. "I never said that, duck."

Soon everyone had retired to their tents, the two techs included. Only Sam and Ramsay remained up.

"Not sleepy?" he asked her.

"Tired but wired," she replied. She stared into the dark, insect-throbbing landscape around them. The scent of heather was strong on the breeze. "The Minotaur's out there somewhere. Not far. And I don't have my suit on, and, to be blunt, I feel naked without it."

"And here's where I don't make some wisecrack about you being naked."

"Absolutely you don't."

"'Cause it wouldn't be right because you hate me. Again."

"No, it wouldn't be right because it would be inappropriate. If you said that kind of thing in any normal workplace, they'd have you up before a disciplinary tribunal and off on a sexual harassment awareness course before you even knew what hit you."

"So you don't hate me," said Ramsay. "Is that what I can take away from this?"

"Rick, frankly I'm not sure how I feel about you," Sam said. "Let's turn it around. How do you feel about you right now?"

"Honestly?"

She twitched her shoulders — what else?

Ramsay gazed into the fire for a time. "Honestly, what I feel is… empty. I feel I've done it now, I've killed the thing that killed my son, but all that's left me with is this sense of: is that it? Now what? I was expecting to have this great swelling in my chest of triumph, satisfaction, completion…"

"Closure?"

"Oh yeah."

"You Americans are big on your closure."

"We are. And it ain't there, or maybe it is but it doesn't feel like I was hoping. It doesn't feel solid. There's no 'Oh, OK, so that's that chapter done with, let's turn the page and start the next.' Ethan's still dead. Ain't nothing going to change that. Ain't nothing going to bring my little boy back. The Lamia being dead as well kinda balances up the scales but somehow not all the way, not even near. I'm glad it's dead, but mainly I'm glad because that's a whole bunch of other kids who won't be sucked dry by it now, a whole bunch of other parents who won't have the light taken out of their world like I did. So that's something. But it's not everything."

"Ethan's mother. I don't even know her name."

"LaVonne."

"Is she around any more?"

"Why d'you ask?"

"You just never mention her, that's all."

Ramsay shook his head a fraction, just enough to convey regret, regret of the mildest kind. "We'd already split up by the time Ethan was two. LaVonne didn't make a good military wife. Didn't like it when I was off on tours of duty. Didn't like being on her own and me being away for long periods and in danger. Wasn't what she'd married me for, she said. That stopped after the Olympians came. President Mayhew, as it then was, called the troops back home once she realised the Olympians weren't going to let us keep on with our police actions in the 'Istans. Most sensible thing that woman did. Lost her any chance of re-election, of course. She said she was a realist, the other party called her a coward and un-American, although the guy who got in and replaced her hasn't been any more proactive or 'American' than she was, has he? Stavropoulos has even hinted he thinks the Olympians might be actual gods, which gives you some idea where he's coming from. Plays up his Greek ethnicity like anything, that man. Says belief in the Pantheon is in his blood.

"Anyways, Mizz Mayhew got me home permanently, is my point, and then I got laid off in the personnel cuts that followed. Half pension, not enough to live on, so I found myself a job as mall security, would you believe, and I thought that'd make LaVonne happy, me in a safe job, clocking on and off like a regular Joe commuter, only it was too late for us by then, unfortunately. There hadn't been enough of a marriage to start with, and it turned out that Vonnie didn't like living with me there every day any more than she'd liked me being off in some desert hellhole for months at a stretch. We were bickering like crazy, and then Ethan came along and I thought he'd be the saving of us. But all he was, poor kid, was the final straw — a baby on top of all the other frustrations in LaVonne's life. So she bailed. Just packed a bag one day and went. I got sole custody, and Vonnie became visitation-rights mom, only she hardly ever exercised those rights.

"We didn't see or speak to each other much, and then after Ethan was gone, we didn't have a reason to see or speak to each other at all any more. She moved back to be with her folks in Gary, Indiana, where, far as I know, she still is. Short question, long answer. How about you, while we're on this subject? No other half? No, of course not. Would you be here if there was? But were you ever married?"

"No. I was… not quite engaged. My partner and I lived together. We'd talked about marrying. We were definitely going to. It just didn't have a chance to happen."

Ramsay waited. Sam didn't offer anything further.

"That's all I'm going to get, isn't it?" he said drily. "All anyone's going to get out of you, Sam. You know something? This enigmatic schtick, this whole keeping-it-all-to-yourself thing — I tell you, it's getting real old. What you don't appear to realise is that, whatever you're holding inside you, not talking about it doesn't make you heroic, it just makes you seem…"

"Seem…?"

"Like not a normal person. Normal people talk about stuff. Normal people open up."

"Just because I don't yammer on all the time about — "

"No." Ramsay stopped her with a jabbing index finger. "It ain't yammering. It's being human. It's accepting that bad things have happened, not trying to act as if they never did. It's being the same as everyone else, not imagining you've somehow had it worse than everyone else and that that somehow makes you superior in some way, privileged 'cause life took a bigger shit on you than it does on most folk and it's beyond your ability to express how much you've been hurt. Hell, we all get shit on, and us Titans got shit on particularly heavily, but I don't believe your pain is worse than the pain I've suffered or Fred has suffered or Dez has suffered or any of us has suffered, and I dare you to prove otherwise."

"You're trying to piss me off, aren't you?"

"Figure I've got nothing to lose."

"Goad me and I'll lose my temper and drop my guard and blurt everything out?"

"That's the general idea."

"And then what? I'll feel better? I went to a counsellor twice a week for nearly a year, Rick. I talked and talked with him. And after a hundred hours of that I didn't feel one ounce better. What makes you think it'll be any different, talking to you?"

"Because, Sam Akehurst," Ramsay said, chidingly, "I'm your friend."

"Oh, right. And maybe you're hoping I'll confess all and then fall sobbing into your arms and you can comfort me and next thing you know, hey presto, we're shagging like rabbits."

"Yeah, that's always been my technique with women. I only sleep with the crying ones. Distraught's such a goddamn turn-on. Those puffy eyes, that runny nose…"

"Ha!" said Sam. It was both a laugh and a victory cry. "Watch this, then. No tears. Dry-eyed, Sam Akehurst delves deep and comes up with the goods. This is what happened. You want to know? I'll give it to you in two sentences. My boyfriend was killed at Hyde Park, July 25th, coming up for three years ago now. I was pregnant with his baby and I miscarried. There." She looked at him, hard. "What do you think? How does that rate on the 'life shit' scale? I'm thinking it's a good nine, maybe even a ten. You would probably downgrade it, though. Not as bad as Fred, who lost everybody he knew. Not as bad as Nigel, who was actually married and whose daughter was, you know, a child and not just a foetus, which gets him extra points. But better at least than Kerstin — husband but no child. And way better than Anders, because it wasn't even relatives of his who died, just comrades, fellow soldiers."

Her voice was a low growl. She could hear the throb of resentment in it, resentment that was simply pain that had taken a wrong turn.

"You just don't get it, do you, Rick? You can't compare tragedies like they're scores on Top Trumps cards. Everyone feels grief in their own way. What I lost was… was everything. Everything. Ade getting killed, the baby — it destroyed me. It was apocalypse. Does it matter to me how well or badly I got off next to other people? No. All I care about is me, what happened to me and how huge it was, how unbearable."

"Ade. His name was Ade," Ramsay said gently.

"Adrian Walters." Sam couldn't recall the last time she'd spoken his name aloud and in full like that. It felt strange, like trying on a pair of old boots from the back of the cupboard that were once comfy and snug but had stiffened with disuse. "Constable Adrian Walters."

"Cop, like you."

She nodded. Damn him, how was he managing to get this stuff out of her? More to the point — why was she letting him?

"Uniform," she said. "Beat copper. The best kind of beat copper. He enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed getting out there, being on the street, being visible, high-profile, wearing the tit-shaped helmet, trying to make a difference in the community he served."

"Nice guy."

"Through and through. Too nice, I sometimes thought. We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys. We're supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster. That's how you get a pearl, after all. But after the crap and slog of work I liked coming home to a stable, dependable, reliable man. Ade wasn't dynamic in any way. He was my antidote to the poison of the world, and not only that but he could understand what I went through on a day-to-day basis, because he went through something similar, so we were on a par in that respect. Only, he always dealt with it better because he was just… better. A better person than me. Sometimes I'd have it up to here with all the sleaze and the wrongness that I had to deal with, and I'd start bitching and whining, and he'd talk me down, all quiet and calm. And — and he always brought me tea in bed in the mornings. Every morning, without fail. Even if our shifts were different and I had to get up at sparrow-fart and he didn't, he always made sure he was awake and could bring me my cup of Earl Grey, milk, one sugar. Such a small thing, but it meant so much."

"Was he looking forward to being a dad? Sounds like he'd have made a good father."

"He never knew. I didn't get the chance to tell him. I planned to. In fact, the day he — the day he was killed, I was going to tell him that evening. I was only a couple of months into the pregnancy. I was sure I was pregnant, I just hadn't been sure enough yet. But that evening, I had it all worked out. I was going to make Ade dinner. He usually made the dinner, so he'd have realised something was up when he came home to me burning saucepans."

"You can't cook."

"I can cook like elephants can tap-dance," Sam said. "But it's the thought that counts. I was going to put something charred and inedible in front of him, uncap a bottle of his favourite lager, and then, when he was good and intrigued, I was going to break the news."

"How do you think he would have reacted?"

"Ade? Over the moon. He'd have grabbed me, squeezed me tight, then let go because he was scared that squeezing me tight might harm the baby somehow. He always wanted kids. He was dying to be a dad. Dying." She laughed hollowly. "I know that that's how it would have gone. I've played the scene out so many times in my head. I can see him running round and round the kitchen, whooping like a loon, then getting on the phone to his parents in New Zealand — they'd emigrated. Never mind that it'd be about five in the morning there. He wouldn't be able to wait to ring them. But instead, I was the one who had to ring them and wake them up. With something very different to say. That was after a friend had called and asked if I'd heard."

"Heard…?"

"About the protest. About Apollo and Artemis. About the stampede they'd caused. I was aware Ade was helping police the march, but I couldn't imagine anything bad was going to happen, certainly not to him. As a rule, the Olympians don't go for cops, do they? We're all on the same side, allegedly. We all belong to the forces of law and order. So I assumed even if the Olympians decided the protest shouldn't be allowed to continue, Ade would be OK. All the police there would be. But what I hadn't factored in was Ade being Ade. One of his fellow PSU officers, the friend, guy called Trev, he phoned me from the scene. There was chaos, I could hear it in the background. Shouting. Screaming. Ambulance sirens. And Trev told me Ade was dead. Just like that. Came right out and said it, his voice quivering: 'Ade's dead.' I said I didn't believe it, and Trev said he didn't believe it either but it was true. He'd watched it with his own eyes, he'd held the body, attempted mouth-to-mouth, for all the good it had done. The rally'd been completely peaceful, he said, up to the moment the Olympians appeared. He and Ade and a couple of hundred others were waiting in vans along Exhibition Road, togged up in their Code Two gear, shields but no sticks, just in case trouble started. Hermes teleported the twins into the park, everything went to hell, the Code One regulars radioed for assistance, and the boys rushed out there to help sort out the mess. That was Ade's thing, why he sidelined with the Police Support Unit, because he believed wholeheartedly in the public's right to peaceful protest and he saw the job of the PSU as helping to facilitate that and keep the protestors safe."

"Didn't work out so well for himself, though."

"There was a kid. This girl, twelve, thirteen, something like that. She was in the Serpentine River in the middle of Hyde Park. It's called a river but it's actually a lake. Lots of people were in the water, desperate to get away, trying to swim to the other side. Apollo and Artemis were just laying into the crowd indiscriminately, Apollo shooting his arrows, Artemis lashing out with her spear. I saw a video of it on TV some time later, and they were wolves among sheep, foxes in the henhouse. Slaughtering. Just… slaughtering. But anyway, the girl, she'd waded into the Serpentine, waist-deep, and she got knocked over by someone shoving past her. She tried to get up but other people kept jumping in, trampling her, pushing her under the surface. Soon as Ade saw, he went to help. Didn't think twice, according to Trev. Battled through the crowd to the bank, dived in, got to the girl, pulled her up from the water, shielded her from the stampede with his own body, started trying to help her back to dry land.

"But he was so concerned about her, he wasn't looking out for himself. Got knocked over by someone, and then people were trampling him, pushing him under. Blind panic. They didn't even see him there. All they wanted to do was get out of the Olympians' way. Ade thrashed around. Never a strong swimmer at the best of times, and his Code Two kit didn't help. Cotton overalls impregnated with flame retardant, leg guards, thigh guards, arm guards, Alt-Berg Peacekeeper boots — all waterlogged and heavy, weighing him down. He tried again and again to get up, get air, and couldn't… and then he couldn't even try. They drowned him. People. The same civilians he'd dedicated his life to looking after and protecting. Drowned him. The girl, far as I know, managed to get away. She was OK. She lived. So that's something, I suppose. It wasn't a completely pointless death."

"You felt numb then, didn't you?" said Ramsay. "That's how I felt when I got the call from Ethan's principal. 'Mr Ramsay? Steadman Block here. I have something to tell you.' First I was like, 'Oh no, what's Ethan done? Flunked a math test?' But Block asked me if I was sitting down, and that's when I knew something bad was coming. And as I listened to what he had to say, I could feel a part of me shutting down. I could feel myself just sort of locking into autopilot. A robot took over and started doing everything for me, acting like me, saying everything I needed to, and I was happy to let it. Kinda like being in the battlesuit. Safe, shielded. I was inside me, far away, deep in this shell that looked and sounded exactly like I did, could pass for me but wasn't, not really. I stayed there for quite a few weeks."

"Yeah, that was it. Me too. Only it was longer than a few weeks. A lot longer. Sometimes, in fact…"

"Sometimes you feel like you haven't altogether come out of it."

Sam picked up a branch and tossed it on the fire. Sparks danced up from the crackling flames, twinkling then gone like fairies when people stopped believing in them.

"Or ever will," she said. "The miscarriage came the next day. I was in hospital, rather conveniently. In the morgue, ID-ing Ade's body. Suddenly there was this… Well, I'll spare you the gory details."

"I thank you for that."

"Gory is the word, though. The strange thing was, I wasn't surprised. It just seemed natural. I remember thinking, Yes, of course. Ade isn't here any more. Why would his child want to stick around either? And then later, much later, I came to the conclusion that it was my fault. I'd been dreading motherhood, I can't deny it. I could see how it was going to mess with my career. Terribly. I'd had this whole path mapped out for myself — DI by thirty, Chief Constable by forty — maybe an unrealisable dream, but I was well on my way there, and having a baby was going to derail the Sam Akehurst ambition express, perhaps for good, so afterwards I had myself believing that I'd somehow willed the foetus to abort itself."

"Whereas in fact it was down to shock and stress, you know that."

"Cognitively I know that. No one can make themselves miscarry just by wishing for it. But you start falling prey to all sorts of strange ideas when you're traumatised, when your whole world has been shaken to pieces. I'd been in that state before, after my parents died, only not as bad. That was the past being taken away from me, which is sort of what's supposed to happen. This was the future being taken away, which isn't. My mind wasn't right. It kept insisting I'd jettisoned the baby on purpose, so I could be free to carry on clambering up the career ladder. The irony is, by that stage I didn't have much of a career left. I was on disability leave, on account of I was a basket case, half an inch away from a total nervous breakdown, or maybe half an inch into one, and it really didn't look as if I'd be coming back from it to any kind of meaningful employment. Even if I did eventually rejoin the Met, I knew they'd have had me on permanent desk duty somewhere in Traffic or Fraud for the rest of my time. I'd be no good to my guv'nor, my DI, any more. Prothero said he'd have me back soon as I was ready, but I knew he was only saying that to make me feel better, and he knew I knew. The whole detective thing was over for me. Dead and buried. So that was why it didn't seem to matter if one day I was over as well. Dead and buried as well. And that was when I started thinking about killing myself."

"Ah." Ramsay's mouth downturned at the corners. "Well now. You can stop there if you like. You don't have to go on."

"No, you asked for it, you wanted it, you're getting the lot, all of it. I drove down to Beachy Head a couple of times. That's a cliff on the south coast of England. It's a beauty spot and also where dozens of people a year throw themselves off. Don't ask me if the two things are connected. I stood there looking out to sea, but I couldn't quite do it, couldn't quite step over the little barrier and then take the next step, right off the edge. So that was a washout, but I had pills at home. Sleeping tablets. I was needing them at the time, and one night I laid out ten of them in a row on my bedside table instead of the usual one, and I placed them all in the palm of my hand, and I even got as far as tipping them into my mouth. But I spat them out. I didn't fancy just falling asleep and not waking up. I wanted to feel my death. I wanted to experience it. So then, the final time, there was a hot bath and the blade from Ade's razor. Ade liked a proper blade. Not one of those clip-in multi-head ones with bits of wire across them for extra safety — a proper old-fashioned thin bendy metal blade with two cutting edges. I lay in the bath and I held the blade at the crook of my elbow. You have to slice down along the inside of the forearm, open up as much of the length of the ulnar artery as you can. I'd seen the body of a young woman who'd topped herself like that, done it the way it should be done. She was anorexic, a heroin addict, in an abusive relationship, and she'd 'ridden the Gillette train out of the station,' as Prothero said. I couldn't understand at the time why she'd done it. Her life was shit, yes, but I thought she'd just been a coward. Why didn't she ditch the bastard of a boyfriend, get into a rehab program and just try and sort herself out? Make an effort, the stupid, self-pitying cow. But I got it later. When I was on the brink of killing myself in the exact same way, I understood. It was the only form of control she had left over her life, the only decision she could still make that would have any effect. Everything else had got the better of her. This was the one way she could still score a victory. Self-pity didn't come into it. It was all about recovering some small shred of dignity while she still could."

"Slashing your wrists in a bath ain't dignified."

"But when you're in that particular mindset, it is. And there's also an element of 'There. See? See how truly miserable I am?' You're leaving your body as a message to the world: life hurts, it hurts too much to bear, this is the only sane solution."

"But actually the sane solution isn't to end it all, it's to go on living," said Ramsay. "Stand up and say 'fuck you' to the pain and bludgeon on."

"I realised that. At the very last moment. Look." She rolled up her sleeve and showed him the inside of her left elbow. "You can just see it. There. Tiny little scar. That's how far I got with the razor blade. Less than a centimetre. It stung like fuck, and I just couldn't continue. That pain was sharper, more real, than the other kind of pain, and it brought me to my senses. The way out, I realised, was worse than the situation. The cure was worse than the disease. It seems trite, looking back, but it honestly was a revelation. I was clearly not suffering as badly as I thought I'd been, if I could be deterred by a little bit of 'ouch' and a trickle of blood. That put things into perspective. I didn't climb out of that bath any happier than when I'd got in, but I did climb out knowing I'd troughed, I'd found rock bottom, and the only way from there was up."

"Wanna know something?" Ramsay said. "Something I've never, ever told anyone else?"