“We can’t disengage. It’s too dangerous.”

Dr. Miriam knocked on the glass. “What’s happening in there?”

“She’s lost.”

“Well, send her a goddamned beacon! Go in through the abort system.” Dr. Miriam flung up her hands. “Shock her back.”

“We’ve already tried that.”

“Did you try reversing the feed?”

“That didn’t work, either.”

Dr. Miriam clenched her fists. “Fuck!”

Rossi looked at her. “So what does this mean? Does someone have to go in and get her?”

“Yes. Yes. Oh shit. Shit. I knew better. I shouldn’t have let you people talk me into this.” She sat down on the edge of a couch, burying her face in her hands. “I’m the only one with any experience. It should be me who goes in.”

“I’m sensing there’s an issue here,” said Hotch. “What is it?”

“I’m the master programmer,” she whispered. “I need to be out in case something goes wrong. I’m stuck out here. And I have to send in someone who has no idea what they’re doing and try and talk them through this, and…and there’s no way to adequately prepare any of you for the horrors you’ll see. They defy description. The things mad artists painted in the fever dreams can’t compare to this. If she goes too far in, if she believes that whatever Stargher is showing her is real, it could be catastrophic. If he hurts her, she’ll bleed. If he kills her, she’ll die.” She looked at Hotch. “Despite what modern culture would have you believe, there’s no separating the body and the mind.”

“I’ve seen a lot of horrors in my life,” said Rossi.

Hotch looked at him. “Dave…”

“Don’t you ‘Dave’ me. I’ll be all right. I’ve got more experience than anyone working on this team. You know that.”

Hotch cleared his throat. “I’m the leader of this team.”

“Yeah,” said Rossi. “And that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be you. You’re needed topside. What do you say?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I don’t either,” said Rossi. “But it doesn’t matter. This needs to get done.”

“All right.” Hotch took a deep breath. He nodded to Dr. Miriam. “Have your people prep him.”

Dr. Miriam put a hand on his arm. “Agent Rossi, are you sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

Katherine finds herself in a cornfield.

She hears the whisper of the little boy’s feet as they tread the soft dark soil, the cornstalks muttering against him. The heavy air smells like dirty bed sheets and motor oil and grass stains, suntan lotion, the salt of the sea. She touches one of the leaves and feels distant words humming in her fingertips. The leaves are tall and broad, an oversaturated shade of green that screams fertility at the nonsensical sky. Overhead is bright and full of hard-edged sunshine, a brittle robin’s egg shade of blue. Toward the horizon it is dark, softening into a familiar dusk of torn plums, pewter ashes, and bruised skin. Stars glitter like shards of broken glass embedded in raw flesh. The silhouette of a tree stands out in stark contrast against the drifting darkness. It is huge; the branches reach up into the spaces between the stars and disappear.

Are you coming?

Yes. Katherine starts to walk, touching the leaves as she passes them by. Each leaf strikes faint chords of memory.

Tickle ironed me cause I was bad

Brush like the dolls

Catch in her hair it was my baptism

Her toe snags in the roots the Xipe he won’t hurt you so hold still for the bone

The field opens up into a circle pressed down into the corn. At the center is a bonfire made up of long branches and human bones. It burns hot and bright, marking the place where sunlight softens into the purple darkness. The air is gray. On the far side of the fire is a tall man whirling on unsteady feet. At first she cannot see him; he is blocked by the reaching flames. Sparks fly up and circle back down, winking out before they can touch down on the flattened cornstalks. His feet make broken circles; his body weaves an unsteady ring around the burning heart of the fire. Katherine smells the sweet meat of new blood and the stink of old, all of it tied up in the freshness of new corn, the bland thick earthy scent. The man is covered in the yellowing skin of another. The dead face flaps over the living one, affixed by the hair into the knotted hanks of the dancer, and the dead hands flop below strong wrists. The dead feet jiggle, the soles slapping the ground in counterpoint, a quick one-two, one-two, the second beat weaker than the first, an echo drawn in dust. The fire crackles. The stench of him is overpowering: overturned graves, flyblown animal carcasses strewn across the breakdown lane of a fast-moving highway. A breeze blows up from the ground, lifting the flames, saturating the air with the dizzying sweetness of night-blooming flowers. He dances past her, long feathers and tails of hair flying out, a pair of long slimy thighbones whirling over his head in complicated patterns. Jawbones lashed to his upper arms, the strings of teeth draped across his chest, the stretched holes in the dead skin where it laces tight to his calves, his forearms, his back. Mesmerizing, terrifying, quivering awe struck deep in her breast and taking root in the flesh of her heart, blooming like a spine-backed carrion-flower, like a soft-petaled moon flower.

His feet stomp the ground: one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two.

What do I do?

The little boy voice says wait.

She holds still. The Xipe’s posture shifts and she knows that he knows she is there. He glides back around again, twirling his bones. The firelight attaches itself to them and runs down their pale yellow length, humming low and strong as they slice through the air. His breath is a trapped thing, a bellows laboring far past its own capabilities. He dances for days, the little boy whispers, his voice the rustling corn, his breath sweetened in silk. He dances for weeks. The Xipe comes closer, each movement of his body in tune with the others, his limbs loosened into the slinking of a great cat and seized by the inherent grace of something wild. The bent stalks crackle. She sees the dirty eyes behind the carrion-mask and they are like Carl’s eyes; darkened far beyond the human scope, peering at her over the black rim of consciousness. They are wells in which all of the mechanisms of night are contained. They hook into her gaze. He spins the bones in tandem, slowing them, holding them quivering over her shoulders. She looks up into the loosened face, into the slackened eye sockets. His muscles tremble with the effort to remain still. His breath smells like chocolate and mushrooms.

No, she thinks. He dances for life.

The Xipe looks into her eyes. Like a cornered animal she looks back. Stars loosen their grip on the sky.

He rests the bones on her shoulders.

A swelling of some black thing, some ancient surge of tidal feeling swirls up from her feet, through the roots in the ground to her skin, and takes the strength out of her knees. She opens her mouth and her tongue is coated in bitter blood, stinging with the salts of a thousand generations. She hits the ground and her legs fold up beneath her, spine curling into itself like a leaf, a shoot unfolding. Her eyes close and the fire flickers in her lids. She takes a breath that throbs into sobs, her heart swelling, pounding with the rhythm of his feet: one-two, one-two, one-two.

It’s all in the heart.

Come on, the boy whispers.

She opens her eyes and finds herself in the true darkness. The stars crowd close and the wind is on her face like velvet fingers. The perfume is thick, crawling along the bare ground like mist, bitter and sensuous. The trunk of the tree is immense, made out of glass, filled with aquamarine. Inside floats a woman. Her hair is like coils of smoke, her skin pearlescent, her lips like breaking dawn. Her eyes are open and staring. They are the color of water. Her hand drifts toward the glass. The pale pointed fingertips graze the inside and a sweet tone resonates through the night, shivering the leaves on the trees, stirring fireflies out of the corn. They spiral up and up and up, winking, transforming into stars.

Her arm jerks. The fingers splay out and start to shake. Katherine grabs her wrist and looks up to the sky.

I’m not signaling. Dammit, I’m not signaling!

The little boy kneels in front of the giant tank.

The good springs, he says. It’s holy water.

In the hallway, Reid’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and squinted at the readout. He flipped it open. He sounded confused. “Hello?”

“This is Dr. Reid, right?”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry. This is Supervisory Special Agent Reid. Who’s this? Wait a minute…is that you, Rhiannon?”

“Yes! Listen, I was trying to get to sleep and just thinking, you know, going over all that old shit…well, not going over it, more like being haunted by it, but I remembered something.”

Reid took out a notepad. “I’m listening. Go ahead.”

“He said all this stuff, shit that barely made any sense. Stuff about cenotes, and cornfields, and I don’t know what the fuck. But he said good springs. That there were good springs to fill the cenote up.”

Reid scribbled it down. His brow furrowed. “I’m not following.”

“Good springs! Good…look, Dr. Reid, check out a Nevada map. There’s a town. He said this stuff about a water goddess and that he wanted to take me there. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I just wrote it off to…too much sex, I don’t know, something. I wasn’t all there. It had been a long night.”

“There’s a town,” prompted Reid.

“Yeah! Goodsprings. It’s off fifteen south, maybe forty miles from here. There’s a cornfield and he said it’s like a farm with water. That’s the best I got.”

“That’s great,” said Reid. “Thank you very much, Rhiannon. You’ve been a big help. I’ve gotta go.”

“Yeah.”

Reid hung up the phone and dashed into the room. Rossi, Hotch, and Dr. Miriam all looked at him. He tore the top sheet off his pad and held it up. “I’ve got something.”