None Against (continued)

An echo of what sounded like laughter came from another part of the jail, somewhere deep in the winding corners of the cold basement. Ehud couldn't tell if it was man or woman.

"How did she convince you?"

"She would have killed herself. She planned to kill Masamune, then herself. As her mother, I couldn't allow that, and Yumi knew it. She used my love."

"Her father, your husband-"

"In jail."

Consuela exhaled as if tired from maintaining a false front too long. The shadows began to swallow her. Hanging in the last of the dim light were two hands, like they had been chopped off at the wrist and laid on velvet. They did not seem like a mother's hands.

"You're an old woman," Ehud said. "You gave in."

"I did what I had to."

"Will she ever be satisfied?"

Consuela receded and lost substance, that stolen glimpse of her face imprinted on the black background. The chill air contracted, sucked into a weak breeze by hidden rents in the foundation. Air of sickness and dissolution.

He thought she had fallen asleep when suddenly her voice rasped out of the darkness, a disembodiment of sound, a wraith.

"No," she said. "Not if satisfaction is an option."

The basement level had no windows, yet that did not bar all ways of leaving. There were other forms of escape, even for those who had ducked a worse fate by coming here. A mother from her willful child could pray for worse. One morning guards would come to Consuela's cell and find that she had disappeared completely.

That echo again. It sounded like laughter but Ehud wasn't sure. He didn't know what could be so damn funny.