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closely. She could not look closely. She knew it was him by the sheepskin slippers, by the shape of his trousers, by the oversize threadbare sweater. She knew it without having to see his face, because

    Her father.
    She staggered back, her insides like slush. It was so dizzyingly cold she couldn’t breathe. She gasped, but no sound came out, and no air came in.
    Her
father
.
    She stumbled to the fireplace to unlock the secret door. There was a soft
click
, and a panel of stones slid back into the wall. She entered, pulling the door shut behind her, and descended the steep stairs to her bedroom, which, as her parents had planned, had gone unnoticed and untouched. There were no windows in the basement, so she groped her way among the chairs and toys that had once seemed so familiar—now riddled with the potential for bruised toes and dinged shins.
    But she had been preparing for an event like this—just likethis—for years. When her mother was still alive, they had rehearsed the steps together; and when her mother died, her father had made her practice, and practice, and practice. Some days, Sefia ran through the steps so often that she dreamed of them when she slept. She had been drilled so many times that, as she was meant to, she had begun to implement the steps already.
    Blindly, she fumbled for the knob of her bedpost and began to unscrew it from its wooden leg. Inside was a key—a shiny silver thing shaped like a flower, something that might be overlooked, mistaken for a child’s plaything—that unlocked the second secret door in the north wall.
    Sefia opened it and crawled inside, closing the door behind her, shutting herself into a room barely bigger than a travel trunk. And then she cried. She cried until her head ached and bright spots burst across her eyes. She cried loudly, hoping someone would hear, and quietly, fearing the same thing. She cried until she had almost forgotten about the mutilated body sprawled on the floor above her. And she cried again when she remembered.
    Eventually she must have blacked out, because she awoke what seemed like hours later, with her eyes swollen nearly shut and her nose stuffy with snot. Gulping back a few dry sobs, Sefia uncurled, aching, from the floor and put her palms to the stone walls.
    There was no key to the third door. Nin had designed it to open when the cobblestones in the wall were pressed in a certain order, and though Sefia’s parents had rehearsed the series with her, they had always done it in the warm lamplight of her bedroom. Get to the tiny room, then wait for her parents toarrive. That had always been the plan. They had always known someone would hunt them down, eventually, but they had always thought one of them would survive.
    Sefia remembered the sequence; her hands found the right river rocks by their contours—the first one in the upper left-hand corner, the second shaped like an owl, the third like a cabin, then a half-moon, two mice in a row, and the last a shaggy buffalo with a single stubby horn. As she touched them, they clicked into place. But what happened next was something her parents had never mentioned, had not warned her about or prepared her for, and it was perhaps the most important thing of all.
    As the small door unlatched, something—some heavy rectangular
thing
wrapped in soft leather—fell out of the crack in the door. It must have been wedged there, stuck fast in the threshold.
    Sefia ran her fingers over it and clasped it to her chest. She hadn’t seen it once in all the years she’d been practicing for her escape.
    She considered leaving it. The thing was so heavy and awkward in her skinny arms. She wished she’d thought to take something from the house before she left. Her mother’s silver ring with the secret compartment inside, a painted hand mirror, one of her father’s old sweaters—anything would have done. But they’d never taught her that. They never told