"You think giving you this would change anything?" Harland asked.
"It changes what happens in the next minute," Eli said. "That's the part you can still choose."
Harland's hand tightened around the remote. The silence stretched long enough for Eli to hear water dripping somewhere inside the wall. He was frightened in a way he had never been frightened before. He felt the urge to run, to shout, to do anything that would end the moment. But Harland stood between him and the stairs, and a sudden move might turn the man's indecision into something worse.
"I spent years working out how to make them feel what I felt," Harland said.
"Then you spent years making yourself more alone," Eli replied.
Something shifted in the older man's eyes. It was not forgiveness or redemption. It was a brief crack in the conviction that had supported every terrible decision he had made. He looked at the remote again, then at the boy in front of him.
Slowly, he extended his hand.
"Take it," he said.
Eli did not move at first. He had imagined the man attacking him, pressing a button, or laughing at the idea of mercy. He had not imagined this. Then he stepped forward carefully, took the remote, and backed away again without taking his eyes off Harland.
The device was smaller than his own flashlight. It weighed almost nothing.
That disturbed him more than he expected. Something so small had been carried by a man prepared to decide what happened to dozens of people. Eli closed his hand around it and realized that his palm was trembling so badly he could barely feel his fingers.
"Stay here," he said. "The sheriff's coming."
Harland looked at him with an expression too complicated for Eli to understand. "You're telling me what to do?"
"I'm asking you to choose the thing that doesn't hurt anybody."
Harland lowered his eyes. For a long moment he seemed older than he had when he came down the stairs. Then he sat on a metal chair beside the wall, resting his hands on his knees.
"Go," he said.
Eli climbed the stairs without running. The fear came with him, a pressure against his chest that made the narrow passage feel even smaller. He wanted to know that the last members had reached the windows. He wanted Ronan. He wanted his mother. Most of all, he wanted Rascal, whose only crime had been a talent for finding bad places to investigate.
Above him, the building was almost empty.
The difference struck Eli the moment he stepped into the main hall. An hour earlier, the room had been crowded with voices, music, the smell of food, and the particular energy of people who knew one another well. Now chairs stood abandoned around half-cleared tables, paper plates had been left beside cold cups of coffee, and the emergency lights revealed every mark on the floor. The old photographs on the walls watched over a silence the building had probably not known during any winter gathering in twenty-two years.