Chapter 17: The Hawkins Laboratory Break-In

The plan arrived on the back of a Hawkins Hardware receipt at six forty-three in the morning.

Holmes had been awake since three. Not insomnia — he had not slept poorly in Hawkins so much as he had simply stopped filing sleep as a priority, the way a man crossing a mountain range stops filing comfort as a priority. He had been at the table, in the cold blue light that preceded Indiana dawn, drawing and redrawing the laboratory's external architecture from memory: the displaced lamp post, the four-meter gap it created, the culvert mouth he had measured with his boot. The ventilation housings. The sub-basement that did not appear in any blueprint filed with the county.

El had been asleep on the narrow bed against the wall. He had checked twice, involuntarily, that she was still breathing — a reflex he catalogued without satisfaction and could not quite suppress.