Pain slams through him in great battering waves. He waits for them to roll back. At the bright hot center of his thoughts is the plan, the next step; he tries to focus everything on that. But images of his enemies keep distracting him. The four hated ones. The doctors.

Now he moves experimentally to find out if he has broken the knee. The pain brings out his tears but he doesn’t feel the grating of anything shattered. He is able to get to his feet and with a rough uncaring need to know he puts his weight on the bad knee. It holds. He limps, dragging the right leg across the grounds, carrying the knife and the blanket: these, and his pajamas, are his only possessions.

Near the end of the building behind him two windows are alight. None of the light reaches this far but even so the lawn is vaguely phosphorescent and his feet leave dark matted prints. He keeps turning his head, searching.

The knee is a great frightful agony. Rhythms of faintness beat through him. Now he is afraid for the first time-not afraid of men but afraid because he isn’t at all sure he has the strength for the fence: can he do it on one good leg?

He does not see the fence at first but the sibilance of the rain gives way to a faint pinging and this sound, felt if not heard, determines the location of the fence for him. He extends a hand before him and gimps forward step by step until his splayed fingers penetrate the mesh.

He looks up but cannot see. Raindrops make him blink. Rut he knows this fence. Twelve feet high, heavy steel chainlink, and there are five strands of barbed wire running parallel at three-inch intervals, canted inward at the top. For all these months he has measured it in his mind and known that he can do it but that was counting on two good legs and now his fear takes the form of a great rage and he has to stifle a roar.

At the far end of the building a shadow passes across one of the lighted windows and Duggai’s breath stops in his throat.