When Matt checks the news—the first thing he does every morning, more important than a piss or a coffee or brushing his teeth—he finds the first update on Zotov et al. in over a week.

He's sacrificed any and all of those three (piss, coffee, teeth) this week before going into the office. Sometimes he gets there and belatedly realizes that he's wearing two different-coloured shoes: his left foot wearing tan and his right foot wearing black because in his hurry to drag himself away and get to work he's forgotten to run his fingers along the stitching on the vamp to make sure they match.

This morning, authorities in New Jersey made another arrest made in connection to the child trafficking operation which is currently believed to be operating in New York State. No names are being released at this time, but representatives can confirm that the man was identified as a result of the hard drives discovered at the home of the late New York City Councilman Marius Wurth, who was arrested last month for possession of child pornography and later died in custody.

It hits him like a quick jab in the stomach and he nearly doubles over. Of course they're filming it. Of course Wurth's collection wasn't just some mishmash of exploitation covertly downloaded—or purchased— from strangers on the internet. Of course some of the filthy, digital horrors that Wurth was willing to die over were home-grown.

He wonders if Amanda is in there, somewhere. If Colin is. He simultaneously needs to know, and needs to make sure he never fucking finds out or else he will spend the rest of his life in prison and the rest of his afterlife in hell. Maybe the latter's already a done deal.

Police are currently working on identifying more potential suspects from the tapes that were recovered from former Councilman Wurth's upstate home, which was raided last month, and they advise WNTV New York that more arrests are forthcoming.

It's a red herring. Why aren't they looking for the fucking house?

Classic fucking police: useless at preventing crime, only there to half-heartedly and half-assedly pick up the pieces after the hurt's already been done. There are kids being hurt right this second (Amanda's voice in his head: oh, a lot more than ten, mask guy), right under their noses, and the NYPD are spending their energy playing CSI with old tapes and arresting buyers instead of trying to prevent the worst from happening. That can wait. Finding Zotov can't.

Matt drags himself into the office, running on four hours of sleep. He's jittery from the morning news and the smell of the mugger's blood lingering in his nose, and Foggy takes one look at him and shakes his head: "I was going to ask you to go to Court to get an adjournment on Singer tomorrow morning, but you look like shit."

"Sorry," says Matt. He realizes he has no idea who Singer is. Is that a client? An adjournment for what? "Is the motion scheduled, cause I can"—

"It's fine," says Foggy, his voice creaking like an old floorboard under a heavy footstep. Trying to hide his stress and doing a terrible job of it, now that Matt is leaned in the doorway of his office looking like roadkill. "I'll figure something out."

"I can"—Matt is momentarily distracted by his phone buzzing, announcing: Claire, Claire, Claire and he nearly drops it as he fumbles to turn it off. She's calling to make sure he's coming over tonight; Matt knows it and, from the way Foggy's hand clenches around his pen, making the plastic creak, Foggy knows it too.

"No," snaps Foggy. "It's fine, Matt. Forget I said anything. Better yet," he sets down his pen, and he must be looking square at Matt, because his voice is sharp and aimed straight at him when he adds, "go the fuck home and take care of yourself. There's no work for you here."

"Foggy," Karen cuts in. She's standing behind Matt, frozen in place and holding a coffee: the sweet smell of three sugars and a good splash of milk. Matt stands aside so that she can pass; "Thanks," she says as she squeezes by. Before she puts down the coffee, she shakes her head at Foggy: Matt barely catches it, except for the way it makes the coffee slosh gently back and forth in the mug.

At her gesture, Foggy immediately lets it drop. "Thanks, Karen." Then, to Matt, his tone now shifted to something less angry and more resigned: "I have a lot of work to do. You go call Claire back. Let's talk later."

Matt takes the hint—not enough to go home, but enough to accept Foggy's anger as deserved and retreat to his office. He drafts a text to Claire:

Sorry, can't talk right now. Looking forward to seeing you tonight, if we're still on? Thanks again.

Then, redrafts:

Sorry, can't talk right now. Still good for tonight? Thanks again.

Then he closes his blinds so that Foggy can't watch him as he sit hunched over his desk, attempting to do work but reverting every twenty minutes to double-, triple-, quadruple-check the news for updates on the morning's arrest.

Closing his blinds also saves him from Foggy and Karen watching his pitiful efforts to eat lunch.

He brought a small, glass container of steamed rice and boiled carrots and some fish, so overcooked that it barely looks like protein anymore. He doesn't bother microwaving it because he doesn't want to leave his office to hang awkwardly around the microwave for three minutes and risk having his tiny meal and pathetic body scrutinized. Plus, microwaving it will just make the scent radiate like a miniature nuclear blast.

He has (had) every intention of eating it. Truly. He even got as far as scrubbing his hands under steaming-hot water in preparation, cleansing himself of any office grime that might ruin the semi-genuine effort he was about to make.

But now, he opens the tightly-sealed plastic tub of food and smells the lukewarm fish—a functional mini-fridge isn't in the office-improvement budget yet—and can't bring himself to pick up his fork. It's not the smell, or the particles drifting through the air and settling onto his tongue. The smell of the fish isn't even as vicious as he was expecting. It's clean, wild-caught turbot, only minimally (and unavoidably) tainted by environmental chemical contaminants.

No—something else is nagging at him.

He thinks of Saint Catherine:

How the soul, having mounted the first step of the Bridge, should proceed to mount the second.

Matt closes the container and tucks it back into the bottom of his bag. He half-heartedly tells himself that he'll hand it off to someone in need on the way home, but it's only a white lie to make himself feel less guilty. In reality, he dumps it in a trash can and consumes nothing more than distilled water for the rest of the day before dragging himself to Claire's.

The TV hums quietly in the background. Some starlet on a late-night talk show is telling a well-rehearsed anecdote that he can't keep track of. Claire is on the other end of the sofa, her legs curled up to her chest and her laptop balanced on top. It's well past midnight.

He's let Claire pour so much formula into his feedbag that he's gained three pounds this week, on top of last week's extra four pounds. The energy is helping his gunshot wound finally heal properly: the scabs are dropping off and fresh skin is knitting itself together across the gnarly exit wound.

It's a small comfort when he thinks of how the weight he's gaining is nothing but water and fat. It coats his bones like the waxy skin on cooled chicken stock. He sometimes imagines he can feel the grease pouring through his pores, then wonders if he's really imagining it. Wonders if Foggy can see the greasy sheen of the formula's hydrogenated vegetable oil on his skin.

Matt can't stop pinching at the skin on his stomach, on the inside of his arms, feeling for the bloat. He realizes he misses the beautiful way hunger sharpened his awareness and brought everything into perfect clarity. He misses the euphoric energy of running on nothing. Now, he feels worse, sullied: he feels morehungry, every day, than he did when he was fasting his way through this hiccup in his senses.

He no longer feels like a panther, but a bear preparing for hibernation. Stupid, slow and food-driven.

"How's the search coming?" he asks suddenly, trying not to sound too eager. He limits himself to asking once per night although he wants to ask every few minutes, like an impatient child on a road trip—are we there yet?

She yawns and stretches her legs out. Ice-cold toes against the side of his thigh. Matt wants to take them in his hand and rub the blood back into them. Instead, he tucks his hands under his knees to resist the urge and tries harder to pay attention to whatever Jimmy Kimmel's audience is laughing at.

"It's coming along," she says. It sounds evasive but, to be fair, he's sent her on a wild goose chase. "Honestly, almost every house in the Hamptons looks like it has a mob boss living in it." She's spent the last week canvassing Google Maps for Zotov's home, inching along mile-by-digital-mile and making notes: this fountain, that driveway. Narrowing down the search until she finds the one. If not the Hamptons, she told him, then I guess we work our way toward Connecticut.

"I wish I could show you this one," she adds, and Matt's ears prick up. She mouths to herself, wow, as her fingers slide along her laptop's trackpad. Her weight shifts on the couch as she leans in to squint at the screen.

The tube in his throat suddenly feels as thick as a garden hose as he asks, "Do you think you found it?"

"No." She shakes her head and laughs. "This place just has a swimming pool shaped exactly like a pair of tits." Her laugh, her voice, is so beautiful. Even with the tube taped to his face, Matt aches with the desire to lean forward and kiss her. He wonders if kissing her will ever be a possibility ever again, after she's seen him like this.

He snorts a laugh, too, in spite of the nagging disappointment that bubbles in his stomach—because it's not the house, because she'll never truly see him as anything but broken—and he lets himself settle back into the cushions. The details of the house are so singular, so strange and poorly designed, that he expects it to jump out at her once it shows up on her screen.

Long brick-paved driveway, bear fountain. Sandstone. Giant windows. Three storeys. Wurth's comment flashes through his head: more money than sense.

Then again, if the fucking police haven't managed—bothered?—to find the place yet… Matt thought Wurth would squeal like a pig the second he got taken into custody and not only tell the police all about his encounter with the Daredevil, but all about Zotov, too. Hell, maybe he did. All Matt knows for sure is that weeks have passed and nothing has come of it: no big bust, no caravan of police cars descending upon some obscenely rich, quiet neighbourhood.

And so now, somehow and against all odds, he's managed to rope in Claire.

"Rope in"—as fucking if. Claire is much smarter than he is. She knows how to work a transaction to her advantage. This agreement that she helps him find this house, made on the condition that he stops going out and nearly getting himself killed (and on the unspoken condition that he keeps showing up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for scheduled feedings; she makes it clear to him that she'll only spend time hunting through Google Maps as long as he's on her couch with a tube up his nose and formula flooding his stomach)—well, this agreement feels like the best option he has right now.

He's letting Claire help him so that he can keep searching and keep fighting—the latter is a side-effect that probably requires a certain amount of cognitive dissonance on her part. On that note: Matt pulls the sleeves of his sweater further down to cover the bruises on his knuckles.

As a later condition of her helping with the search, which she'd unilaterally tacked on after the deal was already made (no consensus ad item, but Matt isn't in a position to negotiate), Claire also went ahead and submitted an anonymous police report with all the details of the house. Still, and as Matt expected, nothing has happened. The tip line is flooded with calls; the cops can't tell good information from bad. They probably think that someone is just trying to get a rich stranger's house swatted for the fun of it.

So Claire keeps helping him look. Maybe less out of a sense of duty or commitment to their agreement; maybe now it's just something to pass the time while syrupy rehydrated dairy drip-drops into his (too easily) yielding stomach.

While she continues to tap away at her laptop, Matt goes through the list he's committed to memory: Cohen. Molina. Wurth. He catches himself running through the names obsessively, fingers tapping against his knees to count out each one. Cohen. Molina. Wurth. Cohen. Molina. Wurth. Cohen. Molina. Wurth. Wurth can be crossed off.

Molina and Cohen are still out there, and Matt wonders if he'll have the same self-control when he comes face to face with them, the same way he managed to (barely) keep himself in check with Wurth.

He wonders if any of them is responsible for murdering Colin.

Matt falls asleep and dreams about a large man with bad teeth picking up a little boy by the back of the neck and tossing him into the cold, cold water of the Hudson.

Sometimes, Matt drifts into sleep only to find himself underwater, fighting through echoing river water and searching for Colin—searching with his hands, and with his ears, trying to find the sound of tiny lungs screaming with all the air they have left. In other dreams, he does find him: his fingertips brushing soft, wet hair, before reaching down to touch open, unblinking eyes.

And sometimes he has dreams about finding Molina and Cohen and Zotov—those are a blessing. He gets to be the hunter instead of the hunted; the predator instead of the prey. He holds the power to deny mercy instead of begging for it. When he wakes from those, his muscles are so sore that he has to spend half an hour meditating or else he's limping the rest of the day, his muscles flooded with lactic acid from being tensed all night.

Look at you, you're learning how to fight back. He thinks of being seventeen years old with Stick's blood going gummy in the creases of his hands; the feel of Stick's cane twisting into the small of his back; the sound of Stick's voice as he laughs, thick and nasal, breathing hard through his just-broken nose: I like it when you let yourself become a weapon, Matty boy. You might not be such a disappointment after all.

There's a large dog barking outside—Matt wakes with a start and has to take a moment to re-orient himself. The window is open, and Claire's old chandelier sways in the breeze, tinkling softly. The television is still on. Claire must have changed the channel after he fell asleep; instead of the sound of post-late-night dead air, an old movie is playing quietly.

For a few minutes he tries to fall back asleep, but it quickly becomes clear that it's not going to happen.

Matt sits and listens to the movie's old-fashioned Transatlantic accents for a while. He listens for the dog, again, but whatever it was barking at must be gone, now. He listens to the chandelier and tries to guess how many tiny little crystals it contains just by the sound alone. While he tries to distract himself, the liquid sits in his stomach and he craves emptiness the way he might've once craved food.

He slides his hand under his shirt and rubs a hand across his ribs. Uses his fingertips to climb up his sternum. There's a softer layer of skin under his touch than there was a few weeks ago, but still: most of the softness he had left in his body remains chiseled off, with very little unnecessary flesh left. He knows that his body has theoretically changed for the worse—he knows this from basic deduction based on the drop in his weight, and certainly from the way Foggy, Karen and Claire keep reacting to the sight of him.

It's been weeks. He's never been so sick, for so long—never lost so much control over his own senses. This set-up, coming to Claire's apartment just to be pumped full of calories, is not tenable. It's embarrassing, and it's not a solution, and in any case: it's not working. His visceral reaction to food hasn't changed, and he's getting complacent: there's been zero movement in finding those kids, not since he paid a visit to Wurth.

Sure, finding Wurth earned him a bullet wound in his side, but it led to arrests. It tightened the circle of salt around Zotov and his gang. The realization feels like a lightning bolt in his brain. Avoiding suffering is not—was never—the way to salvation. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians: "For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."

This is what's all wrong.

Father, I am hungry; for the love of God gives this soul its food. Saint Catherine, in her dedication and monasticism, eventually stopped eating entirely except for the Eucharist, water, and bitter herbs chewed between her teeth and spat back out. When she sometimes did eat, begged to do so by her spiritual advisor and her sisters in the convent and priests of her religious order, she would stick olive branches down her throat afterward, scraping at the soft flesh until she began to gag and it all came back up again.

Matt isn't a saint.

He knows that throwing up your food is disordered, not sacred.

He knows that Saint Catherine died a horrible death at the age of thirty-three, semi-paralyzed from a stroke, bone-thin and hardly able to keep down water.

He knows all of this, just like he knows that he is letting himself become weak and ill as long as his senses remain broken. Worst of all, his muscles are breaking down, fast, his body eagerly cannibalizing itself with every passing hour.

And yet—no amount of meditation or food exposure therapy is going to drag him out of this one. This is Stick's basement, shivering and naked. This is an ocean riptide. Struggling will do nothing but tire him out and make him lose faster. He has to submit to it, to suffer completely, and then come out the other side. It's how he survived his entire life before his body became a weapon: You're such a good boy, Matty.

Matt reaches back to fumble with the valve connecting his NG tube to the feedbag ("feeding bag," Claire scolds him in his head and he nearly jumps). He carefully bends his tube just the way Claire showed him and it takes him a moment, his thumb and forefinger pinching and fiddling with the plastic, but then the port clicks free and he slides off the couch, taking care not to bump her feet.

He slowly makes his way to the bathroom. His stomach is distracting, weighty and bulbous, but his ears stay focused. Matt stays trained on her breathing as he pads across the floor, one hand pressed into the slight swell of his belly.

Is this rock-bottom, or is this the next step of the Bridge?

Claire's breathing is slow and steady and deep: she won't wake any time soon, as long as he's quiet. He grips the handle tight as he closes the door, releasing it slowly so it won't click. Then he turns on the faucet, letting a low, steady stream pour out—not loud enough to be noticeable on the other side of the door over the din of the city, but just enough to provide some white noise.

Just in case.

His palms are hot and his knees are weak. Matt crosses himself, mumbling an apology with an upward glance. Then he leans over the toilet and presses a fist into his solar plexus.

It takes a few attempts before he feels any movement, his knees shaking ever-so-slightly from unbalance and concentration. Focusing his consciousness, he lets his stomach churn, extends his neck so that the NG tube brushes against the back of his throat, lets his nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath—no matter how well-scrubbed a toilet might be, one focused breath is usually enough to get his gag reflex going.

"Come on," he whispers, clenching and unclenching his toes on the cold bathroom floor. A small gag rises up out of his chest, barely more than a hiccup and containing nothing but air. Come on, come on.

He grinds his fist harder into his stomach, leans over further, trying to let gravity pull some weight in the process. The loose end of his NG tube flops uselessly against his cheek and he pushes it back behind his ear, frustrated—he can already feel the pressure growing behind his eyes and the burning heat in his cheeks from doubling over, trying to force his food out by sheer will.

Come on. The NG tube presses against the back of his throat again at a funny angle and he gags, slapping a hand over his mouth in an attempt to suppress the sound and keep it from becoming a wet hack of a cough, amplified by the toilet bowl. On the other side of the bathroom door, Claire stirs: the soft sound of the blanket ruffling, bare feet rubbing against the couch. She's still asleep, but she's restless. He doesn't have time to do this cleanly.

Matt's slides his middle and ring fingers past his lips. They brush against the back of his throat, and the relief is nearly instantaneous. Sticky, artificial-vanillin oily cream rushes past his fingers, over his knuckles, down his wrist. He yanks his hand away, careful not to send a spatter of sick across Claire's tiny bathroom, and resists the urge to wipe the wet mess covering his hand on his sweatpants.

The taste of the blend is vile enough that the rest comes up naturally: gag after gag, rush after rush of rancid sick. Matt drops into a crouch, trying to move closer to the toilet and reduce the sound of his vomit pouring into the still water. He feels a few tiny blood vessels pop beneath the thin skin under his eyes. Like tiny fish roe exploding between his teeth.

His knees dig into the cold tile; his ribs heave and ache as he gags, and gags, and gags.

Once his stomach is empty, Matt stays crouched, teetering on the balls of his feet, arms resting on the edges of the toilet seat. He wipes the bitterness from his lips. It's been a long while since he's been on his knees. He owes Father Lantom a visit, but he's too embarrassed to show up looking like he does now. In any event, he has too much to atone for and he's not sure he can admit the sin he's committing right now.

(His thinks, too, of those nights when Stick would make him kneel on a bed of dry rice, poured out on the floor. His record was fifty-two minutes. Stick had seemed so proud, afterward, as he sat reverently at Matt's feet and gently picked tiny grains from the oozing, bleeding flesh of Matt's knees. You're really becoming something, Matt.)

The smell of Claire's jasmine shampoo hits him suddenly—he nearly jumps, thinking that she's snuck up on him, but he realizes that it's only wafted over from her shower. He should go back to her living room and hook himself back up. Let the rest of the filth drain into his stomach. But he doesn't want to and he'd only be doing it for her, anyway. The search for the house is pointless. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and Molina and Cohen are still out there waiting to be found.

Matt picks at the edge of the tape until he finds enough purchase to rip it from his cheek: it leaves a sticky patch that he rubs at with the back of his wrist, before he steels himself for the next step. Matt closes his eyes and breathes in deep, before starting to pull on the tube.

The very tip of it slips from his stomach, and he feels the length of it wriggle up from inside his body like a tapeworm as he keeps pulling, and pulling; he's done this enough times with Claire that he knows he's supposed to move quickly, but it still feels like an eternity before the end finally slips free of his nose with a splash of rancid-smelling meal replacement formula.

Matt wipes at his nose, smearing the mess along his sleeve; there's blood mixed in. He ignores it. With the edge of his foot, he feels for her little metal trash bin and drops the tube in; it lands with a wet thud.

Matt pulls on his shoes on and pulls on his hoodie. Before he leaves, he takes a moment to take Claire in, still dead-asleep and curled up on the end of her big, ratty couch: she radiates warmth, wrapped tightly in a massive hand-knit blanket that smells like dryer sheets and earl grey tea and is probably passed down from a beloved family member. Her breathing is slow and steady; she won't wake up as long as he's quiet.

Claire is so beautiful, and smart, and good. He hopes she will forgive him. If she doesn't, he knows that he deserves it.

Matt digs out the balloon of heroin, still tucked in the Altoids tin pushed all the way at the back of his bedside drawer. The rubber has gone hard over time and it crunches unpleasantly under his fingertips. Underneath, the heroin is packed hard. He brings it to his nose and inhales deep.

Paint thinner, vinegar, rubber tires, baby formula. Blood, too, from Colin's piece of shit father.

There's something else there; something pleasant but unexpected. He takes another deep breath, trying to locate it in his memory. It reminds him of something he smelled in Chinatown, when Stick would take him into the underground tunnels that lie hidden beneath the streets.

Old smuggling tunnels, he explained, running his hands against the walls, which were plastered in paper advertisements that Matt hadn't yet developed the skills to read with his fingertips. You could hide anything—anyone—in these tunnels. The first time, Matt thought Stick was bringing him into those tunnels to kill him.

The walls were dug out of Manhattan's thick schist bedrock, and Matt's sense of hearing felt uncomfortably muffled. He couldn't visualize anything past the walls on either side of him, except for the rattling of taxis overhead. He could scream all he wanted, and nobody on the surface would ever hear him (not that he would—Stick had trained that instinct out of him ages ago).

Anyway, despite the acute but resigned terror radiating through Matt's limbs, for once it was nothing so dire: Stick was just bringing Matt along for a trip to his pharmacy, Lin's Chinese Herbs, so that he would have an extra set of little hands to carry his prescriptions home.

It's ginseng, he realizes. Mixed in with the heroin, or else sitting on top of the rubber balloon. He can't get a strong enough grasp on the scent to tell. Matt grabs a plate from the kitchen and holds the balloon over top of it, piercing the rubber skin with the sharp edge of his nail. Once he does, the smell of the ginseng explodes tenfold: it's inside, mixed in with the heroin, not sitting on the outside like the blood. Why the fuck would the heroin he took off of Colin's piece of shit parents smell like ginseng?