Page 145 of The Chain

Rachel has never had her nose broken before, and the pain is so shocking that she is momentarily blinded. Ginger punches her in the ribs, stomach, and the left breast.

Rachel winces, collapses onto one knee, and then somehow gets up again.

“You liked that, bitch? You’ll love this,” Ginger says and she punches her in the throat, the left breast again, and then square on her bloody nose.

Heavy, well-placed, well-aimed blows that hurt.

Rachel goes down hard.

Ginger leaps on top of her and flips Rachel onto her back.

Ginger is so quick and efficient that Rachel has no chance.

“No, ugh.” Rachel gasps as Ginger’s hands wrap around her throat and squeeze.

“I knew you were trouble. Knew it right from the start,” Ginger says, her wild, ecstatic, crazy face leering above Rachel. Spittle is flying from her mouth. She’s grinning. She’s enjoying this. “I knew it!” Ginger says and squeezes harder. In FBI self-defense class, she learned how to choke someone out in a few seconds.

Rachel’s vision is tunneling.

Everything is becoming white.

“You’re going to die, bitch!” Ginger yells.

Tunnel.

Whiteness.

Nothingness.

Rachel knows she is disappearing forever now.

She can feel her life dribbling away onto the grimy concrete floor.

How to tell Kylie she loves her but that she isn’t going to make it?

Can’t tell her. Can’t talk. Can’t breathe.

Nothing anyone can do.

Rachel understands everything now.

The Chain is a cruel method of exploiting the most important human emotion—the capacity for love—to make money. It wouldn’t work in a world where there was no filial or sibling or romantic love, and only a sociopath who is without love or who doesn’t understand love could use it for her ends.

Love is what undid Ariadne and Theseus.

The Minotaur too, in the Borges story.

Love, or a fumbling attempt at love, is what nearly undid Ginger.

Rachel sees all that.

She understands.

The Chain is a metaphor for the ties that bind all of us to friends and family. It is the umbilical link between mother and child, the way or path that the hero must travel in a quest, and it is the thin clew of crimson thread that is the solution Ariadne comes up with to the problem of the labyrinth.

Rachel understands it all.

Knowledge is sorrow.