Fight it down! Fight it. Come on. You can do it. Here I go… She retched once. Then again.

No! Control it.

Rising in her throat.

Control…

Control it…

And she did. Breathing through her nose, concentrating on Kate and Eddie and Pammy, on the yellow knapsack containing all her precious possessions. Seeing it, picturing it from every angle. Her whole life was in there. Her new life.

Ron, I don’t want to blow it. I came here for you, honey…

She closed her eyes. Thought: Breathe deep. In, out.

Finally, the nausea subsided. And a moment later she was feeling better and, though she was crying in pain from the snapped wrist, she managed to continue to caterpillar her way toward the table, one foot. Two.

She felt a thump as her head collided with the table leg. She’d just managed to connect with it and couldn’t move any farther. She swung her head back and forth and jostled the table hard. She heard the bottle slosh as it shifted on the tabletop. She looked up.

A bit of the jug was showing beyond the edge of the table. Carole drew back her head and hit the table leg one last time.

No! She’d knocked the leg out of reach. The jug teetered for a moment but stayed upright. Carole strained to get more slack from the clothesline but couldn’t.

Damn. Oh, damn! As she gazed hopelessly up at the filthy bottle she realized it was filled with a liquid and something floated inside. What is that?

She scrunched her way back toward the wall a foot or two and looked up.

It seemed like a lightbulb inside. No, not a whole bulb, just the filament and the base, screwed into a socket. A wire ran from the socket out of the jug to one of those timers that turn the lights on and off when you’re away on vacation. It looked like -

A bomb! Now she recognized the faintest whiff of gasoline.

No, no…

Carole began to squirm away from the table as fast as she could, sobbing in desperation. There was a filing cabinet by the wall. It’d give her some protection. She drew her legs up then felt a chill of panic and unwound them furiously. The motion knocked her off balance. She realized, to her horror, that she was rolling onto her back once more. Oh, stop. Don’t… She stayed poised, perfectly still, for a long moment, quivering as she tried to shift her weight forward. But then she continued to roll, collapsing onto her cuffed hand, her shattered wrist taking the weight of her body. There was a moment of incredible pain and, mercifully, she fainted once more.

“NO WAY, RHYME. YOU CAN’T DO IT.”

Berger looked on uneasily. Rhyme supposed that in this line of work he’d seen all sorts of hysterical scenarios played out at moments like this. The biggest problem Berger’d have wasn’t those wanting to die but those who wanted everyone else to live.

Thom pounded on the door.

“Thom,” Rhyme called. “It’s all right. You can leave us.” Then to Sachs: “We’ve said our farewells. You and me. It’s bad form to ruin a perfect exit.”

“You can’t do this.”

Who’d blown the whistle? Pete Taylor maybe. The doctor must’ve guessed that he and Thom were lying.

Rhyme saw her eyes slip to the three items on the table. The gifts of the Magi: the brandy, the pills and the plastic bag. Also a rubber band, similar to the ones Sachs still wore on her shoes. (How many times had he come home from a crime scene to find Blaine staring at the bands on his shoes, horrified? “Everybody’ll think my husband can’t afford new shoes. He’s keeping the soles on with rubber bands. Honestly, Lincoln!”)

“Sachs, take the cuffs off the good doctor here. I’ll have to ask you to leave one last time.”

She barked a fast laugh. “Excuse me. This’s a crime in New York. The DA could bootstrap it into murder, he wanted to.”

Berger said, “I’m just having a conversation with a patient.”

“That’s why the charge’s only attempt. So far. Maybe we should run your name and prints through NCIC. See what we come up with.”

“Lincoln,” Berger said quickly, alarmed. “I can’t -”

“We’ll get it worked out,” Rhyme said. “Sachs, please.”

Feet apart, hands on trim hips, her gorgeous face imperious. “Let’s go,” she barked to the doctor.

“Sachs, you have no idea how important this is.”

“I won’t let you kill yourself.”

“Let me?” Rhyme snapped. “Let me? And why exactly do I need your permission?”

Berger said, “Miss… Officer Sachs, it’s his decision and it’s completely consensual. Lincoln’s more informed than most of the patients I deal with.”

“Patients? Victims, you mean.”

“Sachs!” Rhyme blurted, trying to keep the desperation from his voice. “It’s taken me a year to find someone to help me.”

“Maybe because it’s wrong. Ever consider that? Why now, Rhyme? Right in the middle of the case?”

“If I have another attack and a stroke, I might lose all ability to communicate. I could be conscious for forty years and completely unable to move. And if I’m not brain-dead, nobody in the universe is going to pull the plug. At least now I’m still able to communicate my decisions.”

“But why?” she blurted.

“Why not?” Rhyme answered. “Tell me. Why not?”

“Well…” It seemed as if the arguments against suicide were so obvious she was having trouble articulating them. “Because…”

“Because why, Sachs?”

“For one thing, it’s cowardly.”

Rhyme laughed. “Do you want to debate it, Sachs? Do you? Fair enough. ‘Cowardly,’ you say. That leads us to Sir Thomas Browne: ‘When life is more terrible than death, it’s the truest valor to live.’ Courage in the face of insurmountable adversity… A classic argument in favor of living. But if that’s true then why anesthetize patients before surgery? Why sell aspirin? Why fix broken arms? Why is Prozac the most prescribed medicine in America? Sorry, but there’s nothing intrinsically good about pain.”

“But you’re not in pain.”

“And how do you define pain, Sachs? Maybe the absence of all feeling can be pain too.”

“You can contribute so much. Look at all you know. All the forensics, all the history.”

“The social-contribution argument. That’s a popular one.” He glanced at Berger but the medico remained silent. Rhyme saw his interest dip to the bone sitting on the table – the pale disk of spinal column. He picked it up, kneaded it in his cuffed hands. He was a former orthopedics man, Rhyme recalled.

He continued to Sachs, “But who says we should contribute anything to life? Besides, the corollary is I might contribute something bad. I might cause some harm too. To myself or someone else.”

“That’s what life is.”

Rhyme smiled. “But I’m choosing death, not life.”

Sachs looked uneasy as she thought hard. “It’s just… death isn’t natural. Life is.”

“No? Freud’d disagree with you. He gave up on the pleasure principle and came to feel that there was another force – a non-erotic primary aggression, he called it. Working to unbind the connections we build in life. Our own destruction’s a perfectly natural force. Everything dies; what’s more natural than that?”

Again she worried a portion of her scalp.

“All right,” she said. “Life’s more of a challenge to you than most people. But I thought… everything I’ve seen about you tells me you’re somebody who likes challenges.”

“Challenges? Let me tell you about challenges. I was on a ventilator for a year. See the tracheotomy scar on my neck? Well, through positive-pressure breathing exercises – and the greatest willpower I could muster – I managed to get off the machine. In fact I’ve got lungs like nobody’s business. They’re as strong as yours. In a C4 quad that’s one for the books, Sachs. It consumed my life for eight months. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eight months just to handle a basic animal function. I’m not talking about painting the Sistine Chapel or playing the violin. I’m talking about fucking breathing.”