He looked at the girls’ pallid bodies, gaping open on the morgue table, the ligature marks a slash of purple across their necks. That was one upside, Archie decided: He killed them right away. And there were worse ways to die than strangulation.

The kid upstairs jumped up and down and an adult walked over and picked her up. Archie could hear her shrieking and giggling.

Today, when Gretchen comes with the pills, Archie manages to get a sentence out when she removes the tape. “I’ll swallow them,” he tells her.

She sets the funnel on the tray and Archie opens his mouth and extends his tongue, like a good patient. She places a pill on his tongue and holds a small glass of water against his parched lips so he can drink. It is the first water he has had since his arrival and it feels good in his mouth and in his throat. She checks around his tongue to ensure that he has swallowed the medicine. They repeat the exercise four times.

When they are done, Archie asks, “How long have I been here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

He hears a buzzing. At first, he thinks it’s in his head, but then he recognizes the sound: flies. The decomposing corpse on the floor. It reminds him of the other man, and for a moment he is a cop again. “The second man who lifted me into the van,” he says. “Where is he? Have you killed him, too?”

Gretchen raises a bewildered eyebrow. “Darling, you sound like a raving lunatic.”

“He was here,” Archie says, his mind foggy. “Before.”

“It’s just us,” she says impatiently.

But he wants to keep her talking, to get as much information as he can. He glances around at the windowless room. The subway tiles. The medical equipment. “Where are we?”

She is done with his questions. “Have you thought about what I asked you?” she says.

Archie has no idea what she’s talking about. “What?”

“What you want to send them.” This is delivered with thinly disguised irritation. “They’re worried about you, darling.” She runs her hand lightly along his arm to where his wrist is bound with a padded leather strap to the gurney. “You’re right-handed, yes?”

Archie has to think on his feet, while he is still lucid, before the pills kick in. “Why, Gretchen? You never sent anything from the other bodies.” Then it strikes him. Her victims. They were always killed within three days of their abductions. “It’s been four days,” he says. “They’re starting to think I’m dead. You want them to know I’m still alive.”

“I’ll let you choose. But we need to do it now.”

The terror is building in his body, but he knows he can’t agree to her terms. As soon as he does, he becomes a partner to it. “No.”

“I’ve removed dozens of spleens,” she mutters. “But only postmortem. Do you think you can remain still?”

He starts to fold in on himself. “Gretchen, don’t do this.”

“It’s moot, of course.” She picks up a syringe from the tray. “This is succinylcholine. It’s a paralyzing agent, used for surgery. You won’t be able to move at all. But you’ll remain conscious. You’ll feel everything.” She glances at him meaningfully. “I think that’s essential, don’t you? If you’re going to lose a part of your body, you should experience it happening. If you wake up and it’s gone, how do you know if you feel any different?”

He can’t stop it. He knows there is no reasoning with her. He can only protect the people he’s left behind. “Who are you going to send it to?” he asks her.

“I was thinking Debbie.”

Archie’s mind lurches, imagining Debbie’s face. “Send it to Henry,” he asks. “Please, Gretchen. Send it to Henry Sobol.”

Gretchen pauses with her preparations and smiles at him. “If I do, you’ll have to be good.”

“I’ll do what you want,” Archie says. “I’ll be good.”

“The problem with succinylcholine is that it will paralyze your diaphragm.” She holds up a plastic tube that leads to a machine behind her. “So first I’m going to have to intubate you.”

Before Archie can react, she inserts a curved steel blade into his mouth, depresses his tongue, and pushes the tube in behind it. The tube is large, filling his throat, and he gags violently and fights it. “Swallow,” she says as she presses her hand against his forehead, pinning his head hard against the gurney.

He can feel his fingers splay, every muscle tensed as he fights the tube. She leans in close, tenderly, her hand still on his forehead. “Swallow it,” she says again. “Fighting it will only make it worse.”

He closes his eyes and forces himself to overcome the gag reflex and swallow the tube as she slides it farther down his throat, deep into his body.

Then it is done. The air fills his lungs. It is calming, actually. It forces his breaths to equalize, his heart rate to slow. He opens his eyes and watches as she slides the hypo into his IV and adjusts the drip into his arm.

He feels suddenly, disturbingly calm. It is the resignation he had seen on the faces of death row inmates. He has no control, so there is no point in fighting any of it. The sensation bleeds out of his body until it is just deadweight. He tries to move his fingers, his head, his shoulders, but nothing responds. It’s a relief, really. He has fought so hard in his tiny career to order chaos, discourage violence, prevent crime. Now he can just let it happen.

She smiles at him, and he knows with that smile that he has been played. He has asked for and received a favor from his murderer. And more than that, he notes with dry detachment, he is grateful.

He can only stare at the familiar fluorescent lights and pipes on the white ceiling, vaguely aware of her movements as she washes her hands, prepares an instrument tray, shaves the hair off his abdomen. He feels the cold iodine on his skin and then she presses the scalpel into his flesh. It opens easily under the sharp blade in her hands, a slice and then a pop as it pulls through the muscle. He tries to distance himself from it; to talk himself out of the pain. For a moment, he thinks he’s going to be all right. That he can stand this. That it’s no worse than the nails. And then she inserts the clamp and pries open the hole she had made in him. It is a wrenching, ripping, nausea-inducing pain that makes Archie scream, only he cannot speak, cannot move his mouth, cannot lift his head. He still manages to cry out in his mind, a strangled howl that he carries with him into unconsciousness.

She lets him sleep. It feels like days, because when he wakes up, his mind has constructed a tunnel of clarity. He turns his head and she is right beside him, face propped up on two stacked fists set on his bed. They are inches apart, nose-to-nose. The tube is gone from his throat, but his throat aches from it. She has not slept. He can tell. He can see the fine veins underneath the pale skin of her forehead. He knows her expressions. He is starting to know her face as well as Debbie’s.

“What were you dreaming about?” she asks him.

Color images flash through his mind. “I was in a car in a city, looking for my house,” he says. His voice is hoarse, a cracked whisper. “I couldn’t find it. I’d forgotten the address. So I just kept circling.” He smirks mirthlessly, feeling his chapped lips crack. A hard nut of pain sits in his chest. “I wonder what it means.”

Gretchen doesn’t move. “You’ll never see them again, you know.”

“I know.” He glances down at the bandage on his abdomen. The pain pales compared to the ache of his ribs. His entire torso is bruised, the skin the color of rotten fruit. His body feels like wet sand. He hardly notices the smell of decomposing flesh anymore. It is a strange thing to be alive. He is getting less and less attached to the idea. “They get it?”

“I sent it to Henry,” she says. “They haven’t released it to the media.”