“No.”

“Fuck. What?”

“I couldn’t do it,” Jeremiah admitted.

“And what are we supposed to do now?” Brent was frantic, gripping the top of his head with his good hand, turning circles as though the trees themselves might offer some solution. “Scott has called me four times since they discharged me from the hospital! He keeps asking me to walk him through that fight again.”

“Does he know?”

“No, I don’t think so. But it won’t take him long to figure it out once he realizes I’m not at home convalescing like I’m supposed to be. Jesus! They’re probably at my house as we speak!”

“Is Mel there?”

“No, thank God. She’s already at work, none the wiser. She doesn’t even know about this yet.” He looked down at his own injured arm. “Jeremiah, we are royally screwed. We need to get you back to the lab and just take our chances. Maybe they’ll go easy on us if we just get back there. There’s nothing else we can do. The clone isn’t dead. Maybe they’ll just look at this as a drunken rampage or something.”

“I can’t, Brent. I can’t do that. Look, I didn’t kill him, but I do have this.” He took the bloody finger from his pocket, cold now, and stiffened into a slight curl, so that any way he held it, it looked like it was pointing at Jeremiah. Brent turned his head violently at the sight of it and then turned back to Jeremiah with a shocked expression.

“What the hell? You cut off his finger? His fucking finger? What the hell?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking. I just did it.”

“Put it away. Jesus!”

Jeremiah slipped the thing back into his pocket and ran a hand through his hair, thinking.

“Maybe we can use it,” he said. “Maybe, between this and those emails, maybe it will be enough.”

“Use it how? What are you going to do with a finger? Wave it around? What good is it? You were supposed to have a body! You were supposed to kill the clone, Jeremiah! A finger isn’t going to do us any good. It isn’t enough to prove anything!”

“It might be,” he said. “We need to think. It might be enough. I mean, I have a finger in my pocket with my own DNA and ten more of them on my own hands. We can use this. We can. We just have to figure out how.”

“You go back to them with that and they’re just going to lock you up and take the finger. And that’s if you’re lucky. It isn’t going to work,” Brent said.

“I can bring it to someone,” Jeremiah said. “I can use it to show someone what they’ve done. We can prove it with this. I think this can work. At least it’s something.”

Brent’s phone rang, the sound startling them both more than it should have. Brent looked at the number.

“Scott again,” he said. “We’ve got to do something fast, Jeremiah. We can’t stay in the woods forever.”