“To get Lin out. And the others. Tell the kid I’ll say we doped him up and stole his keys, if it comes to that. But I think he’ll play.” I explain about the daughter.

“I would,” Lorenzo says. “Play, I mean. If she were mine.” His eyes wander down my body, stopping at the slight swell where my waist used to be. “I wouldn’t have left without you, Gianna. Never.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He does a quick tour around the room, searching for anything that might be a camera, and kisses me. “Never.”

“Now you know how I feel about Sonia. And the boys.” Sonia, mostly, though. Nothing is as bad as the idea of leaving her behind while everything goes to hell. Nothing except bringing another girl into the inferno. I push the thought out of my mind for the next twelve hours. “Go on—get Petroski to do a little jail-breaking.”

Five minutes later, Lorenzo comes back with Lin. When she sees the two gurneys, she turns to me, openmouthed and wide-eyed. I ask Lorenzo to explain while I see to Jackie and Isabel. They don’t need to be in here for what we’re about to do. Hell. I don’t want to be in here for it.

Lorenzo informs me I don’t have a choice. Lin makes a thumbs-up sign with her right hand and thumps her left palm.

“She needs you to assist,” he says.

I look at Lin’s black bracelet. “How’d she manage to say that?”

Lin rolls her eyes, waves both hands back and forth in front of her chest, then sets the index and middle fingers of each hand together and points them at me, shaking them.

“She says never mind and hurry up,” Lorenzo tells me. “I’ll translate.”

“You both know American Sign Language?” I say. “Why?”

He shrugs. “You speak some Vietnamese, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Okay. Point taken.”

Through Lorenzo, I hear each of Lin’s instructions while we scrub ourselves up to the elbows in one of the biochem lab’s sinks. It’s like Brain Surgery for Dummies. Monitor vitals at all times. Pass me the tools handle first. Stay the hell out of my light. And, in true Lin form, For fuck’s sake, don’t pass out.

The first three I can handle. I’m not so sure about number four.

Back in the white room, it takes Lin two full minutes to retract the skin on the chimp’s head and another thirty seconds to bore a hole the size of a dime. She turns off the drill, passes it to me along with a hunk of chimpanzee skull, and signs to Lorenzo.

“She says to think about it like the plug in a sink drain,” he says, passing along this gem of advice.

“Easy for you, Lin,” I say. “I was always more interested in the linguistics half of neurolinguistics.”