“Don’t be so fucking brave.” Morgan’s eyes—those nasty rat eyes—bore into mine. “You move, bitch, and I’ll start pushing the stuff into him.” The eyes shift slightly to the left, over my shoulder. “Go back into the lab.”

It takes a moment before I realize he’s not talking to me. A firm grip, not as strong as a man’s, but strong enough, tightens on my elbow, turning me slightly.

Jackie.

Her head moves in one sharp, defined jerk. Let’s go, it says. In her free hand are Petroski’s keys. They sound like tiny metallic bells in the still of a room where everyone seems to be holding his or her breath.

“Get Petroski,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.” It takes every part of my human brain to ward off the reptilian instinct to flee.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Jean,” Morgan threatens.

“Listen. If you have a human bone left in you, Morgan, you’ll do this right. Have Petroski shoot him. Make it clean. You can always call it an accident later on.”

There’s a pause while Morgan considers this.

“Self-defense?” I suggest. “The serum’s going to be harder to explain. We’re talking about a reputable biochemist here, not some schmuck you recruited from grad school. Think about it. Think what you’re going to say when Lorenzo Rossi walks out of this building speaking in tongues. Then think about what the Italian embassy’s going to say.”

Morgan’s thinking takes an eternity. I spend half of it thinking about guns.

Like any mechanism, they have parts. The part you put a bullet in, the part the bullet comes out of, and the part that makes the bullet go from one place to another. Easy. Simple. Unchanged for centuries. Lock, stock, and barrel. In one order or another.

During the other half of Morgan’s thinking time, I consider Sergeant Petroski, the philosophy major turned soldier. Husband. Father. A man whose hand shakes when he draws his service pistol. A man who knows where the safety is and how to disengage it.

Jackie yanks on my arm again, and I turn to her.

“What would you do to be free, Jacko? Because right now, I’d do just about anything.”

She doesn’t say a word, but she does smile.

“Petroski!” Morgan yells.

Heavy boots echo through the lab. Under them, paper rustles. A sharp crack marks the end of a wayward pair of glasses. The entire world slows as Sergeant Petroski approaches the open door behind me.

“Sir!” Petroski barks.

It all happens in the blink of an eye, but I know my mind is recording each image, each still frame of the movie. Maybe one day I’ll be able to slow these images down, replay them in real time. Right now, the sequence is haphazard and choppy, the soundtrack garbled.

“Shoot this man,” Morgan says.