Would she rather die than face going back into the control of people who have an interest in maintaining her dementia?

Darn tootin’ she would.

Barnacle eyes fixed on her, knife cutting an obscene silver grin in his face, the intruder humps his belly sideways. Four feet from her perch. If he gets a hand on the skylight, she is toast.

Oink. Hump.

Three feet.

“Who sent you?” she hisses. “Someone at Longwood?” A grunt and a hump and a black bar of shadow beneath the cap brim are her only answer. With the blade in his teeth, he can’t talk. It would be like talking to the dentist when the drill is in one’s mouth.

Rose steadies her breath and clears her mind. She suspects she is in no way spiritually prepared for the moment of death. In the bardo of transition, her slippery little drift of energy will attach itself to the first thing it sees, be it tomato worm, opossum, or paramecium.

Now she sees, really sees, the knife: the slight rise to a point on the back where it pushes into the man’s cheek, the drop of sweat on the shiny blade, the delicate swoop of the serrations on its cutting edge, the haft wrapped in dark tape or leather, the strip neatly overlapping itself up to where it stops at the wider, thumb-shaped end.

Folding down over the ridgeline in an extreme Child’s Pose that would impress her yoga instructor, Rose reaches out, grabs the haft, and jerks.

“Whoa!” she mutters as it comes free with a crack.

Monster Man is as surprised as she. “Hey!” he says stupidly. Recovering himself, he spits something at her. A solid speck stings her chin, then falls between her thighs, hitting the roof with a pathetic click.

He snarls. Half of one of his front teeth is broken off at a sharp angle.

Now she has pissed him off.

A nuclear brand of fear starts up her throat, cold enough to freeze her brain. Rose shivers, shaking it off.

Okay, Monster Man is mad.

So is she.

Vocalizing something very like the snarl of a large canine, he moves his gloved hands another foot toward her. The glittering dark eyes never leave her face.

Rose clutches the knife in her left hand, the blade pointing away from her. She passes it to her stronger hand, then wraps the other fist around it in a two-handed grip lest tremors or sweat loosen her hold. The roof is dark. The gloves are black. Rose’s hands have little strength and no steadiness. She aims for the nearest sausage-sized finger. Tentatively, she stabs. The blade strikes something and sinks in a creepy quarter of an inch. Her stomach twists.