“About time,” Marion says. “I can’t take much more of this.”

Neither can Rose. She isn’t sure if she can even walk unassisted. Leaning on chair backs for support, she totters unsteadily around the activities table. In her mad scramble she’d knocked over the mugs. Pens are scattered across the surface and onto the floor.

The nurse is collapsed, head and shoulders beneath the table. Two chairs have fallen over. “She’s definitely down,” Rose says. For the first time since she’d been introduced to the MCU, she is glad it is small, separate from everything else, and, undoubtedly, well soundproofed.

“Let’s get on with it,” Marion says.

“Let me get my pants on,” Rose says wearily.

“You don’t have any pants on? Why aren’t you wearing pants?”

“Tell you later.” Rose retrieves the bottoms of her scrubs. One leg is inside out. Ignoring Marion’s machine-gun questions—“What are you doing? What’s this about your pants? Are you sure she’s down?”—she turns the leg right side out, dons the pants and shoes, rights the office chair, and puts the phone receiver back in its cradle.

Marion sees her then. “Don’t go AWOL again,” she snaps. “Scared the hell out of me.”

“Okay.” Rose sits down in front of the computer.

A long intake of breath shushes in her ear; then Marion says, “One second. Okay. Here we are. The nurse’s password is Quackers2! Capital Q, numeral two, exclamation point.”

Rose types in the password.

“See the box Patient Files in the control bar?”

Rose finds it, clicks on it.

“The log-in is MCUsu6pm.” She spells it out.

Rose is in the patient files. She clicks on her own name. Everything is there.

“Scroll through,” Marion says. “I can slow the video down later for single pages.”

Rose scrolls. Every patient in the secure unit for five years back, they’d decided. A lot of scrolling. Each second grates on Rose’s nerves, sandpaper on a sunburn. The screen blurs. Rose puts on the reading glasses. They don’t help.

Her free ear is attuned to the heap of nurse meat in the activities room. This time she didn’t check Karen’s pulse. Didn’t even take the time to see if the woman was breathing. The cola nurse survived the first drugging; she would just have to survive this time. Two massive doses in such a short time might wreck her liver or spleen or something. Rose hopes not, but she doesn’t know what the drug/drugs is/are: opioid, narcotic, sedative, hallucinogen—probably not that. When she was on it, she hadn’t seen anything interesting. Most likely mostly tranquilizers, downers of some sort. In college they’d called them “reds” for some reason. Rose does not know the chemicals used to make reds.

Seventeen bone-aching minutes later and they are done.

“Log out,” Marion orders.