In the car, we don’t speak. She drives carefully. Stopping at all the yellow lights. Every time she turns a corner, her key chain smacks the ignition panel. One of those furry key chains kids used to have swinging from their backpacks. Soft and perfectly white and I find myself wanting to touch it, hold it. Or—smack, smack—hurl it out the window.

Her face looms above me once more.

“Kit, you better wake up,” she says, her eyes big and grave. “We need to figure things out.”

We’re in my apartment, Diane’s car parked in the lot.

The drive from the lab took less than five minutes, but I threw up once, then twice, into a folded newspaper in Diane’s front seat.

“Did I fall asleep again?” I ask. I don’t even remembering lying down on the sofa.

“It’s the chloroform. Does your head hurt?”

“Like a sack of rocks. Wet rocks.” I try to sit up, stomach bending. “Did anyone call?”

“No,” she says.

I rub my eyes, look at the light coming in the window.

“Did it happen?” I ask. “Did that really happen?”

She looks at me. “Yes.”

What did we do, what did I do?

“He turned up the pressure too high,” I say. “The glass already had a crack and I guess it just blew. A piece caught him in the throat. The carotid.”

Diane nods. “Jugular. The carotid, you die much faster.”

“Jugular,” I repeat, something twitching in my own throat. “It didn’t spray. The jugular.”

Cut the carotid artery, you might die in less than a minute, but cut the jugular, you could make it six, seven, eight minutes with enough pressure. With help.

I’ve taken dozens of science courses—biology, human anatomy, physiology, systems anatomy, neurophysiology. I’ve dissected fetal pigs and kitty cats and oily minks. I’ve stood before cow ovaries and sheep brains. Human spinal cords and brain stems and hearts.

And yet when a body was splayed before me, open on my lap, no microscope needed, no scalpels or probes or forceps or heavy wooden mallets, I hadn’t been able to do anything other than, ultimately, pass out.

From the fog of thought, Diane’s voice comes like a careening arrow.

“What matters now,” she says, “is we need to keep our stories straight.”

The way she’s looking at me, how close she sits, I feel a chill.

“I shouldn’t have listened to you,” I say, my face hot. “I should have called the police. Called 911.”

“But you didn’t,” she says. “And that was the right thing.”

The right thing, which, I realize now, means the smart thing to Diane.

I can’t do the moral math, not yet. Not for myself.

“Why did you tell him, Kit?” she asks. And for the first time since Diane blazed back into my life, her voice wobbles. “About me.”

I pinch the skin between my eyes. “I was drinking. We were drinking.”

“Oh,” she says, pulling back. “Were you two involved?”

“No,” I say quickly, my hand falling to my lap. “Once. Only once.”

“Oh.”

“What? You’re surprised?”

She pauses a second. “No,” she says. “I don’t know that side of you well.”

“What side?” I say.

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

I look at her. “Diane, it slipped out.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” I say.

“No,” she says, “you don’t.” She pauses. “So you went there and you wanted to make sure he didn’t tell your secret.”

“Yes,” I say. “I mean, to ask him if he wouldn’t.”

“I heard you fighting,” she says. “I couldn’t hear what you were saying. And then what?”

“And then it happened.”

She looks at me. Pauses. There’s a glimmer of something in her face; does she not believe me?

“Well,” she says, “he can never tell now.”

We’ve taken turns in the shower, Diane’s shorn scalp glistening. The floor mat from her car is hanging wetly from the shower bar. Diane’s lab coat sits in pink bathwater in the tub, salt and peroxide doing their work. Our OxiCleaned shoes, now marbled white, dry on a bath mat.

“Someone could find him any minute,” she says, beside me on the sofa like we are back in Lanister, droop-eyed Grimm on Mom’s shag carpet staring up at us. “We need to have our story ready. We saw Alex in the lab, said hello, but we didn’t stay.”

“After the mice infestation, you were spooked. You wanted to leave.”

She looks at me as if doubting anyone would believe she would be spooked by dead mice or anything at all. “You offered to take me on a tour of the area,” she says.

“So we left. The cameras show us leaving. We left.”

“Today or tomorrow or Monday morning, someone finds him. Runs over to the body, or doesn’t. Calls 911 or the campus police: There’s been an accident at the lab.”

“The police will wonder how Alex could turn off the nitrogen with a piece of glass in his neck,” I say. My brain has returned, full force, and I can think of a thousand ways to get caught.

“It probably has an automatic shutoff. No one’s going to think about that anyway,” Diane says. I’m not sure either of us believes it.

“Our access cards—”

“Our access cards show we left together,” she says. “Your Russian friend saw us. The cameras saw us.”

“What about our shoes, your lab coat?”

“We’re going to dump them. I’ll take them. There’s some deep storm drains by my place.”

“What if they find them? I read once where they found a baby in a storm drain. They’ll match my shoe prints—”

“The shoe prints are gone. The blood covered them. The OxiClean will take care of any spots we might have missed and—”

“And it’ll interfere with luminol,” I finish. Such smart women, we did manage to do a few smart things.

I pause, thinking of G-21. The things we did.

“But Diane, it didn’t…” She must know. “It didn’t look…natural.”

“There’s nothing natural,” Diane says, “about any of it.”

I close my mouth, bite my lip. She’s looking at the bathroom’s open door. Her scarlet lab coat hanging now, dripping dry.

“Are you worried about the Russian?” she says abruptly.

“Serge?” I blink, startled. We’re in a spy novel now. I picture Diane with a pistol disguised as a lipstick tube in her hand. “No. Serge is a good guy.”

“Do you think he’ll go back later?”

“If he does, probably only to the animal unit. The cage-wash room or the vivarium. He doesn’t like Zell, some of the others. He thinks they’re slobs.” I pause. “I don’t think he liked Alex.”

He is the political animal, Serge said. He is the one.

She looks at me.

“He didn’t look inside the bag,” I say, my voice speeding up. “And it was sealed.”

“How often do they pick up those biohazard bins?”

“I don’t know,” I say, staring down at our legs, our feet, both of us smelling like my soap. That’s when I feel a hot rush up my cheeks, under my eyes. But I don’t let it happen. I won’t let her see it.

“Kit,” she says, very gently, “we need to stick together now.”

“I need some air.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

I step out onto the balcony and stay there, alone.

The sun starts to drag down and the sky goes vermilion, smoke drifting from wildfires somewhere. Calcium, I think. The flame test just two nights before. His hand holding the wire in the Bunsen’s flare. Everything beginning, or seeming to.

But it had begun before, hadn’t it? He would push and probe and prod and pry. He would find my weakest spot. He would take what he wanted for himself.

It’s easier to think about this than about anything else.

When I step back inside, I don’t see her.

For a few frantic seconds, I think she’s gone and wonder what it means. But then the bathroom door opens and she appears, newly pale, her eyes red.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.” She walks toward her backpack, sitting on my lone dining-room chair, the plastic one with the crack.

“You were in there awhile.”

“I felt a little sick,” she says. “I’m okay now.” As she reaches for her backpack, her shirt lifts, exposing a small bit of flesh. I nearly flinch at the xylophone of bones on her spine.

“The sun’s down,” I say, hoping she’ll leave so at last I can breathe.

She nods distractedly. “You’ve been through a lot,” she says. “Just remember, it was an accident, like you said. And anyone can have one bad second. The poison wasn’t meant for him. It just happened and then it was too late.”

“Poison—what?”

Diane looks confused a moment, then shakes her head. “I mean the accident. It wasn’t your fault. That’s all I mean.”

I look at her, the quivering in her hands. She seemed so cool, so self-possessed in G-21 and with Serge. But now I wonder if any of that was real. Was it possible she’d been going through all these motions while her brain was somersaulting back in time? The thought is terrifying.

“You can go home,” I say quickly. “I’ll get rid of the shoes and lab coat. It makes more sense.”

“But no one here knows me. Doesn’t it make more sense—”

“I’ll do it,” I say, even as I wonder if my rust-shingled car will stall in the evening chill, if I ever replaced the headlight. “It’s my responsibility.”

She nods, sliding her backpack on. Reaches for her keys, which have fallen to the carpet.

“I’ll leave, then,” she says, looking out the window. “It’s dark enough.”

The lab coat is dripping with excruciating slowness on the shower bar, the shoes from the tub. Lifting them to my face, I think I can still see the blood, smell it even, which is impossible.

I know I need to get them out of here.

I put them in a garbage bag, and then I put that in another garbage bag.

I grab my jacket. My fingers move strangely on the buttons, as though they’re no longer used to routine tasks, only blood and mayhem.

In the building parking lot, I scrape massage-parlor flyers off the windshield of my slowly dying Pontiac hatchback. The only thing I’d ever won, back when I was nineteen. The local used-car dealership held a contest. Whoever kept a hand on it the longest won. Ten-minute breaks every three hours. It took me fifty-six hours, and I got lucky when my main competition, a truck driver with legs thick as propane tanks, fell asleep on his feet. All this for a clunker with sixty thousand miles on it already, my cousin Scott said, shaking his head.

These days, I use it only to drive to the big box store once a month for bales of paper towels, coffee tins like barrels. I hope it will start and it does and before I know it my foot is shaking over the gas and the car erupts to shuddery life.

Driving, my SoWest Lab Supplies baseball cap pulled low, I begin to make my way out of town. No one sees me; no one ever does.

But my brain zigzags to dire places. It’s as if Diane’s brain, so wary, so watchful, after more than a decade in hiding, so wired for vigilance and self-protection, has infected my own.

Why had she been so eager to dispose of the shoes? Why did I listen to her?

In the end, there’s only you, my mom always said, sitting me down at the kitchen table to explain about payday loans and title loans and my dad’s bounced checks. And your mom, of course.