She looks up toward the driveway. She sees Morgan, silhouette backlit by the pulsing blue and red lights.

“Emily?”

She lets go of George’s hand. “Over here!”

“Keep on shouting!”

“I’m over here, Morgan.” She positions herself on her knees, grits her teeth, and yanks out the knife. George groans. His breath whistles tight and fast. She transfers the knife to one hand and rests the remaining palm on his forehead. “Make sure the paramedics watch their feet. It’s slippery when you get past the pavement.”

Morgan stops and yells over his shoulder.

Emily looks at George. Her voice lowers, gets soft around the edges. “Still awake?”

His eyelids roll all the way up. Droplets of water hang heavy on the lashes. His neck twists a little, the flashing lights outlining the shape of his nose. “The trick is,” he sighs. “To not…pass out from…the pain.”

She withdraws her hand. “Can you stay conscious?”

“I…can do it.”

Morgan makes his way down into the clearing. His gun is drawn and pointed at the ground. “What the hell happened here?”

“It’s all right.” The rain drums the top of her head, runs through her hair and down the sides of her face. She glances at Morgan. “I have it under control.”

His eyebrows lift. “I see that.”

The paramedics move up behind him, circle around, and filter into the clearing. They set down a perimeter of equipment and get to work. Emily stands, unsteady on her feet. Her cuffs, her jeans, her collar are soaked in blood. She looks around as she clutches the knife in one hand.

Morgan holsters his gun and rushes to her side. “Come on,” he says, taking up her arm. “We need to get you out of here.”

“I’m all right.” She cranes her head around to look at the paramedics. “I can walk.”

“There’s no telling how much blood you’ve lost.”

“Most of it is his.” She looks at him. “I’m okay, Morgan.” Her teeth chatter. “Really.”

“Come on. You’re going to the hospital. We need to get your neck looked at.”

“Okay.”

Morgan puts an arm around her shoulders. Emily leans into him. He’s warm and solid; the faint lingering smell of his aftershave pulls the lost and reeling pieces of her back into the moment. The cut on her neck stings and starts to throb. Her feet weave crooked patterns on the ground. A pair of police officers hustle past, running down the grassy slope and into the trees.

At the bottom of the driveway she sees Hotch, the features of his face drawn into a delicate tightness that shatters upon sight of her; fear and worry, tenderness and relief, shards of emotion soften in his eyes. Her body starts to shudder. Morgan’s arm tightens. He takes his time, climbing with her to the back of the ambulance. He jumps up inside and digs around for a blanket. He finds one and jumps down, shakes it open, drapes it around her shoulders.

“I can ride,” she says.

“Ride?” Morgan looks at her, then glances at the open ambulance. “You mean ride with Foyet?”

“He can’t do anything.” Emily tightens the blanket around herself. “He’s been incapacitated by a stab wound. Besides, there’ll be a police officer in there with a sidearm.”

“Emily, you do not have to ride to the hospital with Foyet. I’ll drive you.”

She looks at the grove of trees. “It’ll be fine.”

“No, it won’t be.” Morgan folds his arms. “Because it’s not happening. Look at me. He tried to kill you, the hospital is only three miles away, and we’re leaving. Right now.”

Hotch holds up a hand. “Derek…enough.”

“It’s not far. Someone can drive her.”

Emily shivers.

Hotch turns his attention to her, stepping forward. “I’ll ride with you, if you want to ride.” His words are slow, measured. He curves gentle hands around her upper arms. “How’s that?”

Emily holds up the knife. “I need an evidence bag for this.”

Hotch looks to Morgan. “Do you have any gloves?”

“Yeah.” He pulls them on. “I’ll take care of it.”

The paramedics lug the gurney up onto the driveway, one of them holding aloft a bag of blood. Hotch moves closer to Emily, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. He watches them load the gurney.

He looks at her. “Are you sure about this?”

She watches as they roll it in, securing it into place. She nods. “I’m sure.”

“Okay. Come on.”

Once inside, the doors slam shut and the ambulance begins to roll, sirens on and piercing, everything inside swaying up over the potholes and the frost heaves to the road. One of the paramedics looks at the cut on her neck. Emily watches the other two of them as they work on Foyet, connecting him to monitors and fitting an oxygen tube into his nostrils, injecting him full of painkillers. Chemical repose softens the angles in his face. His mouth relaxes, the dimple in his cheek unfurling. His eyes go glassy. The lids loosen, irises rolling around beneath them. The paramedic touches the bruised skin on her neck, dries it before pulling the edges together. He secures them with strips of butterfly tape. He covers it with a pad of gauze, takes Emily’s hand, and brings her fingers up to hold it in place.

“They’re gonna want to stitch this up in the ER,” he says. “This’ll hold you for now.”

Emily nods. “Thank you.”

Hotch holds her close. “You don’t have to look at him,” he murmurs.

The vibration of the road rises up through the floor. The big engine kicks up through its chain of gears. The casters rattle. The handcuff clinks against the metal.

“I know,” she says.

She looks at the blood bag swinging on a hook in the ceiling, watches it deflate, clear plastic spaces opening up in the red as the walls of the bag close in and start to touch each other. Red tubing curls around itself once before disappearing into plastic hardware taped to the inside of George’s elbow. One of the paramedics kneels over him, holding steady pressure on the wad of gauze packed into the wound. The look on his face is intense, serene.

A flood of questions rises: is he still conscious? This look on his face, is it normal? Will he remember me sitting here? She looks from face to face. Are these the kind of people who would give too much morphine and when the rubber hits the road plead miscommunication, or illegible paperwork, or a finger slipping on the wrong end of the syringe? Do they want to? They know what he is. Would they do it if I wasn’t here? Would it be the secret that binds them? I don’t know what too much morphine looks like; I can’t read the drugs as they write in their delirious language across his body. I don’t dare ask. I hardly dare to think. I don’t dare do anything but sit here, in Aaron’s arms, looking around, memorizing faces and details.

The blood flows down the tube, spills into his vein, spreads out in his body with all the odds stacked against it. An army of cells flung at the front lines and most of them coming home, dead with a lack of oxygen, interred in tiny wooden boxes.

“What did I hit?”

Aaron runs a hand over her hair. “What?”

Emily ignores him, her eyes fixed on the pair of white gloved hands holding down the wound. “For organs.” She looks at the paramedic’s face. “What did I hit?”

He blinks out of the zone and looks up at her. “Uh, looks like stomach and spleen.”

“Is that bad?”

“Well,” he says. “It ain’t good.”

“How many of these have you seen in the field?”

He turns pink. “None, ma’am.”

“Oh.” Emily pauses. “Do you think he’ll make it?”

“I don’t know.” She sees the struggle in his face as he searches for the answer he thinks she wants to hear. “It’s possible.”

She presses the folded gauze tighter into her neck. “I wasn’t trying to kill.”

“Could be you did a fine job with that.” His smile is small and hard and full of respect. “I don’t know. Time will tell, I guess.”

“Yes.” The inside of Emily’s mind slides onto a sea of serenity. Each surrounding detail gains a radiant luster. She wonders if she’s going into shock. “It will, won’t it?”

The wheels come to an abrupt halt. The rear doors fly open and Emily turns to see trauma-garbed personnel swarm the pavement. The paramedics leap into action, yanking the gurney out into the wet night. The legs rattle and fall, clunking into place, and the paramedics run toward the ER doors at the doctors’ heels, letting information fly like arrows into the din. Each pertinent bit finds its target, quivering there in orders barked and decisions made. The cacophony sweeps into the hospital and fades out behind the double doors.

Hotch climbs out first. He holds up his hands and Emily takes them. She moves and the world acquires a strange weak quality, slipping sideways. All of her sensory input feels on the verge of pulling up anchor and drifting like smoke through a gentle wind.

She pauses. “I’m not okay.”

“What? What do you mean?”

She stands. There is a huge throb inside her head, an echoing thunder of blood. “There’s,” she sighs. “I’m…”

Darkness rushes up around her like a long soft fall into deep water. Her muscles sag. Hotch scrambles up into the ambulance and gets behind her, holds his hands under her head just as her knees buckle. Emily collapses, arms flopping like a rag doll’s and he drops down with her, guarding the back of her head. She hits the floor, one leg hanging over the edge, half on Hotch and half asprawl. She shakes her head, her eyelids fluttering. She hums a little. A hand reaches up, touches Hotch’s elbow.

“What happened?” Her voice is thick and sleepy.

He looks at the emergency doors. His lips tighten. “I think you’re in a little shock, Emily.”

Her eyes snap open. “Where’s George?”

“Foyet’s in the hospital. I imagine he’s on his way to surgery.”

“He’s not dead?”

Hotch shakes his head. “No.”

“I passed out, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but only for a short moment.”

She sighs. Her eyebrows knot up. “My head hurts.”

She rubs her forehead. “Did I hit it?”

A pair of nurses rush over with a wheelchair. One of them climbs up into the ambulance and gathers up Emily’s shoulders.

He glances at Hotch. “Sir, we’ll take it from here.”

Hotch nods, holding his hands up. Despite her murmured protestations, the nurses maneuver Emily into a wheelchair. Thunder mutters out over the water. Rain slants in on a strong wind, ticking on the sides of the ambulance. They wheel her toward the emergency room and as he watches her go, one long white hand reaches up and curls in the rain, like she’s drowning.