A doctor comes into her curtained cubicle in the emergency room. He peels off the butterfly strips with great care, the cloth-backed adhesive pinched in sleek purple fingertips. Emily presses her mouth shut and watches the second hand sweep around the face of the clock as his breath, laced with peppermint, lands soft and warm in her ear. The cold needle, packed full of numbness, pinches going in and he hisses in his breath along with her, holds it out of sympathy. The steady gnawing ache melts away and she doesn’t feel the little needle darting in and out of her skin; every now and then she feels the tugging higher up, or lower down, as the doctor shifts his hands and his stitches pull the cut in her flesh closed. Aaron sits with her, holds her hand. She squeezes his fingers. Her palm gets hot and sweaty against his. The doctor says there is no way to estimate how much blood she’s lost, and that he is worried about the possibility of shock. He bandages up her neck, tells her that he wants to keep her overnight for observation.

He’s good at making eye contact, so earnest. We may need to take action.

So she nods.

Aaron helps her out of her soaked clothing. He unzips her, lets her lean against his body as he tugs against its wet embrace. Her jeans peel away like a stubborn rind. He gets on his knees to take off her flip-flops. A nurse brings in a gown and blankets to keep the shivering down and washcloths folded up beside a basin full of steaming water. Emily lies in bed, exhaustion in her blood, circulating and pressing her down with each turn through her arteries and her veins, each slow beat of her heart. The washcloth is rough and warm and the soap smells faintly of lilies and lavender, a soothing scent, the breath of a summer field calming after the moist aggression of hot peppermint. Her skin tingles. The nurse picks up her limbs, sweeps up the rain and the piss and the clinging blood into the washcloth, wringing them out into the bowl. She dries Emily’s feet, rubs them with lotion, and works a pair of soft warm socks up over her toes. She presses thick gummy plastic pads onto Emily’s chest and clips them to a bundle of wires. They translate the sound of her heart into beep beep beep, converts the syllables of its muscular impulses into green electronic cuneiform: racing peaks and manic valleys, sliding moraines, quivering trenches. It cracks the time into tidal segments.

Her eyes are closed. When did that happen?

The sheets shift warm and clean against her bare calves. She murmurs toward the movement in the room: Where’s George?

The nurse pulls the blanket up to her breastbone.

Is he dead?

I don’t know.

The TV is on and turned down low. Alex Trebek has the answer and they all clamor to ask the question. Emily wants to open her eyes but her eyelashes are too heavy.

Would you like some Jell-O?

Did I kill him?

I’ll find out.

We’re going to hold her overnight for observation.

Emily opens her eyes.

The lights in her room are off. The hallway is dim, but she can see the shapes of the chairs where Reid and JJ left them, the chair where Hotch sat long after they left; she sees the blue weave of the upholstery, a scatter of pamphlets, an untouched tray of food. Her heart goes beep…beep…beep…beep. She looks up and counts the ceiling tiles: twenty-four and the one over the bed has been replaced with a painting of blue sky. Cumulus clouds, light and fluffy, the kind a child might imagine angels sitting on and playing harps, might see sleeping all curled up like baby birds inside their white wings. An automated blood pressure cuff whirs to life, inhaling the room’s stale air. It constricts around her upper arm. Faint orange street light falls in through the window, slants across the linoleum. The cuff hisses, holds tight, hisses and holds tight. Thick walls mute the thunder but lightning slashes into the sky, filling up the room. The air runs out of the cuff. The monitor makes a sound as it registers the reading. Each flash lights up the small markerboard and chases the handwritten red letters proclaiming JANINE her nurse and RICK her aide, displays her blood pressure as it was at suppertime (too low), her body temperature (a degree below normal), her goals for the day (none).

A hospital is never dark.

Overnight.

There is a note on the bedside table. She reaches for it and picks it up, spreads it open with her fingertips. The paper trembles. The nurse has written in blue ink HE IS OKAY and HE’S THROUGH SURGERY and AARON CAME WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING. Her arm is heavy, her muscles feel logy, so she lets her hand fall onto the bed. Her eyes close.

Her heart goes beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep.

She imagines blood passed from hand to hand in a bag, dark red with iron and oxygen. JANINE hooks it to the port in the back of her hand and it’s cold as it merges with the river in her wrist.

I slept through that part.

Her eyes roll beneath her lids.

Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe it wasn’t real.

She thinks she must be sleeping, or at the very least waiting in her brain’s antechamber for full sleep to unroll its lush carpet. Her eyes are closed, but she still sees the room and the stutter-flashes of lightning, the white walls, the numbers on the clock indistinct. The markerboard is wiped blank. She climbs out of her bed, feels the drag of IV tubing and turns her head to see blood. It hangs there, red and full, strange fruit. She reaches up, unhooks the bag from its stand and cradles it like a baby, like a milk-full breast. She walks out into the hallway, carrying it in her folded arms, wearing a flowered sundress and sandals. Her hair is loose and dry, brushing against her shoulders. She smells like flowers. The sounds of seagulls drift down through the loudspeakers.

I want to know what room he’s in. I want to walk through the walls and count the stitches holding him together.

There are butterflies trapped in the walls. She hears them whispering and in her mind’s eye they fly through the darkness to land on George’s back, drawn there by the sweat. Her hands reach up from beneath him, crushing them into his skin. Their soft powdery bellies are full of sweet sticky blood.

She closes her eyes and imagines Aaron, sees him in the chair in his black suit and a blue tie sees him with her hand in his, limp and soft, and she thinks do you ever wish you were wrong about a profile?

His voice comes back to her, weakened by distance and diluted by time. It touches the nape of her neck, draws itself in silk: I wish it every day.

She goes into George’s room. He is alone in the white cave. He has more wires and more monitors, more bags, yellow and clear and red. Her own blood has turned to pomegranates. Thick and shiny, blushing, heavy with juice, she rips one open and the tart scent fills her nose, runs down the insides of her wrists. Ruby juice streaks her knees and splashes all over the floor tiles. She moves through puddles, imprinting purple tracks into the dirt on the floor. He is asleep. His heart makes no sound. The flesh of his face is relaxed, draped close to the bone. His consciousness drips all over his bones, runs in streaks, curls up in the lines of his face . Her fingers dig into the pale muscular rind, break through the membranes to get at the scarlet seeds. Blood runs everywhere, drips thick off her fingers, smelling of sugar and burnt metal.

Food of the dead, she murmurs, sliding the seeds into her mouth. She bites down, floods herself with goosebumps. This is what you eat in hell.

She sees the bindings on his belly and moves forward, touches them like cerements, fingertips reverent as they stroke the weave. It rises and falls, caught in the flow of his breath. She leans over and touches his face with reddened fingers and then presses a hand into his heartbeat, feeling it kick strong and hard up through the ribs against her palm. She puts her mouth against the skin, the vibrating thud thud thud tickling the insides of her lips. He touches the bare skin over her spine. A firecracker of adrenaline bursts behind her breastbone and her breath skips and the brushing of his fingers feels like a match scraping up the inside of her skin; her face burns and her breath goes beep-beep-beep beep-beep-beep beep-beep-beep and her heart trembles as she thinks oh my God, look at this, how everything is different, it’s all different.

Emily peels the tape and lifts the bandages away. She sees the cut she made in him, lengthened by the scalpel and curving like a road to his ribs, a livid purple line stitched in place like a ladder for her tongue to climb. With a shaking fingertip she traces the seam beneath the thread, each heavy knot slowing her progress. The speed of his breath climbs; each stitch is a notch in a machine until her finger rests idle at the bottom and his lungs are revving. His breath shakes, full of fresh heat, the pain holding it in tight. Emily looks at him and lowers her face to his belly. George cups a hand around the back of her head as she touches her tongue to the bottom of the wound, glides up over the row of stitches like teeth, a zipper of skin. She tastes iodine and sand and bitter green leaves. There is pain and something else, something raw in the movement of his chest, scooping up the air and changing it into sound; she bites the stitch at the top, takes the severed edge in her teeth, pulls back. The whole thing lifts up on the arch of a weakened spine, slides loose on a long low-pitched moan. His flesh unravels and falls open like a rich red blue-veined flower.

There is little blood. What is there is thick and sticky, dark. Emily works both hands inside, wrists twisting as she sinks in up to the elbows. She closes her eyes. Steam curls around her arms, stinking of chrysanthemums and raw beef. His skin bulges out where his organs shift. She pulls out handfuls of wet-winged butterflies. Her hands unfold. They twitch, lethargic on her gore-streaked palms.

Emily holds them up to the light.

Beep…beep…beep…beep…beep. Beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep.

The wings flutter. The tiny hairlike legs stir. It’s like holding up a double handful of cherry blossoms into a spring breeze; they roll on her fingers, silky and animated, falling, fluttering to life, swarming in swirls, riding the currents of air. Some of them touch down on her eyelashes. Little legs brush her cheeks, crawl across her lips. Tiny soft wings fan her chin, tickle her nostrils, traverse her hairline. Minuscule feet scatter ticklish goosebumps throughout her skin, make her squirm, make her nipples hard.

She imagines one landing on her clit. She feels its little legs struggling for purchase and she starts to come, the tiny contractions beginning deep in her cunt. They unroll, spreading out, the waves in her blood racing ahead of her short breaths. She rests her face on George’s chest and moans. The butterflies descend, fluttering across her back, crawling up her spine. They sip her sweat. Her body shudders and they lift off in a cloud, hovering with each peak and settling back down, rising and falling with each thrash of her hips.

Emily holds his wound together with slippery fingers, kisses its yellow edges. A butterfly rides a teardrop as it glides down her face. George wipes it away, smears pink powder and broken legs across her cheek. Her face burrows into his wound. He sighs, body stiffening, semen pulsing against her breasts.

Pomegranate seeds burst between her teeth. They taste like lightning.

This is what you eat in hell, she murmurs.

Emily wakes up.