Both Jack and Riley's hands went up immediately. "What do we have to do?" Jack asked.

"First of all, I'd like to be clear that this is a horrible idea and probably the shadiest thing I've ever done in my career. So if either of you catch yourself thinking of breathing a word of it to the California Board of Nursing, just remember- you're doing this voluntarily and I know how to kill you without anyone figuring out what happened." With that off her chest, Gayle twisted a length of masking tape into a short cord and secured it to the end of the closed tube containing Mac's blood.

"On second thought, I didn't say that last part." She said, figuring practicing medicine without a license was enough of a felony was enough without threatening to murder two government agents.

And she wasn't going to do it anyway, she decided. This was all just in case there was no other possible way to save him. Because, in all likelihood, it would kill Mac and irreparably terminate her license. But if she was willing to go to the last minute before trying it, she had to be willing and able to commit to it if and when the time came.

Goddammit.

Riley and Jack still looked at her expectantly. "Is there any possible way out of here?" She tried one last time. "Or any possible, even remote way we can call for help?" She said. Behind her, Mac shifted.

"You…" He started. Everyone turned to give him their full attention. "The r'peater antenna." He stopped to take a couple of breaths. "Take off the cover and strip the wires coming out of the ceiling. Hold one of them against your phone's antenna... might…" He stopped, gripping the edge of the cot, his knuckles white, eyes screwed shut for a moment. His face was the greyish kind of pale that made Gayle want to move the AED a little closer to him. She watched him throw up another stomach full of blood into the bucket. Even in the dark of the room, she could tell it was brighter than last time. Smelled more like fresh blood than coffee ground vomit. Shit. She looked at her watch as she handed Mac another towel and helped him wash out his mouth.

"You get that, Riley?" Gayle asked urgently. Riley was staring at Mac with a look of horror on her face. Gayle noticed she wasn't moving. She let her eyes soften slightly. "That was really intense, what you just saw, and its okay to be really freaked out right now." Gayle said, turning down the intensity as much as she could. "But real talk: if you want Mac to live you need to do what he said, okay?" Riley blinked, nodding again as she took her phone out of her pocket.

Confident that Riley had a mission to complete, Gayle turned to Jack. "I need you to spin this as hard and fast as you can without stopping for like 5 minutes." She instructed, handing him the tube of Mac's blood with the tape attached. Jack looked unsure. Gayle widened her eyes at him.

"Will do."

Gayle replaced the nearly empty IV bag with a fresh one, then cycled the dynamap again.

1830: HR [ERROR], [RR 33], SPO2 [ERROR] BP [[75/38 !HYPO]]

Crap. She looked at Mac's phone, which didn't paint a much better picture. The ECG was still reading, even though his blood pressure was too low to read a pulse. Via the ECG Mac's heart rate was 145 and climbing. He'd dropped the towel to the floor.

"Mac?" She asked urgently. His eyes opened briefly, then fluttered shut without a word.

By her estimate, he'd probably brought up 1,500 ml of blood in vomit so far, and was likely bleeding in other places too. He would code if he lost much more blood.

"Any luck, Riley?" She asked urgently. Riley was standing on a chair in the corner of the room. Flashlight in her mouth, the cover for the repeater on the shelf below. She was working through a tangle of wires emanating from a hole in the ceiling.

"I just checked the last one." She said, she said looking mortified. Gayle looked at her expectantly. Something. Anything. Please. She didn't want to have to do this.

"And?"

"And its not going to work, Gayle." Gayle's face fell.

"Okay." She said, nodding. "Okay, well, um." He was 100% going to die if she didn't do this. Very soon. Without medical direction. They'd finally reached that point. Fuck.

"What do we do, then?" Jack's words hung in the air.

"Remember when I said I thought the poison was making it hard for Mac to clot blood?"

"Yeah?" Riley said.

"Well, um, based on how long it took to do that, I think its a kind of warfarin." Gayle explained. Part of her was stalling, and she knew it, but it needed to be explained.

"Let's pretend I have no idea what that means." Jack said.

"Well you have a bunch of different proteins and chemicals in your blood that all need to be working in order for you to clot blood. Warfarins interfere with the ability to make a few of them, and over time you run out of those." She said, taking a deep breath and cringing inwardly. "The time it took for Mac to start bleeding is about that amount of time." She watched Mac's chest rise and fall a couple of times as she quickly finished her explanation. "Basically speaking, he's going to keep bleeding until he gets some of those proteins and chemicals back into his system."

"And so we're going to have to give him some, right? That's why you asked for volunteers." Riley said.

"How?" Jack asked. He stopped spinning the tube.

"Those chemicals- they're in your blood, or Riley's blood, or my blood." She said. "We transfuse some of that into him, it'll both help plug the leaks and give him a few more blood cells to work with. I'm just hoping one of us is compatible."

"How do we figure that out?"

"According to your files, both of you could give blood to Mac. I'm not, but I'll test mine anyway. They say up to 11% of listed blood types are wrong in employee files and dog tags. That's why they do a bunch of testing before transfusing any blood to a recipient."

"And that's all testing you can do, right?" Riley said.

"Technically no."

"Un-technically?" Jack prompted.

"We're gonna find out."

Gayle had done some work in some really rural parts of South America prior to coming to the Phoenix Foundation. Places where medical labs were virtually non-existent. That didn't mean people needed health care any less, just that a lot more things were eyeballed and sometimes she and the other health workers had had to improvise.

Gayle's desk was made of glass that was frosted on the underside. She marked out a long rectangle with masking tape, then separated it into three sections and cleaned the sections with alcohol, labelling them "R" "J" and "G" respectively. "I need a few drops of each of your blood in your space." She said.

She took a lancet out of the blood sugar kit and pierced her finger with it, then dropped a few drops of her blood in the space labelled "G". "Like that." She looked over at Jack. "Can I have the tube?" Jack handed it over to her. She shined a flashlight through it. On top, there was a thin layer of clear fluid. Jack wasn't the perfect replacement for a centrifuge, but there was enough for a couple drops in each space. She used a syringe to transfer a minute amount of Mac's serum onto her blood, then mixed it with a toothpick.

She repeated the process with Jack's blood, then Riley's. When she was finished, she placed the flashlight under her blood mixture. Tiny clumps were already visible. "For clarification, we're looking for that not to happen." She set a timer for four minutes. During the time, she took Mac's vitals manually.

1845: HR 148, RR 33, BP 74/38. Skin was the same, and he'd barely moved when she shook his shoulder this time.

Only 15 minutes had gone by. Another half liter of fluid had gone in, barely managing to hold his vitals steady. Vitals that already weren't particularly compatible with life. She crossed her fingers as she placed the flashlight under Jack's blood. It had clumped. She looked at Riley's.

It hadn't. Just a thin, orange-pink stain on the glass surface. Riley would be her donor.

"Riley, is there any other reason, any at all, that you couldn't give Mac blood?" Gayle asked seriously. Part of her wanted Riley to say she couldn't. It would make the decision a lot easier. She shook her head.

"I gave blood a couple months ago, they said I was fine." Riley said. That was exactly what Gayle wanted to hear.

"Are you personally okay to give blood to Mac?" She asked. Riley nodded. "Even at the risk of you losing about the same amount of blood you would during a typical donation?"

"Yes." Riley agreed.

"Okay. Go ahead and lay on the cot next to Mac. The one that doesn't have the stuff on it."

Gayle rummaged in her kit for the largest bore butterfly needle she had and pulled a 60ml syringe out of the emergency kit. This was shaping up to be just as improvised and horrible as she imagined it would, she thought as she removed the tube end of the butterfly needle and attached it to a standard IV connector cap. By some act of God, they connected to each other.

She couldn't believe she was doing this. She wracked her brain for any possible other solution to the problem. She came up empty.

"All right, this is going to be like donating blood, but I'm going to basically fill this syringe, inject it into Mac, then fill it again. I'll do that about 6 times, or until either of you start having problems." Gayle explained as she took Riley's vitals. Luckily, Riley had decent veins. She managed to get the butterfly into a large vein in the inside of Riley's elbow and taped it in place. She cheered internally as she was able to slowly pull blood into the syringe without blowing the vein.

After what seemed like ages, the syringe was full. "Still doing okay?" Gayle asked Riley. The last thing she needed was for Riley to have problems too. Riley nodded. Jack took her other hand.

"Keep going."

Gayle put the SPO2 clip on Mac's ear, grateful when an intermittent number came up on the dynamap screen. It blinked in the 150s now, with an SPO2 of 89%. Gayle clamped and disconnected the fluids from Mac's IV, and connected the syringe instead. Slowly, she injected the blood. 60ml in 10 minutes was probably faster than was safe given the situation, and she watched the dynamap screen like a hawk. No change.

She went back to Riley, took an additional 60 ml. Checked that Riley was alright. Injected it into Mac.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Gayle injected the last syringeful of blood into Mac. She hooked the bag of saline back up to him and took another full set of vitals. Listened to his lung fields.

1930: HR 142, RR 28, BP 80/42, SPO2 92%. Lung fields were clear. In the glow of the flashlight, Mac was still deathly pale, but no longer grey.

"Riley, you still doing okay?" Gayle said.

"I'm fine." Riley said resolutely. She looked pale and was lying flat against the cot. "Those don't look too different. You can take more if he needs it." She said, concerned but resolute.

Gayle shook her head. The fact that it was an hour later and Mac was still breathing was enough to say the action had worked. And, by some miracle, no one had died. She wasn't pushing her luck. "No, you just stay where you are and relax. You did great." Gayle said as she removed the needle from Riley's arm and re-took her vitals. Still within normal limits. Gayle let out a sigh.

There were still nearly 4 hours to go, but people were stable. Gayle rolled her office chair between the two cots and crossed her arms. It was late, and in 4 hours she would probably be fired and arrested, and after a few months of arduous hearings in front of the California Board of Nursing she would probably lose her license. For the moment, though, and until she let herself think seriously about what actually could have happened instead, she was confident she had done the right thing. And that was probably enough for now.