He's hauled down to the same cell as before, searched for weapons, and left alone. It's not long before Joel catches himself wishing they'd hit him - it would pass the time and give him something to focus on besides the anxious waiting. There's nothing to do but pace the floor and no way of marking time at all, with no light but a single hanging bulb.

"What are you doing?"

"Killing time."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"I am sure you will figure that out . . ."

Out there, things are happening. Jerry will be out doing damage control, trying to nudge his sheep back into the fold. Marlene will have been looped in. Will this finally be a bridge too far for even her? Someone will have checked on Ellie . . . god, she must be worried sick. He shouldn't have gone to see her. It was selfish of him.

He couldn't have done anything else.

He has to piss once and he's starting to get hungry, so he thinks it's probably evening before the door swings open. He's a touch disappointed but not really all that surprised to see Jerry not looking at all like a deposed tyrant. The doctor's face holds cold rage. He steps inside the cell and closes the door, leaving the four guards outside. Bold of him, Joel thinks idly.

Anderson's not in the mood for pleasantries. "You stupid fuck." His voice is almost a hiss. "You've really screwed the pooch now, you know that?"

Joel leans against the wall and folds his arms. His face is just as dark. "What's the matter, Jerry? Scared of the truth coming out?"

"You don't even know what truth is. We're building something here and you come in with your half-baked conspiracy theories and think you can just burn it all down! You can't, of course, but that's not going to stop you trying, is it?" Joel is silent. Jerry glares at him and draws a slow breath. "Yeah, your little attempt at a populist uprising isn't going anywhere. These people are loyal to me. They trust me. Yeah, you planted a few doubts, but they settled down after I explained things to them."

"Explained what?"

"Same thing I've been trying to tell you for months: that one girl's life can't be more important than the rest of the world's survival. Somehow, they get it." He pauses. "Yes, the experiments are risky, but I am doing everything in my power to do what needs to be done while keeping Ellie safe."

"By suppressing her immune system? By trying to get the Cordyceps to grow out of control?"

Anderson shakes his head. "You don't get it. You really don't get it."

"Then, maybe you should've explained it to me instead of shuttin' me out!"

"Shutting you out? Joel, we've rolled out the red carpet for you and you've done nothing but punish us for it! We should've left you in that overpass for the infected to find. Or, at the very least escorted your ass out of Salt Lake as soon as Marlene paid you off. But, I thought you could help support the girl. All you've done is poison her against us and put her even more at risk."

"I'm putting her at risk? Oh, that's rich."

"We should've killed you a long time ago! For everyone's sake."

Joel knows, by now, where he stands with the Fireflies, but the conviction in Anderson's voice still rocks him back a little. "Well," he says quietly, "Then I guess it's time you correct your mistake. Because I won't stand around and watch her die."

Anderson snorts, but his face holds no humor. "We can't. Because of Ellie."

Something about his tone makes a trickle of fear spread through Joel. "What are you talking about?"

"I went to see her after your little stunt. You must've said something to her because the first thing she asked was what you'd done. She was agitated - out of control. For a minute, we were worried the Cordyceps was spreading to her limbic system, but a scan proved otherwise." He shakes his head. "You've taught her a lot about violence. She's taken a hostage."

Joel blinks. "A hostage? What hostage?"

"Herself. She got hold of a knife and tried to rip her own IV port out. She said if we did anything to you, she was done with us, done with the study, and she'd find a way to make sure we never got our hands on the cure. We've got this teenage girl threatening to end her own life over a piece of shit like you, and, I believe that she'll do it, too. That's what your attachment - your obsession - has done to her!" He pauses for breath, panting. Joel is speechless. After a moment, Jerry laughs bitterly. "So, no, we can't kill you, Joel. At least not until we work out this particular situation."

Joel has to remind himself to breathe. He told her . . . She doesn't do what she's told. Especially when people she cares about are in danger. Fuck, he should have seen this coming. He never should have said goodbye. "Let me talk to her," he says quietly, "I can . . . I can talk some sense into her. Might be the only one that can."

"That's never going to happen."

"Look, she's just a scared kid! She doesn't want to lose anybody else. I can make her understand."

"No, you don't get it, you are never going to see her again. You've used up all your chances. We'll keep you alive, for her sake, but that's all you get, and it's more than you deserve."

"An' that's fine if you'll just stop the damn trial! It's what I expected. But, you're killing her and I can't just stand by and watch."

"I'm trying to save her life!"

"By killing her slow?"

Anderson seems to reach some kind of decision. His face twists with emotion. Anger and disgust and maybe just a little bit of self-loathing. "You think you can judge me? Fine. Step into my world. Take a look at the choices I have to make."

He pulls a marker from his pocket and turns to the wall. The door has been roughly framed in, with cracked dry wall. On the gray backdrop, he draws a quick, rough sketch of a brain - a half-moon of squiggled lines around a fist-sized black circle that Joel recognizes immediately as Ellie's Cordyceps growth. "As soon as I saw the brain scans, I knew what I should do. What I'd do if she were a captured enemy combatant or a test subject or even one of our own people. The Cordyceps sits in the brain, and whatever mechanisms are keeping it in check, they'll be expressed in the neurons right alongside it. We need to look at those neurons, do some immunohistological stains on them, and that's the first step toward an in vitro study to figure out how the immunity works and replicate it for others. We could get enough of the Cordyceps to sequence its genome - even to grow more of it, maybe. But, we'd need to do an en bloc resection. And she was a kid. A little girl. Icouldn't do it. I've tried every other option, killing over a dozen of my own people in the process because I just couldn't do what needed to be done."

"Jerry . . . enough, alright? Enough with the doctor-speak, enough with the hints. What are you actually saying?"

He draws two sharp lines, one on each side of the growth. "We'd need to cut into her brain. Remove the entire growth and a section of the adjoining tissue."

"Remove part of her brain."

"Yes."

Joel swallows. His head is spinning. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds. "Could . . . could she even survive something like that?"

Some of the rage drains out of Jerry's face. He seems conflicted. "Technically . . . maybe. It's not in her hypothalamus. She'd probably still be able to breathe and swallow and regulate her heartbeat. Basic functions would be intact, but . . . the damage would be . . . severe. Both speech centers would be affected. She wouldn't be able to understand language. She'd lose most of her motor function over half her body and a lot of sensation, too. She'd be severely disabled. It . . . wouldn't be fair. To put someone through that."

"I . . . I don't understand. You just said she could survive."

"If we had to do that kind of a surgery . . . it wouldn't be ethical to make her survive. It would have to be a terminal surgery."

"Meaning, what? You'd kill her after?" Joel's voice isn't even angry. He's too sick and horrified for that.

"To keep her from going through that kind of pain? Yes. She would die, painlessly, under anesthesia. It's better than what ninety-five percent of the world gets."

"But, it's not what she'd want! She told me before the biopsy! She said if anything went wrong, she'd want to try to go on fighting."

"It's not her decision at that point."

"The hell it ain't!"

Jerry just shakes his head, as anger creeps back into his face. "I can see you're not going to be reasonable - about any of it. It doesn't matter - we're not doing the terminal surgery, at least not yet. There's one more thing I had to try, and we're going to see it through."

Joel swallows. "The chemo."

"Yeah. Yes, it suppresses the immune system. Yes, I was hoping her Cordyceps would spread. I'm still hoping. I go to bed every night praying that it'll spread to her skin or her spleen or her liver or anywhere besides her brain. Because then we could remove it. We could study the growths and the immune response to them. We could get everything we need off of that and never have to touch her brain. Yes, there are risks. If it spreads through her brain instead, it could go to her limbic system and she could turn. But, I took a chance at her surviving over the certainty of her dying."

Joel stares at him for a minute. This is . . . more than he can process. More than he can take. But, there's still one thing he knows for sure. "There's one more option," he says quietly, "You can stop. You don't have to kill her - not accidentally and not on purpose. You can just let her go."

He shakes his head. "That's not an option at all." He pockets the marker and turns towards the door. "We'll continue with the chemotherapy for as long as her body can take it. If it works . . . we'll do everything we can to make sure she makes a full recovery. If it doesn't . . . all I can promise is that it will be painless."

Joel draws a slow breath. "You sick son of a bitch . . ."

Jerry cuts him off. "And, you know? A part of me thinks that knowing this ought to be punishment enough for what you've done." He turns and glares pure fire at Joel. "But, then I remember that you used my daughter against me."

Joel glares back at him, unapologetic.

Jerry opens the door and jerks his head at the four guards outside. "Make sure to leave him alive."

As they shove him against the wall and the blows start falling, Joel's first gut response is relief. Jerry surely didn't intend this part as a mercy, but that's what it is. As long as he's shaking off hits and struggling to keep his head on straight, he only has to focus on that straightforward, familiar kind of pain. It lets him put off feeling the other pain - the one that's worse than any punch to the gut, the one he can't do anything about.

At least for a little while.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/

The days pass slowly. Each hour feels like torture, but there's nothing to be done about them. Joel fights to keep a grip on his fear. At times, he has to suppress the urge to babble to himself, just to hear a voice. They feed him enough to get by. They don't beat him again, and after a couple of days he can breathe without fire spreading through his chest. That makes it harder, actually. When breaths aren't a struggle, he has more trouble keeping track of the passage of time. Every couple of days, Marlene drops by to let him know that Ellie is still alive and still a trooper about her treatments. Anderson never comes by himself. Joel gets the sense that the doctor is just done with him.

It's a few hours after breakfast maybe two weeks in and Joel is leaning back against the wall, the mattress under him, trying to resist the urge to just bang his head repeatedly off of the metal. The door opens with a clang and a soft screech.

Joel looks up, expecting Marlene, but smiles when he sees it's his only other regular visitor. He doesn't have any furniture, so she plops down on the floor across from him, legs folded Indian-style like the kid she still is. "Hey, old man."

Dr. Anderson may have written Joel off as a lost cause, but his daughter's visited four or five times. Joel wonders why her father lets her. He has to know about it. "Mornin', Abby."

"How's your face?"

The guards hadn't been as careful about leaving only concealable injuries this time. No matter. The bruises have almost completely healed - only faint green smudges remain - and the split over his eyebrow is just a flaking scab. "It's fine."

"And your hand?"

Ruefully, he looks down at the blue-black bruises over his left knuckles. He'd . . . finally cracked a little three days before. A large dent and many chips in the drywall to the side of the door stand as more permanent reminders of his outburst. For that, the guards had made him spend the night with his hands zip tied behind him. At least he'd had the sense not to use his gun hand. "It's healing. Nothing broke, I don't think."

"I could bring you some painkillers . . ."

"No, you can't, but it's a nice offer." He leans forward and props his elbows on his knees. "Why do you keep coming down here, girl?"

Abby's lip quirks. "Promised a friend."

Joel swallows. "How is she?"

"I told her about your hand. She called you . . . about twelve kinds of idiot."

Joel smiles a little. "Those her words, huh? 'Idiot.'"

"Well . . . the rest of the words I'm not going to repeat."

"Still mad at me, then."

The girl's lips press together. "She's scared for you. It's not the same thing."

Joel nods. He knows. "How is she?"

"The sepsis cleared up. Her white blood cell count is back to normal. Her temperature is down and she's doing okay on the liquid diet. We finally had to shave her head. She said to tell you 'haha, can't stop me now.'"

Joel forces a smile. "I'm sure she's very proud of herself." He looks away. "And she's not . . . she's not doing anything to hurt herself?"

"She never wanted to do that - she just thought she had to if she was gonna keep you alive. She believes in the study. She wants it to work."

"Yeah," Joel says tiredly, "She's a little hero."

Abby nods. Her expression is torn. "Only . . ."

"Only what?"

The girl swallows. Kids grow up fast these days, but this is still way too much for someone her age. She keeps her composure, though. "I think she's getting tired. It's been . . . a lot of complications. A lot of side effects. She's getting weak."

Joel closes his eyes. That's not what he wants to hear, but he can't let Abby see how much it hurts. "Any . . . any light at the end of the tunnel?"

"There's been no sign of Cordyceps growth. Not on blood work, not on full body scans. I think . . . everyone's getting a little desperate. I don't know what to do."

"There's nothing for you to do. You bein' there for her as a friend is more than we had any right to ask."

"Nobody will tell me what happens if the study fails. I . . . I screamed at my dad about it last night. He won't say a word. And, I think it is failing. No matter what they do, the Cordyceps just doesn't respond."

"You don't need to be worrying about that."

Her face hardens. "My dad . . ."

"Is trying to protect you." He cuts her off. "Let him."

She sighs. After a moment, she looks down and pulls open her backpack. "She wanted me to give you these."

"Now, she can't be giving her stuff away! We're not there, yet." He takes the books anyway and turns them over in his hands. The Parable of the Sower. The Parable of the Talents. "Besides, these are yours."

"It's fine. I want you to have them. We both do."

He sighs. "Abby . . . if Ellie dies, they're gonna kill me next, and, frankly, I'm gonna let 'em. It's just how these things go. Now, I appreciate everything you've done for Ellie. But, don't go gettin' attached to an old shit like me."

"She told me you'd be an ass about this kind of a thing." Abby's face holds no ire. "I grabbed a couple things from your room. She told me what to get. It's inside the second book." She stands and leaves without a word.

Joel opens the book and a few pieces of paper slide out. There's the picture of Sarah from Tommy's - the one Ellie gave him when they first made it to Salt Lake City. There's the sketch of the giraffes and another, newer sketch of what's clearly his own face, rendered in colored pencil. He runs his fingers over them, one by one, then tucks them under his mattress where they'll be safe. He's about to set the book aside, when a scrawled note on the inside cover catches his eye. The handwriting is shaky but clear enough.

She makes it to the stars.

He closes his eyes and doesn't open them for a long time.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/

It takes the better part of a day, but he eventually resigns himself to reading the books. There's nothing else to do in here, anyhow. What he finds seems way too heavy for a kid to be reading, especially on the recommendation of another kid. Joel skims through the story of a girl named Lauren and her struggle against an apocalypse of sorts. He doesn't pay too much attention to the various atrocities that befall her along the way - everybody now has their own troubles, and it takes a lot to shock him. His eyes glaze over a bit when the book gets into philosophy - and there's a lot of that. All about life and change and the futility of holding on to anything. People believe what they have to. To cope. By the time light's out is getting close, though, he's reached the last page and what he sees there stops him in his tracks.

Ellie lied. Or at least, she misrepresented the ending.

Lauren dies at the end. Her friends load her ashes into their spaceship and take her to the stars, just like she'd always wanted. Just like Ellie's always wanted.

The lights go out without warning, leaving him in pitch blackness. All the same, he doesn't sleep at all that night.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/

Another day passes, agonizing in its slowness, like all the ones before. Joel forces himself to eat. He's gonna stay alive for Ellie, for as long as she needs him to. He can do that much.

He's just choked down the last of his dinner when the door swings open again, and this time it's Marlene, flanked by four guards. He springs to his feet. Something in her face tells him that this is different. That this is it.

"What is it?" he asks roughly, "The sepsis again?"

"No. She's comfortable." Marlene is shaking her head. "But, this is the end of the line."

"The fuck are you talking about?"

"We've done everything. We've tried everything. Her body can't take any more chemo. It's time to move on." Marlene draws a slow breath. For all her coldness over the past few months, she's teetering. She looks like she's held together with scotch tape and barbed wire. "We're setting up the operating room. Dr. Anderson is going to do the en bloc resection. The terminal surgery."

This is the fight that Joel has been preparing for these past two weeks, but now that it's here, the pain hits a lot harder than he expected. He makes his voice hard. "She ain't sick. You have no right . . ."

"We don't need your consent." Her voice is sharp, but not angry. She actually gives him a small smile that's full of pain. "We have hers."

"She wouldn't . . ."

"That's a fucking lie, and you know it! The fate of the world hangs in the balance. Ellie gets that, even if you never could. She's going to die, Joel. We can make it painless. And we can make it mean something. It's what she wants."

"She's a kid! She's scared of lettin' people down and losing all her friends, not of dying. You never had any right to even ask this of her . . ."

"Joel, just stop." Marlene holds up a hand. "Just put aside your own bullshit for one minute. She needs you."

"Well, yeah, I'm the only one not lining up to scoop out her brain!"

"I'm saying she needs you to support her. She's asked to see you. But, that's only going to happen if I'm sure you're not going to make this harder on her."

"See her . . ." he says quietly, "You'd let that happen?"

"For her . . . yes. And I'm doing more than that. She had conditions. On her consent for the surgery. She wanted you released. You visit with her while she goes to sleep, and then you walk out of here free and clear, and you never look back. That was the deal."

"I am not letting a little girl die for me!"

"You will. You'll do it for her. This whole time, you've been fighting to protect her . . . you're not gonna take this from her. You're not gonna make her lose you, too."

Joel considers his response for long moments. He eyes the guards. There's four of them. Heavily armed. He's got no chance.

Marlene's cheekbone cracks under his fist, but he knows it won't be enough.

tbc