“No,” said Dunbar. “Not Florence.”

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, more stunned than usual by the inadequacy of his words.

“We must give her new organs,” said Dunbar, “put her on some machines while they’re being replaced. Take mine, if you can’t get others soon enough. I know they’re old, but they still work.”

Dunbar peeled off his jacket and slipped the tie from his neck.

“Mr. Dunbar…” the doctor began.

“It’s not natural for her to die first,” said Dunbar, unbuttoning his collar. “It should be the other way round. Take anything she needs: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, eyes, whatever might save her life.”

“Mr. Dunbar, there’s nothing we can do,” said the doctor, putting a restraining hand on Dunbar’s arm. “I’m sorry. The whole body is septic, the new organs would just start to fail as soon as we put them in.”

Florence had been poisoned with Abrin, a toxin for which there was no antidote, combined in this case with other poisons to make her death more certain and more painful. Her system was being purged and her blood changed, which would give her a little more time, but her body was already caught up in an irreversible process of collapse.

Dunbar continued to unbutton his shirt until it was open to the waist.

“What are you doing?” asked Florence, waking from the heavy sedation she was under.

“I want to donate…”

“Oh, Daddy,” said Florence, her eyes filling with tears.

Dunbar reached out and clasped Florence’s hand. With a mixture of relief and dread, he realized that he could not feel the anesthetic numbness that had spread over him when he was told that Catherine was not going to “make it.” There were no battlements left around his heart to postpone his surrender to sorrow and desolation. Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly? And yet he had felt blessed for the first time only the day before. There was something obscene about the indiscriminate clarity of his new mind. If only he had gone with Florence to Wyoming, if only he had renounced his power a little sooner. Now he was like a man whose sight has been restored just in time to be wheeled in front of The Flaying of Marsyas, unable to move, unable to leave, knowing he will never see the other galleries again.

“We’ll be right outside,” said the doctor to Florence, “just press this button if you need any help.”

Florence nodded, but said nothing, as if she only had a certain number of words left and meant to use them carefully. Once the doctor and the nurses had left the room, she managed to speak again.

“It’s not that I’m frightened of dying,” she said. “It’s more that I’m upset about the other people it will hurt…and the waste of love.”

She glanced over to Chris for a moment, as if to ask for his forgiveness on behalf of all the people who would be hurt by her death.

“The waste of love,” repeated Dunbar, shattered by his daughter’s verdict and by the landscape it forced him to imagine.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Florence, speaking in an emphatic whisper, “I’m so glad we reconciled before it was too late.”

“But it is too late,” said Dunbar, unable to stop himself.

“I know…” she said. “The children—I can’t bear to let them down when they’re so young.”

Dunbar struggled to find an exonerating formula for his tormented daughter, but the effort of speaking proved too much for her and before he could relieve Florence of her blameless guilt, she closed her eyes again and lay motionless on the bed, barely breathing.

“She’s resting,” said Wilson, “let’s sit down for a while.”

Dunbar seemed to crumble as he sank into one of the armchairs in the corner of his daughter’s room. Above the formality of his polished black shoes and charcoal trousers, his abdomen and his chest were exposed in an incongruous streak of nakedness. He watched the tufts of white hair rise and fall with his breathing, as if he were observing someone else’s body for signs of life.

“No mercy,” said Dunbar, pressing his hands to his head, “in this world, or any other.”

He felt pain gripping his forehead like a metal band. Soon, a second belt of pain started tightening around his chest. He crossed his arms and clasped his sides, as if hugging himself after a long separation, and then slouched back into the chair, struggling to breathe. He felt the onset of that boundless dread, the untethered astronaut tumbling through the stale darkness of space. And then he felt a heavy flood in his head, like the time he flipped backward and cracked his skull on the path in Davos; he had seemed to be suspended on the thick threshold of passing out, registering the emergency with a strange detachment, his head flooding with a foretaste of oblivion.

Before he knew what was going on, the doctor was by his side, calling out instructions to the nurses. Dunbar heard the words “defibrillator” and “oxygen” and felt the atmosphere of alarm closing around him like the pain clutching at his head and heart.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Dunbar,” said the doctor, who was already holding a syringe at the ready. “We’re going to get rid of that pain right away.”

“Please don’t,” gasped Dunbar. “I’ve had enough; I’ve seen enough.”

“I know you’re very distressed at this moment…”

“What is it you don’t want me to miss?” said Dunbar. “Watching my daughter die in front of me?”

“And how is it you want her to spend the last few hours of her life,” the doctor replied: “watching you die in front of her?”

Dunbar recognized the truth of what the doctor had said, and resignedly held out his arm for the injection. He must stand by Florence as she died and pour whatever was left of his vitality and kindness into her, holding back his own annihilation.

“More life,” he muttered, as the clear liquid joined his bloodstream and dissolved the tension in his head and chest. “Do you mind if I have a word alone with Wilson and Chris?”

“Of course not,” said the doctor politely, as if there had never been a moment’s discord between them.

“Charlie,” said Dunbar, leaning forward to talk more privately to his friend. “I don’t want to talk about…I can’t talk about…”

“I understand,” said Wilson.

“But when this is over, can you stop these bastards from saving my life?”

“We could draw up a living will for you.”

“Make it happen,” said Dunbar, as if trying to remember a quotation. “Don’t let the girls get hold of the company. Help Cogniccenti, if that’s the only way to keep them from getting control. And find out if either of them was involved in poisoning Florence and, if so, then make sure that she spends the rest of her life in prison.”

“I’ll make sure of it,” said Wilson. “Abby’s already wanted by the British police in connection with Peter Walker’s suicide.”

Dunbar sank back in the chair a second time.

“He committed suicide?” he said.

“I’m sorry, I thought Florence had told you.”

“No,” said Dunbar, staring across the room, temporarily emptied by the surfeit of horror, as if there was no room left for thought or speech, or any specific grief. He could see Florence lying motionless on the bed, with her eyes shut. Chris sat beside her, watching her breathe.

“No, she didn’t tell me,” said Dunbar eventually. “Poor Peter, he was my friend. I couldn’t have made it without him.”

He looked at Wilson with passionate disbelief.

“How has it come to this, Charlie? Why is your son watching my daughter die? Why has everything been destroyed, just as I’ve started to understand it for the first time?”

“All of us will be blown to dust,” said Wilson, “but the understanding won’t be destroyed and it can’t be, as long as someone is left standing who still prefers to tell the truth.”