The fire started at ten past three on Wednesday morning, and by six o'clock the smell of it had come into the lab.

Elias knew before they brought her. He stood at the sink with the water running over his gloved hands and the clock above him ticking toward the hour, and he caught it on the air from the corridor, a thin gray bitterness at the back of his throat. He told himself that it was the pipes. He told himself that someone upstairs had burned the toast. But the smell came on, steadily, along the yellow passage, with the squeal of a gurney and the low voices of the transport men, and by the time the double doors banged open he was standing quite still with his back to them and his heart beating very slowly and very hard.

"Dock Street," said Dobbs, behind him. "Tenement, fourth floor. They only got the fire out about five." He cleared his throat. "She's pretty bad, Doc. I'd put a mask on."

Elias turned.

The bag lay on the gurney, black and heavy and slightly misshapen, with a white tag at the zip. Smoke-stained water had pooled in the folds and was dripping onto the tile. The smell that rose from it was dense and sweet and bitter all at once, wood and plaster and melted plastic, and under it, faint and unmistakable, the other smell. The smell that nothing else on earth resembled.

He had smelled it only once.

He had been eighteen years old, and it had been in the clothes of a man at a graveside. A fireman in a dress uniform, standing by the grass, with soot still ground into the creases of his collar. The man had taken off his cap. He had said something low and kind. And Elias, standing three feet from him with a rose in his hand, had thought: that is what it was. That is what was left.

"Table two," he said.

His voice came out all right. It was a small miracle.

The men lifted the bag. They set it down with a hollow thump. Dobbs handed him a clipboard, and Elias took it and signed, and saw his own signature shake across the page like the track of a seismograph. He gave the board back. The men went out. The doors sighed shut.

He stood at the foot of table two.

He did not know how long. It might have been one minute or ten. He stood with his arms at his sides and the white light pouring down, and the smell rolled over him in slow soft waves, and he looked at the long black shape under the sheet and could not make himself take a step.

The scissors lay on the tray beside the table. They were a plain pair, steel, with blunt blades and a heavy handle, the instrument that one used to open a body bag. He had used them four thousand times. He picked them up, and found that his hand was not steady, and put them down. He picked them up again.

He thought: it is only a woman.

It was only a woman, seventy-one years old, who had gone to bed in a fourth-floor flat on Dock Street and had not been able to get out. He knew her name. He had read it on the form. Dolores Marchetti. Widow. Retired. No children. He told himself that it was a case like any other, a thing with a cause and a manner and a number, to be worked through in order, from the outside in.

The scissors rattled on the steel.

"Doc?"

Wade had come in. He stood by the counter in his scrubs, a paper mask hanging at his chin, and his young face was pinched and white in the glare.

"Do you want me to start the photographs?"

"Yes."

"Okay." He hesitated. "Do you want, I mean, should I get Dr. Fenwick? He's on the board for today. He can do the external, if you're..."

"I am perfectly able."

"I know. I know you are." Wade's eyes dropped. "I only meant, you've gone kind of gray."

Elias put down the scissors.

He laid them very carefully on the tray, and stepped back, and put his hands behind him. It was a thing that he had learned at nineteen: when the body begins to do what it wishes, give it something to hold. He gripped his own wrist. He fixed his eyes on the white wall above the table and drew a long breath, and let it out, and the room tilted and settled.

"Begin the photographs," he said.

His voice cracked on the last word.

It was a very small crack. A hair. But Wade heard it, and his whole face altered, and he went quietly to the cabinet for the camera without another word. Elias stood where he was. The flash went off, and off again. Each blaze threw the room into sudden white relief, the steel and the tile and the black shape on the table, and then the dark came back, and the smell with it.

He thought of a ridge.

He did not mean to. It came as it always came, from nowhere, between one breath and the next. A long dark shoulder of hill against the sky. A crooked chimney. A row of tall windows, and the left-most of them his mother's, where a lamp had burned in the evenings while she read. He had been four hundred miles away. He had seen it only afterward, in the cold daylight, from the road, with the smoke still going up in a thin gray rope from the stones.

They had not let him go in.

He had stood at the gate, among the policemen, with his coat collar turned up and a stranger's hand on his shoulder. He had seen the long black gap where the roof had been. He had smelled it on the wind. He had stood there for an hour, and nobody had said anything to him at all.

"Dr. Mercer?"

It was a woman's voice. It came from a great way off.

"Doc. Are you okay?"

Quinn stood at the door. She had come in quietly, in her leather jacket, with her hair tied back and a folder under her arm. She had the sharp tired brightness of someone who has been awake since four. Behind her, a head taller, with his dark overcoat unbuttoned and a gray muffler loose about his throat, stood Luke.

Elias opened his mouth.

He meant to say that he was well. It was the first sentence that came to him. It was the one that he had said ten thousand times, in a thousand rooms. I am perfectly well. It lay ready on his tongue like a coin. But when he tried to speak, there was no sound at all, and the smell closed over him like water, and the gray rim of the world began to crawl in from the edges.

He could not breathe.

He had felt it come before, in a stairwell, in a bullpen. A tightening, a locking of the chest. But never so complete. It was as though a hand had closed on his lungs and was pressing, slowly, steadily, with the whole weight of the night. His vision narrowed. The white tile swam. He saw the black shape on the table, and the sheet, and a drop of gray water falling from the edge, and he thought, quite clearly: she was alive.

She was alive when it began. She was in the dark, in a bed, and the smell came under the door.

"Doc!" said Quinn.

He took a step back.

He did not mean to. It was only that the floor seemed to tilt, and his foot moved of itself. He struck the counter with his hip. A tray of instruments rang. He put out a hand, and it closed on nothing, and he stood there, swaying, with his mouth open and a thin high sound escaping his throat that he did not recognize as his own.

Then a shadow fell across the light.

It came between him and the table. It was large and warm and entirely solid, and it smelled of rain and cedar. It did not touch him. It stood a pace in front of him, with its back to the room, and he looked up, and saw that it was a man in a dark coat, tall and broad and perfectly still.

Luke had crossed the lab.

He had come in over the line of the threshold, past Quinn, past the whole width of the tile, with no sound at all, and now he stood between Elias and the thing that lay on the table. He had placed himself so that his shoulders blocked the view. He was facing Elias. His hands hung at his sides, open. His dark eyes, in the hard light, were steady and calm and very close.

"Look at me," he said.

It was very low. It was meant for one person only.

Elias looked.

"You do not have to touch her," said Luke. "I will not ask it of you."

The words went in like a hand into cold water.

He did not know what he had expected. He had thought, in the back of his mind, with a dull and shameful certainty, that there would be a reproach. Not an open one. Something light and kindly and faintly puzzled. Doctor, is there a difficulty? Elias, what is the matter? He had been prepared for it. He had braced for it, as for a blow.

But the face before him held nothing of the kind. It held only a deep, quiet attention, like a lamp turned to the wall. And behind the attention there was a thing so close to pain that Elias could not look at it directly.

"I cannot," he whispered.

"I know."

"I cannot go near it."

"Then you will not."

"I..." He swallowed. "I have done it, I have done four thousand, I do not, I do not know what, it is not..."

"It does not matter." Luke's voice did not rise. "You are not required to know."

He stood there, a wall of warm dark cloth between a man and his terror, and said nothing more. He did not lay a hand on him. He did not move closer. He only held the space, with the whole of his body, as a man holds a door against a wind.

Behind him, Quinn made a small sound.

"Captain?" she said. "Is he..."

"Detective." Luke did not turn his head. "Would you do me a kindness? Dr. Mercer will go through the fire marshal's report in his office before he examines the body. I should like him to have it in front of him now. Wade will do the preliminaries. Dr. Fenwick will assist." A pause. "Please tell the fire marshal that we will have a time of death by noon."

"Sure." Her voice was small. "Yeah. Okay."

"Thank you."

She went out. Elias heard her steps, quick and uncertain, on the tile. Wade had retreated to the far end of the counter, with the camera held against his chest like a shield. He did not look up. Luke inclined his head toward the door.

"Come," he said. "I will take you out."

They went into the corridor.

It was empty. A long yellow tunnel lit by humming tubes, with a floor of scuffed gray linoleum and a row of closed doors. Somewhere at the far end a cart rattled. The air was cool and smelled faintly of floor wax, and for the first time in an hour Elias could breathe.

He walked to the wall and put his back to it.

He slid down. He did it slowly, with his shoulders against the cold tile, until he was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped round them. He did not care. He sat with his head against the wall and his eyes shut, and gasped, and the dark waves went through him one after another, shuddering, like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

He heard Luke come out. He heard the doors close, and a step on the linoleum, and then a pause.

Two paces away, the footsteps stopped.

The man did not come closer. He did not speak. Elias heard the faint dry rustle of a coat as he lowered himself, not beside him, but against the opposite wall, six feet off, and sat down on the floor with his back to the tile and his long legs stretched out in front of him. There was a long silence. A pipe knocked in the wall.

"I do not know what is wrong with me," said Elias.

It was a thin, cracked, bewildered voice. It did not sound like his own.

"Nothing is wrong with you."

"I have worked with the dead for eleven years. I have opened, I have seen..." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I have never done this."

"It is not the dead."

Elias took his hands from his face.

Luke was looking at him. He sat across the corridor with his arms resting on his knees, and his face in the yellow light was drawn and pale. He did not look like the man at the podium, or the man in the interview room. He looked like a tired person sitting on a hospital floor. There was a fine gray dust of plaster on the shoulder of his coat.

"It is the smoke," said Luke.

Elias said nothing.

"It does a certain thing to the body. It reaches a place that other things do not." His voice was gentle, and entirely without emphasis. "A person may stand in a room of corpses for twenty years and feel nothing. And then one morning, a smell comes under a door, and he is a child again."

"I was not a child."

"No." The faint ghost of a smile. "I do not suppose that you ever were."

The corridor was very still.

Elias looked at his gloved hands. They lay on his knees, black and unmoving, a little curled. He felt the cold of the floor through his trousers. He felt the pulse in his throat slowing, and slowing, and a great plain weariness come up in him like a tide.

"I cannot be near it," he said.

It was out before he could stop it. It was only a murmur. But the words came with a weight behind them, and he heard them fall into the quiet like stones into a well.

"Fire," he said. "I cannot. I cannot smell it. I have not, in twelve years, I have gone to the other side of the street. I have walked out of a restaurant because a man lit a, a candle." He gave a short dry laugh. "I have never said so. I did not think that anyone would believe me."

"I believe you."

"You do not ask why."

"No."

"You never do."

"I am a patient man," said Luke.

It was said so softly that Elias barely heard it. He lifted his head. The dark eyes across the corridor were fixed on his, and there was nothing in them but a quiet, aching understanding.

"I know," said Luke. "I know that you cannot."

He did not say how.

It hung in the air between them, a small plain thing, unexplained. Elias saw it. He saw it as one sees a stone at the bottom of a clear stream, perfectly distinct and quite out of reach. He opened his mouth to ask. He had the question ready, small and sharp and cold, and it rose in him like a bubble.

And then Luke moved.

It was a very slight motion. He shifted his weight against the wall, and drew up one knee, and rested his forearm on it. The sleeve of his coat rode back. He did it without thought, as a man does who is tired, and the cuff of his shirt slid with it, and the white fabric came away from his left wrist.

Elias saw the mark.

It was only for a moment. It lay across the inside of the wrist, a narrow band of skin, paler than the rest, ridged and shining and faintly puckered, like the surface of a candle that has once been softened by a flame. It ran from the heel of the hand up under the cuff, out of sight. It was old. It was perfectly healed. It had been there, he thought, for a very long time.

"I cannot either," said Luke.

His voice was very quiet.

He had not seen where Elias was looking. He sat with his head tipped back against the tile and his eyes closed, and he spoke to the ceiling, in a low unguarded murmur, as a man speaks who has been alone with a thing for years and does not know that it is audible.

"I have not been near a fire since I was twenty-three."

The pipe knocked in the wall.

Elias did not breathe.

He sat on the cold floor with his arms around his knees and looked at the man across from him, at the closed eyes and the pale throat and the gray plaster dust on a dark sleeve, and a sensation moved in him that he could not name. It was not suspicion. It was too large for that. It was something much heavier and much slower, like the turning of a very great wheel in a dark place, and it had begun, quite gently, to move.

Twenty-three.

Twelve years ago, a rookie patrolman of the Ninth Precinct had been twenty-three years old. He knew it. He had seen it on a screen, in the small hours of an October night. He had seen a date, and a number, and a posting, and had closed the file very gently, as one closes a door on a sleeping child.

He did not say anything.

He could not have spoken. He sat there with his heart beating heavy and slow, and watched the other man's face, and saw it open its eyes.

They met his own.

For a long moment neither of them moved. Luke's gaze was dark and clear and very tired, and there was something in it that Elias could not read, a kind of startled, wide-open nakedness, like a man who has been seen in the act of undressing. His lips parted. He drew breath, as if to speak. And then, slowly, with great care, he drew down the cuff of his sleeve.

He did it without haste. He covered the pale band, and smoothed the cloth, and fastened the button.

"You should rest," he said.

His voice was perfectly level. It was the courteous voice, the gentle one, a little thin.

"I will have Fenwick do the examination. Wade will assist. I will see that the report is brought to you as soon as it is done." He rose. It was a slow movement, slightly stiff, as of a man who has sat too long in the cold. "You need not go back in. You need not look at anything. I will ask Quinn to take the fire marshal's file to your office, and I will bring you tea."

"Luke."

He had said it without thinking. It was a plain syllable, low and unsteady, and he saw it land.

The man stood very still.

"Yes?"

Elias looked up at him.

He saw the dark coat, and the tired face, and the hand that hung at the man's side, with its scarred knuckles and its covered wrist. He saw the long yellow light of the corridor lying on the floor between them. He had a hundred things to say. They all crowded at the door of his mouth, and none of them would pass.

"Thank you," he said.

It was nothing. It was a very small thing, after all that. But the tension went out of the man's shoulders like a held breath, and he bent his head.

"I will bring the tea," he said.

He went down the corridor. Elias watched him go. He walked with his usual long unhurried stride, a dark figure receding under the humming lights, and at the far end he paused, with one hand on the elevator button, and did not look back.

He stood there a moment. Then the doors opened, and he went in.

Elias sat on the floor with his back against the wall.

It was a long time before he got up. He sat with his hands in his lap and the smell of smoke at the back of his throat, and thought of a white scar, and a number. Of a man who had said, I have not been near a fire since. Of the word since, and how softly it had been spoken, and how much weight it carried.

He thought: he was there.

It was not a deduction. It was something more primitive, a settling, like silt at the bottom of a glass. He did not say it. He did not let it form into words. He only held it, in the cold dim corridor, with his arms about his knees, and felt it grow slowly quiet, and slowly true.

Behind the door of the lab, a camera flashed. Once. Twice. A pale light under the sill, and then the dark.

He did not go in.