When Ivan opened the door, Zlata and Veronika, carrying Rachel, followed Raisa with Anya into the president's office. Larisa had gone in first, and was out of Zlata's sight for the moment. Zlata almost ran into Raisa's back, and realized her coworker had stopped dead just inside the office. Raisa seemed to be struggling to hold onto Anya, almost dropping her. Zlata could see sweat suddenly break out on Raisa's face.

Zlata felt her own stomach knotting. She turned her head and gave Veronika a helpless look, and saw it reflected back at her. They both knew what Raisa must have seen.

From inside the room, Zlata heard the president's voice say, "Don't stop there. You have work to do," and she almost lost her hold on Rachel. The president was never in the office when they came in to set up. He preferred to see his "mannequins" already in position when he first arrived.

Raisa began creeping forward, visibly trembling, and Zlata followed. In a moment, Zlata could see what had shocked Raisa.

On the near side of the room, where they always set up the girls, there was an assembly of glass, metal, and pressed wood that looked very nearly the way Zlata had visualized it: a glass-sided rectangular tank on the floor in front, about a meter from front to back, a meter high, and around two-thirds that size in width. It was open at the top. Above and behind it was another tank, about the same size, this one full of water. Projecting out from the upper tank, at its bottom, a metal pipe emerged from the side and overhung the lower tank. There was a metal cap, appearing to screw on, at the end of the pipe. Holding back the flow of water, no doubt, thought Zlata.

Zlata saw an electrical cord emerging from the back of the upper tank, plugged into a wall outlet. Inside the tank, on that back wall, there was a black tube that ran the length of the wall along the bottom. There was an identical tube at the back of the lower tank, and an identical electrical cord coming out of the back. She looked at the president and said in a tiny, quavery voice, "You're going to electrocute her?"

The president looked puzzled for a moment, then saw where she was looking. "Oh. No." He gave Zlata a smile that she could only, under the circumstances, see as evil. "That's only to heat the water in both tanks. You're a nurse. I'm sure you're familiar with hypothermia."

Zlata nodded absently, her mind on other things, and then, when a thought struck her, nearly fainted. I failed Anya, she told herself miserably. I could have steered Larisa away from this idea, just like with the poison, just like with the knives. All I had to tell her was that Anya would die from lowered body temperature long before she drowned. That the president wouldn't want that, wouldn't want her to die early. And since I didn't think of that, here we are, preparing to kill Anya.

It was warm and humid at this end of the room. Zlata could tell the temperature control was working.

Zlata suddenly felt eerily calm. It's okay, she thought, because this can't really be happening. Nothing like this can really happen.

Raisa carefully set Anya on the floor; she was trembling too badly to maintain her hold, and feared dropping her. Zlata looked at Veronika, who nodded, and they set Rachel down.

Zlata could see Larisa, but had no hope of reading her thoughts. Larisa's face appeared calm. She was standing still, facing the tanks, two fingers pinching her lower lip and apparently forgotten there.

Beside Larisa's foot, there was a small bowl of unwrapped hard candy. The only prop needed, other than the girls themselves.

Larisa closed her eyes, and opened them. She knelt beside Anya, who was lying on her back, her body straight. Larisa put one hand on Anya's lower stomach, the other behind her head, and grunted with the effort of bending Anya at the waist to get her sitting upright. Without looking up, she gestured at the nurses, and said, barely audibly, "Help me with Pixie so we can get her sitting cross-legged."

Zlata looked at Raisa and Veronika, who looked at each other, and back at Zlata.

They're looking at me to lead, Zlata realized. They'll do what I do.

Zlata took a very deep breath. I know I'm going to prison anyway, she told herself. What I do here and now doesn't affect that one way or another. It only affects whether I can live with myself.

Slowly and deliberately, she folded her arms across her chest. When Raisa and Veronika did the same, Zlata turned and walked back through the door into the ward. She heard the others following her, and was grateful for their support. She went into her room and lay on the bed. The others went into their rooms.

She looked around the room. There wasn't much to it, but it was a livable room, and Zlata realized for the first time that it felt like home. She had lived in it for months. It was her place. Will prison ever feel like home? she wondered. Will I get used to it?

She was startled to see the president standing at her door. In a surprisingly gentle voice, he said, "I would like to talk to all three of you. We can meet in that room." He pointed at Veronika's.

Perhaps it was that gentleness that persuaded her. He understands, Zlata thought. He's not mad.

She rose and went out past him into Veronika's room, Raisa following her in. The two of them sat on the bed on either side of Veronika, who was lying down. The president entered, and closed the door.

"There is a method of execution we use sometimes at the women's prison you visited," he said without preamble, in that same quiet voice. "Only with the very worst criminals. The condemned woman is raised onto her toes by a rope around her neck, her hands tied behind her. Her legs will eventually lose the strength to support her, and the rope around her neck will choke her to death at last. In the meantime, she is whipped. She is naked, and the whip finds all of the most painful spots. She tries to kill herself by lifting her feet off the floor, but the self-preservation instinct will not allow it." He smiled. "It is odd how the body maintains hope when there can be none. At any rate, the condemned prisoner can usually hold out for several hours, alternately screaming and choking."

He paused until all three of them looked into his eyes. It is so strange, Zlata thought. There is nothing human behind them at all.

At last he continued. "If you resume your jobs right now, and do what you are required to do, you will live. But if your defiance continues, if you continue evading your duties, all four of you will die."

Veronika stared at him wide-eyed. In a voice barely understandable from trembling, she stammered, "Four? Larisa too? But... she's doing her job! She's still in there, trying to do what you want!"

"The four of you are a team. When any member of a team refuses to give her utmost effort for the team, the entire team fails. Miss Celenskaya will be executed first, and the three of you will watch. After that, the three of you will die together, watching each other suffer." He pointed in the direction of his office. "Or you can do your jobs."

Zlata couldn't breathe. Nothing we can do, Zlata thought hopelessly, can save Anya. That's out of our hands. The only thing we have a choice about is saving Larisa from an awful death we caused ourselves.

Without a signal among them, the three nurses sprang off the bed.

The president held up a hand. "Wait. I will give you time to change clothes. I don't want the smell of piss in my office."

Zlata hadn't even realized she had wet herself. They all had.

The president rose and left the room. Raisa and Zlata bolted for their own rooms, and yanked open the underwear drawers.

He can't mean this! thought Rachel desperately. This has to be something to scare us! He'll put the stopper back in the water pipe and laugh. I know him!

If ever before she had felt an overpowering need to move her body, nothing compared with this. If they leave us like this, she told herself, Anya is going to die in there! Yet it was the same as always: Rachel had no sense of what mental signal would result in even so much as her finger wiggling. She could only sit and watch the water dribble down to splash onto the slowly-rising surface around Anya. By the time all the water emptied from above, it was easy to see it was going to be over Anya's head.

It infuriated Rachel, most of all, that she herself was sitting there in a masturbation pose. I look like I'm excited by this! How can they do this to me? she wondered. No, she told herself, it isn't the nurses' fault. It's him, it's all him. He is the sickest son-of-a-bitch on the planet.

Rachel tried not to think of the drama that had taken place before Anya had been placed in the tank. No words had been spoken by the nurses, but it seemed as though they were refusing to participate in today's cruel joke. She shied away from considering that, because it suggested that this was not a joke at all. That they knew Anya would be left where she was until she drowned.

There was barely a quarter-inch of water surrounding Anya at present. But the stream from above continued. Rachel was powerless to do anything to stop it. She wanted to scream. Even that outlet was denied her.

Gerov came over and slapped small adhesive patches onto the backs of both mannequins, of the same type he had used on the first day -- heart monitors. On his phone he engaged the app that kept tracks of both mannequins' heartbeats.

He squatted down beside the larger of the two mannequins, and said in English, "I see you are both awake. Your hearts are going like mad. I imagine they will slow down in time, and then begin racing again when the end is near." He smiled to see that the big mannequin's pulse was still faster now. "You shouldn't feel this is unfair. Remember that you are both under death sentences. For your friend, the day has arrived. But in a few days you will have a new friend to play with. Big girl, very strong. You came to know her very intimately one night, I understand. You will be intimate with her again. It will be less painful for you. Perhaps you will come to be very aroused by it." He chuckled, then spoke a few sentences in Russian to the smaller mannequin.

Rachel felt her life floating away. She would not be the one to die today, but she believed she might as well be. Life without Anya was empty of everything she wanted, everything she needed.

She knew he must be talking about the Amazon. Whatever positive emotion Rachel had been able to derive from the horror of serving in the president's nasty fantasies had come from being able to be with Anya, even when it hurt. She tried to imagine a similar life with the Amazon. She couldn't. It was too bleak.

My own life ends today, she thought.

Anya saw how she had been fooling herself. She had known that a new girl, that mean Novocheva woman, was coming soon, perhaps within days. She had known Novocheva and Retchell would be paired up -- that surely was the reason the president had been concerned about whether Retchell was attracted to women. Anya had avoided speculating about her own role, not wanting to think she would be marginalized as a third wheel, and certainly not considering that the president would have no need for her at all.

But she knew now. She was not going to survive today.

She concentrated on Retchell. At least, she thought, they let me look at her. Retchell will be the last thing I see.

The thought calmed her.

Raisa lay on her bed. Her mind spun. She knew she would never forget how it felt to curl Anya's fingers around the bars along the bottom of the tank, on either side of her hip. Bars Anya would want so much to let go of, to save herself.

But it's out there, Raisa said within herself over and over. The message to Tatyana is out there.

She counted off all the ways her effort might have gone wrong, if it had. She had discounted the possibility that Ivan himself would discover the note. She couldn't picture any reason he himself would move the dishes around and discover the folded message hidden underneath. And it was clear that must not have happened, she told herself, because there would have been fallout from that long before now. Ivan didn't find it.

Her hope was that some kitchen worker would find it, most likely one of the dishwashers. Raisa visualized a skinny teenaged boy, with no chin and a pockmarked face. He would find the note... maybe. It seemed more likely he would just shove all of the contents of Raisa's tray into the dishwater, where in seconds the note would become waterlogged and unreadable. Or he would see the note, and flip it unread into a nearby trash can. Or he would see the "5 U.S.A. DOLLAR REWARD" legend on it, and laugh, or he would miss the word "UNOPENED" above Tatyana's address, would unfold the note, read it, think it was crazy ramblings or, if he believed all of it, get scared and tear up the note. Or he would consult his supervisor, who would tell him to throw it out, saying "It's worthless now, you opened the damn thing, and anyway it's all nuts. Somebody playing a joke."

Raisa, totaling up the many ways her attempt at communication could fail, felt her hope fading. But it was the only hope she had.

If the message got through, she thought, Anya might be saved. If it didn't, Anya will die, Rachel will be emotionally destroyed, and all of us will eventually end up in the prison.

There, she thought. That makes it all pretty simple, doesn't it?

She turned over and buried her head against her arms.

The president read a few messages and typed a few responses, only halfway concentrating. He looked frequently at the life-and-death drama unfolding in his own office.

He was annoyed that the nurses' resistance had taken some of the fun out of it. He cheered himself up at the prospect of watching their executions.

He had hinted to them that they would escape punishment if they completed today's chore. That was necessary. If they had thought their lives were over no matter what they did, he could never have secured their cooperation. But now they were no longer needed.

He would recruit another team of nurses. That was easily done. As before, a few days of training would be necessary, which was frustrating, because it meant he would not have Novocheva join Preston at the dacha quite as soon as he had hoped.

Since Preston was to be moved in any case, he decided the sensible plan would be to fly her back to the prison. The new team of nurses could then train there under the doctor's supervision, with both Novocheva and Preston to work with. As soon as the doctor was satisfied, the nurses and mannequins could be moved to the dacha.

Celenskaya had earned points for participating without objection, but in truth, he didn't really think she was needed anymore either. The poses he envisioned for Novocheva and Preston were more basically sexual, and didn't require as much imagination as Celenskaya had offered.

Yes, he decided, the new nurses should be able to handle the job entirely on their own, without Celenskaya's "vision." Doctor Tourachev has been bugging me, he reminded himself, about wanting Celenskaya for some experiment involving snakes, something similar to what he had done with Marya, but a little more elaborate.

That's the plan, then. Turn Celenskaya over to the doctor; execute the current nurses by the method I outlined to them. Oh! The new nurses could watch that! Excellent idea. That would give them the needed motivation to perform their duties with zeal.

He started to punch the keys on his laptop to contact Doctor Tourachev, to tell him Novocheva would not be needed for a few days, but stopped himself, smiling and shaking his head. Time for that later, Dimitri, he told himself. You are missing the show! There is a fascinating drama going on right in front of your eyes! Don't get so wrapped up in the future that you ignore the present!

Yelena didn't realize she'd fallen asleep. The lights in the room were back at full strength. She suspected their brightening might be what had awakened her, in which case it was very early morning.

She sucked in a quick breath, realizing it was too quiet. Marya had stopped crying.

On her video screen, she saw that Marya was curled up on the bed and apparently asleep.

Just seconds later, the door to Marya's room opened, and one of the doctor's medical assistants glided silently across the room. Yelena realized it was probably not a coincidence that Marya's room was being invaded just seconds after Yelena had awakened. They were probably waiting for me, she thought grimly. So I can watch.

With practiced movements, the technician jabbed a syringe into Marya's arm. It's starting, Yelena thought with sudden terror. She hadn't even realized she had jumped to her feet and was screaming, "No! No! Leave her alone!" at the screen. She stopped. She knew it wouldn't accomplish anything. The man couldn't even hear her, and wouldn't pay her any attention even if he did. She watched silently, biting her lip, as the man picked the inert Marya up and carried her out of the room over his shoulder.

Doctor Tourachev gestured absently at an empty operating table. "Just put her down there." He ignored the technician as the man lay the president's daughter down on the table and went to his own desk, sitting in his chair to wait politely.

Tourachev was absorbed in a silent study of several charts. None of them quite had the information he wanted.

Damn it! he thought. He wished he hadn't told the president he would have Novocheva ready by today. And she should be ready now. She would be if she was normal. The president was expecting the girl shortly, preferably delivered to his dacha tomorrow. The doctor thought he still could do it, but he still had work to do.

And now the president expected the doctor to work on his daughter too! That would be more straightforward, at least. He just had to immobilize her jaw, permanently, and sew her lips and eyelids closed. But there wasn't really any hurry on that. He could keep her here, unconscious, and she wouldn't be going anywhere. He understood the president wanted her taken care of quite soon as well, but priority had to go to Novocheva. For her there was a specific deadline.

The problem that had developed, becoming clear only in the last few days as the nerve drug was brought up to maintenance level, was that it wasn't lasting long enough. A dose sufficient for Preston and for Simonina didn't seem to be sufficient for Novocheva. Within less than twenty-four hours after being given the drug, she would already be opening her eyes, looking around, and her lips would twitch as if she was trying to speak. She could be dosed more often, say every twelve hours, but the president had stated he wanted her at his disposal for as long as twenty-four hours at a time. The dose could be increased so it would be sufficient for twenty-four, but it was dangerous to do that blindly. An overdose could kill her. The correct dose must be measured carefully and not exceeded.

The doctor's best guess as to the cause of the problem was simply that Novocheva's internal organs cleaned impurities out of her bloodstream at a faster-than-normal rate. Everyone's body did such cleaning, which was exactly why any drug injected into the bloodstream gradually disappeared and had to be replenished, but for Novocheva the rate must, he decided, be outside the standard window. It made sense -- the girl was obviously unusually healthy, and this would probably be part of the reason: her organs did their jobs extremely well. The doctor wondered if she ever took painkillers for her sports injuries. If she did, he was willing to bet that she probably had to take them more often than anyone else, for them to do any good. On the other hand, she seemed to be the type who would simply ignore the pain.

It would take the better part of the day to solve this problem. Novocheva had just been given her daily dose of the drug. He would take a blood sample from her now, measure precisely the amount of the nerve drug present in the sample, and then take further samples at one-hour intervals, measuring the amount of the drug remaining each time. Unfortunately, making those measurements would take up most of each hour between taking samples. The number of samples needed would be, he judged, about a half-dozen. That would give him enough of a timeline to make a mathematically reliable calculation of the amount of drug that would be needed, to remain effective for twenty-four hours. But all of that would leave him literally no time left over to deal with the president's daughter. She would just have to wait her turn.