They heard her long before they reached her room. Her cries rang down the hall, along which walked Dr. Albert, his face harried.

"I'm sorry Gil." he said. "She was fine when I called you. We had gotten to the point where she could talk about her cats without going into that semi-trance. I called you. Then, I mentioned the book you told me about, and I could almost hear her mind snap out of it."

"That's when the crying started?" asked Catherine.

"Yes." said the doctor. "I have no idea why. We had to restrain her. She was very upset."

"If her memory is back, that makes sense." Grissom pointed out.

"Why don't you let me go in first?" Catherine suggested. "She's comfortable with me. You and Nick should be able to hear from the hallway."

Grissom knew what she had said, but only because she had looked at him when she said it. Usually, his hearing faded in and out, but this time it had been a sharp cut off, between one cry and the next. If he wasn't in the room, no matter how loudly Sophie screamed, he wouldn't hear her. He saw Nick nod out of the corner of his eye, and knew he had to think of something fast, but nothing came. So he nodded, and Catherine entered the room alone.

Grissom motioned Nick over. "Will you be all right here?" The younger man nodded. "All right, I'm going to go back to the lab, and help Sara and Warrick. Call me when you get something."

Nick protested that Sara and Warrick hardly needed help spinning their wheels in the lab. When that got no response, he called out that Grissom would have to tell them some day, but that too went unacknowledged. Shaking his head, Nick turned back to his surveillance.

* * * * * * *

Sophie Ellis was crying. She called out insensibly to her mother, and pulled against the restraints that held her to the bed. Catherine was taken aback by the severity of her condition. The woman on the bed bore little resemblance to the one she had spoken with earlier. Catherine made her way to the side of the bed, mindful of the splaying limbs, and grabbed on to Sophie's hand.

"Sophie?" she called out. "It's Catherine, Sophie, from the Crime lab. I need to talk to you."

There was no response, so Catherine tried another tack.

"Sophie? Sophie what's wrong? What's the matter."

"I did it!" she screamed, and Catherine jumped back. "I helped him. I held them still, I tied them up, I set it on fire, I buried the gun."

"Calm down Sophie." she said vainly, "You'll be ok. It wasn't your fault."

"Yes it was." Sophie screamed and jerked at the restraints.

"We need your help Sophie." said Catherine, as calmly as she could under the circumstances, "Where is he? Where is your brother."

Sophie began to laugh. It was a chilling sound without the slightest trace of humour in it.

"My brother is gone." she told them. "My dear Colin is gone. Do you think he would stay after what he had done? No Ms Willows, my brother is a genius. Surely you must have realized that by now."

"Where Sophie?" Catherine insisted.

"I don't know." she said. "There will be another town and another full moon, and more disappearances. He has almost twenty days to watch them, to learn all about their routines, and then, when the time is right, he'll strike."

Catherine recoiled from the bed, letting fall Sophie's hand.

"Colin is a monster Catherine." Sophie said, her voice dead, "And so am I."

* * * * * * *

Catherine was shaken when she left the room, only able to look mutely at Nick and tell him with her eyes that they were done. It wasn't until they were halfway back to the lab that she noticed something was amiss.

"Where's Grissom?" she asked.

"The lab." Nick replied dryly. "He left just after you went into the room."

"Why?" she asked sharply.

"That Catherine, is the million dollar question."

* * * * * * *

Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, Warrick Brown, Nicholas Stokes, Sara Sidle and Jim Brass stood on the top step of the back porch at the Ellis house. When she had calmed down a little, Sophie had told the doctors where they would find the gun she had buried. It would be, she had said in a chillingly matter of fact tone of voice, in the back yard, in the flower garden she had planted on her brother's command to cover up the freshly tilled soil. Also in the gardens, she reported they would find the five small bodies of Colin's victims.

The gun, a nine millimetre as Bobby had theorized, had already been recovered and sent to him in the lab by one of Brass' officers. Those who remained watched as the forensics team, supervised by the coroner, uncovered the bodies, and removed them from the ground. Something brushed against Grissom's feet, and when he looked down, he saw the remaining kitten circling his ankles. He stooped to pick it up. He could feel it purring, but that was all. Brass was talking, and Grissom turned to look at him, shading his eyes against the setting sun.

"House is empty. The brother's clothes are gone. I can get his picture out, but it isn't likely we'll find him unless he strikes again."

"Oh, he'll strike again." said Catherine. "All we've managed to ensure is that he'll strike alone."

"How is the sister?" Brass asked, hoping for a silver lining in all of this.

"She's. . ."Nick paused, groping for a diplomatic description. "Heartbroken."

Brass looked at him questioningly.

"Her brother used her, and she remembers every single detail." Catherine elaborated. "She's a danger to herself. They'll have to keep her under observation for quite some time."

David walked past, following the last of the bodies. Grissom heard his cell phone ring, and answered it. It was Bobby, telling him that the gun was a match to the bullets, and that the print lab was checking for prints, would they bring something back for comparison. Grissom hung up and sent Warrick and Nick after an item that might have Colin's prints on it.

Sara turned away from the garden, the flowers strewn awry, and watched as the coroner's truck drove away. She walked alone back to the Tahoe, and she heard Catherine talk to Grissom as she walked away, but decided that she didn't want to hear it. She knew how the conversation would go.

"Why did you leave Gil?" Catherine asked. "Why did you leave the hospital."

"You and Nick had things under control." Damn the man, she thought. His explanations would be much easier to contest if he didn't always sound so convincing. "You want more responsibility, I didn't think you'd mind."

"You've been giving me so much responsibility lately, I may as well be the shift supervisor." she said, the familiar snap in her voice. "I don't know what to do with it Grissom. I don't know whether to tell them to call me or to call you. I don't know if I should be the one tying things up. I can't work like this. I need to know one way or another. I can't be caught in the middle."

"Catherine." he began, but she cut him, not in the mood for his explanations.

"I don't want an answer Grissom. Not yet. I want you to think, and to tell me the truth, because I really need to know." She walked off to the car and got in.

Grissom didn't hear anything on the way back to the lab, but he didn't think it had anything to do with his genetic flaws.

* * * * * * *

She found him on the roof. It hadn't been much of a search. The others had gone home, to family and friends to remind themselves that at least some of the world was ordered and good. His office was empty, his car in the parking lot, and his soul was aching. She knew that he would be on the roof.

He was close to the edge, looking out across the panorama that was Las Vegas. The lights shone brightly in the little darkness that was left of the night. To the east, the sky was burning red and orange, signifying that, as it always had, the sun would come to wash away the darkness. Except that there were some places the sun could not reach, no matter how brightly it shone. At some point, a person had to take inspiration from the sun and light himself from within. She could tell even without seeing his face, that Grissom was losing his flame.

It had been that flame which had caught her attention so abruptly all those years ago. When he spoke, it was with such enthusiasm for his subject, that she was swept away in it. That spark had never diminished, and rarely wavered in all the time since, until tonight.

He sensed her somehow and turned around. There were tears in his eyes, and running down his cheeks. He looked so old, as old as Catherine had when Eddie died, or as Warrick had after the Phelps case, age that had nothing to do with chronology, only experience. The lines on his face were highlighted by the strange combination of light that surrounded him, part electric, part stellar and part solar.

"What have I done Sara?" he asked, his tone heart broken. "What will I do?"

Her heart ached for him, but she knew what she had to do.

"You have to tell us Grissom." It came out so hard. "You have to tell them."

"How can I work with it? What if I can't work?"

"We'll compensate Grissom." she said, her tone becoming heated. "We'll learn to compensate. We can compensate for Catherine when the children die because we know what it does to her. We can compensate for Warrick when a case hits close to home because we know. They can compensate for me on the battered women's cases because they know. But dammit Grissom, they can't compensate for you if you don't let us."

"I don't want them to." he said quietly, looking away.

"That's beyond you Grissom." she said, tears in her eyes, knowing he could hear her. "You have to. If you don't we won't function and. . ."she cut herself off, but he understood.

"And what happened tonight will happen again." There was a bitterness in his voice that she had never heard before.

"You can still do this Grissom." She told him, believing with all her heart it was true. "You can still put pieces together better than anyone else on this team. We all still have so much to learn from you. You can still sit in on interviews, you can still go to scenes, you just can't be alone."

"I've always been alone."

"That's no longer an option for you Gris." Her voice still sounded of tears, but he wanted to remember it forever. "You have to actually become part of the team you've worked so hard to build."

"A team." he mused. "Teamwork is a beautiful thing." He turned to face her again.

"More than baseball?" she asked, a smile hinting around the corners of her mouth.

"Much more."

Together they faced the sun, as it slowly rose up over the horizon blotting out the last few stars and dimming the artificial lights of the Strip. The lines on his face were still there, but they were fainter now in the pure light of day, and the tears were gone. So were hers.

"Good night stars, good night air." She said.

"Good night noises everywhere." he finished, a hint of fear in his voice. "It doesn't seem so bad anymore."

"Light will do that." She reminded him. "And so will the promise of friendship."

The sun cleared the horizon to the music of the birds of Nevada. Below them, in the city of Las Vegas, a police siren wailed, and neither of them heard it.

By choice.