Light.
Not the ambient, apologetic glow of my apartment’s single lamp or the anemic fluorescence of the station’s overhead panels. This light is clinical. Precise. A small, concentrated beam moving across my vision with the practiced, methodical rhythm of someone who has done this thousands of times and is checking for something specific.
My pupil contracts.
The reflex is involuntary—my body responding to the stimulus before my brain has organized itself enough to identify the stimulus, let alone the person administering it. My eyelids flutter against the brightness, the muscles working in the sluggish, uncoordinated pattern of someone surfacing from a depth they didn’t choose.
The light withdraws.
And in its place: a face.
Female. Mid-forties, maybe, though the kind of face that wears age like a credential rather than a decline. Warmbrown skin. Dark coils of hair pinned back from a forehead that radiates the specific, competent calm of someone whose profession requires delivering bad news with precision and good news with restraint. Her eyes are sharp—nearly black, framed by the kind of fine laugh lines that suggest she smiles often and means it.
And she’s smiling now.
Beaming, actually. The full, sunrise-bright expression of a woman who has been watching monitors and checking vitals and waiting for exactly this moment—the moment her patient’s eyes decide to rejoin the conversation.
“Dr. Sylvie Winters,” she announces, extending a hand that I don’t have the motor coordination to shake. Her voice is warm. Musical, even—carrying the particular cadence of someone who has spent years calibrating their tone to make hospitals feel less like institutions and more like places where human beings are tended to by other human beings. “Welcome back, Chief Martinez. You had us in suspense.”
I blink.
The motion requires more effort than it should, my eyelids operating on a delay that makes every visual input arrive approximately one second after my brain expects it. The room resolves in stages—white ceiling, curtain rail, an IV stand to my left with a clear line running to the back of my hand, monitoring equipment producing the rhythmic chirp of metrics I can’t read from this angle.
Hospital.
No. Not a hospital. Smaller. The ceiling is residential height, the walls painted a sage green that no public institution would choose, and the air smells like?—
Lavender.
Real lavender, not the synthetic approximation that cleaning supply companies stamp on their products. The genuine,botanical scent of the herb, probably growing somewhere nearby, infusing the space with an aroma that my Omega physiology recognizes at a cellular level assafe.
“Where…”
My voice emerges as a rasp. Sandpaper on stone. The vocal cords protesting their reactivation with the specific, scratchy resistance of tissue that has been dry for too long.
“You’re at my private medical center,” Dr. Winters answers, producing a cup of water from the side table with the seamless efficiency of a woman who anticipated the question and its prerequisite. She guides the straw to my lips with a gentleness that feels practiced but not impersonal. “Small operation. Just me and two nurses. But we’re the only Omega-specialty facility within a hundred miles, so we tend to get interesting patients.”
I drink.
The water hits my throat like rain on parched earth, and the relief is so immediate that my eyes close involuntarily for the two seconds it takes the liquid to remind my body what hydration feels like.
“You were brought in by emergency transport,” she continues, setting the cup down and pulling a rolling stool into position beside the bed with the fluid motion of someone whose workspace is an extension of her body. “Due to the explosion at the station.”
I frown.
The wordexplosionenters my brain and finds no corresponding file. My memory offers fragments—the parking lot, gravel, October air, the smell of smoke from the station’s damaged wall. Roman’s face. A hug. A blush.
A key fob in my hand.
A click.
And then?—
Nothing.
“Explosion?” I repeat, the word feeling wrong in my mouth, too large for the gap in my memory it’s supposed to fill. “I…no. My cruiser. My cruiser exploded.”
The fragments reassemble as I speak them, the act of narration triggering the reconstruction—the parking lot, the key fob, the sound that wasn’t a sound but a force, Roman’s arm around my waist, the world going sideways and then going black.
