Sadie
Lev drives differently than Dmitri.
Dmitri drives the way Nick moves through a room, deliberate, aware of every car and corner. Lev drives the way a man drives when he's been told to do a job but would rather be doing something else. He takes the turns a little fast, checks his mirrors a little less, and when we pull up outside the clinic, he leaves the engine running and gives me a nod that saysgorather than the steady eye contact Dmitri holds until I'm through the door.
I don't think much of it. Nick told me Dmitri would be with him today, something about a meeting that needed both of them. He didn't give me details and I didn't ask, because that's our arrangement. I get the mornings and the evenings. The hours in between belong to his world, and I've made peace with not looking too closely at what fills them.
"Thanks, Lev." I grab my bag from the back seat.
He lifts two fingers off the steering wheel. I close the door. The car pulls away before I've taken three steps.
I watch the taillights round the corner and disappear.
Dmitri never leaves until I'm inside. It's a small thing, a ten-second thing, but I notice its absence the way I notice a number on my meter that's a few points off. Close enough to be fine. Far enough to make my skin prickle.
I shake it off. I'm being paranoid. Three weeks of stability and my brain is inventing threats because it doesn't know what to do without them. I hitch my bag higher on my shoulder and walk toward the staff entrance.
The staff entrance is at the side of the building, down the narrow alley that runs between the clinic and the laundromat next door. I've walked this alley every workday for weeks. I know the dumpster against the clinic wall, the fire exit with the peeling paint, the puddle that forms at the low point after rain. It's thirty steps from the sidewalk to the door. I've counted.
I'm on step twelve when I hear a van door slide open.
It's a white panel van. It was parked at the far end of the alley when I turned the corner and I registered it the way you register any parked vehicle, a glance, a classification, a dismissal. Delivery van. Laundromat. Normal.
Two men step out.
They're fast. Faster than Jason ever was. The first one is behind me before I've fully processed the sound of the door, and his arm goes across my chest and pulls me backward into his body. The second is in front of me, and he has something in his hand, a cloth, dark, damp, and the smell hits me before the fabric does. Sweet and chemical and immediately, horribly familiar from a pharmacology module I took three years ago.
Chloroform. Or something close to it.
I fight.
I don't think about fighting. I just do it. My elbow drives backward into the ribs of the man holding me and I feel the impact, feel him grunt, feel his arm loosen for half a second. I twist sideways. My bag slides off my shoulder and hits the asphalt and my first thought, absurd and clinical and perfectly me, is that my insulin pen is in that bag.
The second man gets the cloth over my mouth and nose.
I hold my breath. I know to hold my breath because I know what this chemical does, how fast it works, how quickly it shuts down a conscious mind. I have maybe fifteen seconds of held breath before my lungs override my willpower and force me to inhale.
I use ten of them.
I bite. My teeth close on the hand behind the cloth and I feel skin give and the man swears in a language that isn't English. Russian. He's swearing in Russian and the word he uses is one I've heard Nick say under his breath when he is having a hard day.
The man behind me gets his arm back across my chest, tighter this time, and he lifts me off my feet. My shoes scrape the asphalt. I kick backward and connect with a shin and he swears too, but he doesn't let go.
My lungs are burning.
I try to scream but the cloth is pressed so tight against my mouth that the sound has nowhere to go. It comes out muffled, a strangled note that bounces off the alley walls and dies before it reaches the street.
I inhale.
The sweetness floods my mouth and nose and the edges of the alley soften immediately. I feel my legs stop kicking. I feel my hands, which were clawing at the arm across my chest, slow and then stop. The dumpster tilts sideways. The sky above the alley narrows to a bright strip and then dims.
I think about Nick.
I think about the fact that my insulin pen is in the bag on the ground and if these men don't know I'm diabetic, if they don'tknow what happens when a Type 1 goes without insulin, then the chloroform isn't the thing that's going to kill me.
The alley goes dark.
I come back once.
