I didn’t open my eyes. Not yet. I lay still and took inventory of my body the way I did after a hard fall on the wall. Toes, ankles, knees, hips, working upward. Everything seemed functional but sluggish, my limbs heavy with whatever pharmaceutical blanket they’d dropped on me.
The room was dark. Not fully dark, the monitor cast its green glow, and the parking lot lights filtered through the window blinds, but the overhead fluorescents were off. It must have been night shift, which meant I’d been out for hours.
I heard the door open.
The footsteps were different from the ones I’d been hearing all day. My regular nurse had a quick, efficient stride. These steps were slower, each one placed with what seemed like almost performative precision. Like someone walking the way they thought a nurse should walk.
I cracked my eyes open.
A nurse I hadn’t seen before stood at the foot of my bed, backlit by the dim hallway light leaking through the half-open door. She was holding a small tray with what looked like a medication cup and a syringe, and she was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“Time for your vitals,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
It was the feeling from the mountains. The feeling I’d gotten from Mark on our hike. Not similar to it, theexact same feeling. The hum in my bones, the fine hairs rising on my arms, the primal tightening in my gut.
The charred-sage smell hit me a heartbeat later.
The nurse took a step closer.
“I’m—” My voice was thick. The sedative still had its hooks in me, dragging at the edges of my consciousness. “I’m fine. I don’t need my vitals taken.”
“Doctor’s orders.” Another step. Her face was clearer now, but something about it was wrong, like Mark’s face had been the night I’d knocked on his door.
Dread rose up and made my stomach clench. Every cell in my body was firing the same signal, a single imperative so loud it drowned out the sedative fog and the monitor beeps and the modern, civilized part of my brain that was desperately trying to tell me that this was a hospital and this was a nurse and I was being paranoid.
If you stay in this bed you are going to die.
The thought wasn’t mine, but it came from inside me, seeming to bypass every layer of my rational mind and speak directly to my legs.
The nurse set the tray down on the bedside table and reached for my arm.
I moved.
The IV ripped free for the second time that day. The monitor shrieked. I rolled off the far side of the bed, my bare feet hitting cold tile, and the nurse’s hand closed on the air where my forearm had been a half-second before.
There was no gasp, no startled step backward, no reflexiveoh, honey, it’s okay. She just stood there with her hand still extended, her head swiveling to track me with terrifying smoothness.
I grabbed the window latch and shoved it up. The window was the kind that only opened six inches—suicide prevention, probably—but I braced my feet against the wall andpulled, and the restrictor hardware tore free from the frame.
The night air poured in. I was two stories up. I could see the parking lot below, and a single cottonwood tree whose upper branches stretched close enough to the building that?—
I didn’t let myself think about it. The thing behind me hadn’t moved yet, or hadn’t moved fast enough, and I had the sickening certainty that the moment I turned to look I would see something other than a nurse standing in the dim green light of the monitors.
I went through the window feet first. The hospital gown caught on the latch and tore. Bark scraped my palms. The cottonwood branch dipped under my weight but held, and then I was climbing down in the dark with the cold air on my bare legs and the parking lot security lights turning everything orange and my heart hammering so hard it felt like it was trying to break through my sternum and make a run for it on its own.
My feet hit the ground and I took off running.
CHAPTER 3
Katie
I made it maybe two hundred yards before I realized all I was wearing was approximately forty percent of a hospital gown.
The parking lot gave way to a service road that ran along the back of the hospital complex, lined with dumpsters and delivery bays and other industrial infrastructure. My bare feet slapped concrete that still held the day’s heat, and my torn gown flapped behind me like the world’s least effective cape. The night air was cool against parts of me that should not have been exposed to it, and somewhere in the building I’d just fled an alarm was going off that might or might not have been related to my departure.
I didn’t stop. The charred-sage smell was still in my nostrils and the voice inside me, the one that wasn’t mine but lived in me anyway, was still pushing me forward like it had strong opinions about my continued existence.
