Nothing.
“Are you in danger?”
The girl’s eyes flicked to the curtain.Then back to the ceiling.
“Someone is coming to get me,” she said.Her voice was flat, scraped clean of inflection.“They always come.”
Maren’s stomach dropped.“Who’s coming?”
The girl closed her eyes.
“Go away,” she whispered.“Please.It’s better if you don’t know.”
* * *
Maren’s shift ended at six.
She clocked out, changed into the spare clothes she kept in her locker, and went straight back to the ICU.She badged through the security door and headed for bay four.
The bed was empty.
Stripped.Fresh sheets, folded and stacked at the foot.The monitors powered down.The IV pole wiped clean and pushed against the wall.The rolling table where Maren had left the chart was bare.
She stood in the doorway and counted to five.Then she turned and walked to the nurses’ station.
“Where’s the patient from bay four?”
The day charge nurse—Tammy Ostroff, who had started three months before Maren—looked up from the assignment board.
“Which patient?”
“Jane Doe.Sealed transfer from last night.Teenage girl.”
Tammy scrolled through the system.Tapped twice.Scrolled again.
“There’s no record of a patient in bay four overnight.”
“I admitted her myself.I started her IV.I charted her vitals at 2:15, 3:30, and 5:00 a.m.”
“Maren.”Tammy turned the screen so she could see it.The bay-four column was blank.No admit time.No vitals.No chart entries.No transfer code.The entire record had been wiped clean, as if the girl had never existed.
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m telling you what the system shows.”
“And I’m telling you I spent three hours with a teenage girl who was brought in under a transfer protocol nobody can explain, and now she’s gone, and her records have been erased.”Maren kept her voice even, but her hands had curled into fists at her sides.“Someone moved her.Someone deleted her chart.I want to know who.”
Tammy stared at her.The assignment board behind her blinked with incoming patients, shift changes, and bed requests from the floor.The machinery of the hospital was grinding forward the way it always did.
“I’ll flag it for the night supervisor,” Tammy said carefully.
“The night supervisor signed for the transfer.She’s part of whatever this is.”
“Maren.”Tammy lowered her voice.“Go home.You’ve been on for twelve hours.You’re tired.I’ll look into it when the admin team gets in at nine, and I’ll call you if I find anything.Okay?”
It wasn’t okay.None of it was okay.But Maren recognized the look on Tammy’s face—guarded, careful, already moving on.
“Fine,” Maren said.“Call me.”
