In a hospital bed.

"Special Agent Gabby Jones."

Who said that? Someone was reading her name, reading it from a file. She could hear the papers being shuffled, hell she could hear the color of the folder.

No that couldn't be right, she must be looking at it?

Was she even awake? She felt so sleepy, sleepy and good and... and... horny?

Gabby opened her eyes slowly, her lids feeling almost too heavy to lift. There were beeps and buzzes, the dim background noise of people coming and going. An intercom, or a radio. And above her, white ceiling tiles.

A hospital. She had been dreaming and... had there been an accident?

"Holy shit, you're awake!"

Her neck hurt, but she rolled her head to one side to see a short, stubby man with a brutal buzz-cut. Fielding. Agent Fielding. Her colleague.

"I gotta call the boss," he muttered and scuttled away. Gabby tried to call him back, to ask him what was going on, but her voice didn't seem to work and then suddenly it all came down. The Butcher Op, going down that hole and then getting cold-cocked... fuck! But she was alive?

She closed her eyes and, without thinking, fell asleep again.

"Gabby." her boss, Green, was big in every way. His bulk strained the cheap hospital chair he was occupying and seeing it bend made her tense. She was fine, she had been told. Physically fine at least, although her muscles would be aching from lack of use, and there was still so much they didn't know. Like where she had been. "Two months! And you don't remember anything?" She didn't, and that was terrifying.

She'd been found propped up on a bench in front of the hospital she was now in, wearing the same clothes she'd been wearing when she and Hicks had disappeared, two months previously, while infiltrating the HQ of the gangster Butcher. There were signs that she'd been under heavy sedation for some time - IV marks and the like - but she'd been unharmed. Except her memories of everything since that blow to the head had been erased.

And there was still no sign of Hicks.

"Well," Green sighed, "let's hope it comes back to you. Since you've been gone Butcher's organization has pretty much gone to ground. It's the weirdest thing. Maybe they found out we'd been watching and decided to shut things down for a while, but there's even less dealers out on a Friday night than there were before. We'll get you to see someone - get you some help to see if we can jog any memories - and you'll need some physical rehabilitation too. You won't be back in action for a while yet, so don't go getting any wild ideas about tracking down Lewis. We're doing everything we can."

Gabby slumped back onto her pillows, scared and confused. What the hell had happened to her?