Wake up

Light.

Not the green sick glow of grow-lamps. Not the white nova of a rifle stock connecting with skull. This is warm, golden, the particular quality of morning sun that filters through cheap blinds and lands in horizontal bars across a familiar ceiling. Your ceiling. The water stain shaped like Florida. The hairline crack that runs from the light fixture to the corner.

Home.

You try to move your head and the world punishes you for it. A deep, grinding ache radiates from the right side of your skull down through your jaw, your neck, your shoulder—everything connected to everything, every nerve ending filing a formal complaint. Your mouth is desert-dry. Your lips are cracked. There's a thick pad of gauze taped above your right eyebrow, and when you blink, your eyelid drags against the adhesive edge of a butterfly bandage.

You groan. It comes out as a dry rasp, barely human.

The apartment smells like instant coffee and something antiseptic. On the bedside table—your bedside table, the one with the wobbly leg—sits an arrangement that looks like a small pharmacy: a bottle of ibuprofen, a blister pack of antibiotics with three tablets already popped from the foil, a tube of antibiotic ointment, a glass of water with a bendy straw, and a folded washcloth. Next to it, a thermometer.

You hear the rustle of pages turning. Slow, deliberate, the sound of someone who has been sitting still for a very long time.

You turn your head—carefully, glacially—toward the living room doorway.

Lina is sitting on your couch. Human Lina. Small Lina. Five-foot-four Lina with her dark hair pulled back in a messy knot at the base of her skull, stray strands falling across her temples. She's wearing one of your oversized university t-shirts—the grey one with the faded engineering department logo—and it hangs off one shoulder, the hem pooling at mid-thigh. Her legs are tucked beneath her, bare feet visible, toenails unpainted. She's holding one of the old Popular Mechanics magazines you keep stacked on the shelf by the bathroom, and she's reading it with the focused intensity of someone who has exhausted every other form of distraction available to her.

The morning sun catches the side of her face through the blinds, painting warm bars across her cheekbone, and her eyes—brown, human, Jane's eyes—are glistening. Just slightly. Just enough that the light turns the moisture into something visible.

"Hey," you manage. Your voice sounds like someone dragging gravel across sandpaper. "Hi. Good morning."

Her head snaps up. The magazine drops from her hands—lands spine-up on the cushion, pages splaying—and she's on her feet before you can process the movement. She crosses the room in three quick steps and stands over the bed, looking down at you with an expression that keeps rearranging itself: relief collapsing into anger collapsing into something wet and trembling that she's clearly fighting to contain.

"Good morning, you fucking dork," she says. Her voice cracks on the last word. She sits on the edge of the bed—carefully, deliberately, as though the mattress might shatter—and presses her palms flat against her thighs. "Do you even know how long you were sleeping?"

You think about it. The greenhouse. The rifle stock. Darkness. Then this—morning light, your bed, gauze on your head.

"So I got knocked out around nine last night," you say slowly, each word a small labor, "and it's... what, seven in the morning? So that's about ten hours of beautiful ****—"

"That was four days ago."

The words land like a punch. You stare at her. She stares back. Her jaw is set hard, the muscle jumping beneath the skin, but her eyes are bright and wet and the morning sunlight catches the tears she hasn't let fall and turns them into tiny prisms at her lash line.

"You—" She stops. Breathes. Starts again, and her voice is rough, scraped raw. "Four days, Sam. Four fucking days. You know how hard it was when the doctor came? Asked me how you hit your head so badly? I had to—" She presses the heel of her hand against her eye, grinding the moisture away with a frustrated gesture. "I told him a vase fell off the shelf onto you while you were sleeping. A vase. He looked at me like I was insane. I had to bribe him two thousand dollars to not call the police, and then he gave me this whole speech about concussion protocols and subdural hematomas and watching for—for pupil dilation and—"

Her voice breaks. Not dramatically—just a small fracture, like a hairline crack in glass, and she turns her face away from you toward the window. The morning light catches the dampness on her cheek.

"And then I sat here," she says quietly. "Right here. On this bed. Beside you. Waiting for you to wake up any moment. Checking your breathing every twenty minutes. Changing your bandage. Making sure you didn't—" She swallows hard. "But you didn't wake up. Not that night. Not the next day. Not the day after that. Four days, Sam. Four days of sitting in this apartment with your stupid magazines and your stupid instant ramen and your stupid face just... lying there."

She turns back to you. The tears are falling now—she's given up fighting them—tracking down both cheeks in thin lines that she doesn't bother wiping.

"I killed Marco," she says. "I killed every single one of them. I avenged Jane. And then I spent four days thinking I'd traded you for it."

Her hand finds yours on the bedsheet. Her fingers are warm and trembling and she grips you like she's confirming you're solid, that you're real, that you're not going to dissolve back into the unconsciousness that stole four days from both of you.

"Don't you ever," she whispers, "do that to me again."