“Come back in fifteen,” the charge nurse said as I pushed through the doors into the waiting lobby.
* * *
“Finally.” Sike stood when she saw me. She walked ahead of me to the elevators and pushed the DOWN button.
“I still don’t get why you can’t get to Y4 on your own,” I said as the elevator arrived.
“Me either,” she said and stepped inside.
We went through the warren of hallways that led to Y4, and reached the final elevator bank. “This is the one that wouldn’t work for me,” she said, pointing. I waved my badge in front of the door. It arrived, and we stepped in.
“The Shadows control our access. You’d have to ask them.” I looked up, toward the recesses behind the lights set above. “Maybe they didn’t want you to come down?”
“But now it’s fine?” Sike frowned. “What’s changed?”
“I’m here?” I guessed. The Shadows never did anything the easy way, not when the hard way involved more pain for them to feed on. Shit. “Sike—why are you here?”
“There’s been a small accident.”
The elevator doors opened, releasing us onto Y4.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My home floor was chaos. The P.M. shift charge nurse spotted me from behind her desk. “Did they call you to come in early?”
“I’m on break from trauma. What’s going on?”
“New admit. If you want to keep your dinner down, stay outside.” I didn’t think I had that as an option. “Who’s she?” the charge nurse asked as Sike came forward. Sike opened her stolen lab coat, pulling some paperwork out of the breast pocket.
“I have visitation rights for any members of the Rose Throne on this floor.”
The charge nurse snorted. “Figures. Room four.”
Sike put her forms away and walked across the floor. I could leave now, my escorting job done, but my stupid, foolish curiosity wouldn’t let me. I followed her in.
* * *
Doctors barked orders and nurses swarmed the room like ants: finding IV sites, hanging meds, setting up sterile surgical trays.
“Did anyone find the fingers?” a doctor asked aloud. “Any of them?” he went on, his voice rising. No one answered.
The patient sat on the bed in the middle of everything, arms exposed, face bound up in gauze, seeping bright red blood. A nurse stood beside the bed, clamping her gloved hands over the gauze where his ears would be, to apply pressure.
“And not a drop to drink,” Sike murmured, then strode into the room. “The Rose Throne demands recursion.”
The doctor stopped where he was, Betadine staining his gloves and his patient’s hand orange-brown. The doctor was willowy, too tall, folded over the bed like a number 3. When he looked over at Sike, his face was stern. “You can’t take him—he needs profound medical care.”
Sike took off her lab coat and folded it over her arm. “Gideon Strand is the Rose Throne’s property.”
I blinked. The man underneath all the gauze was Gideon? The daytimer from my kitchen, with Anna? I couldn’t tell. With all the gauze, I couldn’t see much of anything.
“We demand recursion. I’m here on behalf of Anna Arsov, the near-ascended.”
“I don’t care who you are, lady. You’re not taking him.”
“Gideon,” Sike said, addressing their patient. The gauzed man groaned in response. “Come with me.” She snapped her fingers.
And like King Kong on the Empire State Building, he started to swat staff away like tiny planes.
“Restraints!” the doctor ordered, and a nurse ran off to get them. Technically—I should have. Or could have. But I didn’t know whose side I was on just then—“Ten milligrams of Haldol stat! And get me a trank gun!”
There was an isolation cart right outside the door. I took a step back outside and made my choice—I put the code into the isolation cart and hauled open the top drawer. It unlocked, freeing the trank gun. I grabbed and loaded two of the sedative darts.
I went back into the room with the trank gun ready, even if I wasn’t sure whom I was going to shoot. Sike and the doctor were in each other’s faces.
“I have every right to take him. He belongs to my Throne. We are responsible for his care.”
“You can’t possibly care for him. He’s staying here.”
Gideon was wrestling with the nurses beyond. One of my P.M. shift co-workers yelped as he made contact with her ribs.
“Nobody get injured!” said the doctor, and the nurses stopped trying. Gideon pulled himself out of bed and stumbled, unable to see where he was at or where he was going.