The Gender Game 5: The Gender Fall(39)

Each noise of the house settling or sound from outside caused me to wake abruptly, instantly alert, searching for any news of Violet’s condition. Several times, I caught myself starting to stand up to go check on them, only to try to convince myself to sit back down. There were a couple close calls, but for the most part, I managed to find a hidden reserve of patience.

By the time Dr. Tierney came out, I was holding on to my control by a thin thread. I felt raw, on edge, a feeling with which I was becoming hauntingly familiar. I stared at the walls, at the floor, at the ceiling, so out of it I didn’t even notice Dr. Tierney until she somehow manifested right next to me. I felt dumb, sluggish, watching as she stared at the mostly empty, long-cold cup of tea before me, then picked it up and drained the rest of its contents in one gulp.

“It’s done,” she announced as she finished, setting the mug down on an end table with a decisive clink. I studied her as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We relieved the pressure in her skull and patched her eardrum with special paper—a trick of the trade, you know.” Her exhaustion was apparent from the way her words came out of her mouth, a little slower, a little less coherent than normal.

“Will she recover?” I demanded, and Dr. Tierney met my gaze, her eyes filled with sympathy.

“I wish I knew,” she said honestly, and sighed. “She’s strong, she’s a fighter, but in cases like these, we won’t know until she’s awake. And even then, there still may be some side effects, like memory loss, problems speaking, vision impairment, balance issues… The list goes on.”

I exhaled, the stone in the pit of my stomach growing. “So we did all this for nothing?”

Dr. Tierney shook her head sharply. “We drained the blood. We stopped her from dying. The bleeding in her brain was extensive. There’s no way to know how long she would have lasted without this surgery. I think we caught it before there was critical and irreversible damage, but I don’t believe in giving false hope. If it went well, then she’ll be up in two days… three at the most.”

I nodded, feeling numb. “Can I… Can I be with her?”

“Of course you can,” she said, sounding offended that I’d thought there was a possibility I couldn’t. “And while you’re at it, get some sleep. Really.”

As long as I could be near Violet, where I could check on her to make sure she was still there, then sleep sounded like the best plan I’d ever heard. I headed toward the door.





14





Violet





I woke up slowly. It seemed that recently, all I had been doing was waking up and falling asleep again. I’d come to before—I remembered in various degrees of clarity—more than once, with weird tubes protruding from me, restraining my movement and adding minor discomforts to the fading pain in my head and body. Some of the times I’d been scared, fought… but mostly I’d been sleeping. I couldn’t tell how many days it had been, but there had been darkness and light in various periods… Viggo was often with me when I woke, and his presence always convinced me that I was safe, that I wasn’t being treated only to be tortured by my enemies.

This particular moment of waking was significant, though, for several reasons. There was no sense of urgency or panic. None at all. Even odder, I felt strangely calm and relaxed, even taking a moment to stretch out my limbs as I slowly peeled back my eyelids.

My memory of what had happened after the palace and before the surgery hadn’t come back fully, just a vague sense of bad things happening, sometimes punctuated by flashes of memory that came to me in sharp, painful glimpses. But now I could remember waking several times before, as well as conversations—though all of them still had a fuzzy, surreal quality I couldn’t place.

Dr. Tierney had taken me off the IV earlier—I wasn’t sure how long ago, but I was sure it was hours, not days—and told me I would be getting some food in me, too, as soon as I rested a little longer. She’d even removed my catheter and helped me go to the bathroom, much to my embarrassment. She wasn’t here now, probably having stepped out to do errands, tend to her other patients, or maybe sleep.

The absence of pain in my head was… exhilarating. It still ached slightly, like a bad headache, but I was no longer confronted with agony every time I moved, and in comparison, it almost felt like an absence of pain altogether.

No, the pain wasn’t absent, but it was manageable. As my gaze started to come into focus, I panned it around the room, ridiculously happy as my eyes caressed objects while my mind provided me with their names—and they didn’t even spin! I noted with clarity, for the first time, that I was in the same room as before, but my clothes had been changed.