“Some more than others.”
The woman pulled her arm back. The flat of her blade crashed toward Lila’s face, smacking against her skull.
Beeping woke her. Its steady cadence, its pitch, its closeness to her head, its likeness to an alarm clock—it all worked together to eject Lila from her deep slumber.
Rudely.
Lila covered her ears. “Kill it to death.”
The noise quieted, though not enough to soothe the headache looming behind Lila’s eyes. Dr. Helen Hardwicke-Randolph peered over her, an OB/GYN by practice, but the only doctor that Lila had trusted since she turned eighteen. Her beautiful silver hair, wrapped in a bun at the nape of her neck, contrasted prettily with her dusty orange scrubs. Scrubs that were out of place against the light blue décor behind her.
Blue. Calming. The sea.
“Emergency room,” Lila muttered, nose crinkling at the smell of rubbing alcohol and cinnamon-scented cleansers.
“Yes. Do you remember being brought in?” Helen twisted a ring on her thumb, turning on its bright light, then brought it up to Lila’s face.
“Do it, and I will eat your brain.”
Helen turned off the light and sat on a rolling stool beside her bed. Snatching up her stethoscope, the doctor listened to Lila’s breathing. Several machines leaned over the pair, filled with numbers and blinking lights that Lila did not understand. She only knew that she was connected to a few of them. An IV had been taped to her arm, and something was clamped to one of her fingers. She tried to shake it off, but Helen smacked her fingers and reseated the clip.
Lila had been given a private room on the highborn side of the hospital, rather than a nook with a curtain. She even had a real bed encased in plastic, instead of the cheap foam tables that the poorer patients were given. It crunched and squeaked underneath her as she rolled her body.
“Do you remember being brought in?” Helen asked again as she flipped her stethoscope back over her head.
“No.” Lila yawned. “I picked the color scheme for the hospital. Blue is calming. I thought it worked best in here.”
“So you are responsible for making me wear these ugly orange scrubs every day?”
“I could change the color. Do you want to risk it?”
“I might. My coworkers might want to as well.”
“Put it to a vote, then,” Lila said, thumbing the clamp. “What happened? Why am I here?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I got shot by a tranq. Why do I feel like I got shot by a tranq?”
“Because you got shot by a tranq. You’d think it was a bullet by the way your mother and Commander Sutton are carrying on. They nearly came to blows in the middle of the emergency room.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” came a familiar voice from the doorway. As Sutton brushed a gray strand out of her eyes, Lila glimpsed a few drops of dried blood on the sleeve of her red jacket. Her blackcoat was missing.
Lila’s eyes opened wider.
Commander Sutton was on guard duty.
In a hospital.
“Don’t sit up, fool. Not yet,” Sutton warned. “Get a bucket, doctor.”
“But you’re in Randolph General.”
“So are you. I’d much rather be guarding the door than in your position. Lie back—”
Lila lunged toward the side of the bed, barely grabbing the basin Helen offered before she gagged. Her brain spun in circles and slammed against her skull as she hunched over it. The chicken salad she’d eaten for lunch clawed at her throat, but Lila stubbornly held it down.