Chapter ThreeVisiting Hours

The night-lights went for my eyes first.

There were dozens of them along the Children's Wing corridor, little plastic moons and stars set low in the wall, glowing soft yellow. As the three of us came through the double doors, they peeled themselves off the plaster with a sound like Velcro and rose into the air on grey, dusty wings.

"Moths," Priya said. "Giant moths. Brilliant. Love that."

They came at us in a cloud. One hit my face and burst into powder, and the powder went up my nose and into my eyes, and my legs went heavy. Not tired. Heavy, like I'd been awake for three days and somebody had wrapped me in a warm duvet and told me it was fine to lie down.

I sat down. On the floor of the corridor. I didn't decide to.

"Mo!" Dez's hand closed on the back of my collar. "Up. Up!"

"Two minutes," I heard myself say. "Just two minutes."

He slapped me. Not hard. Hard enough. My eyes came open and the corridor came back, full of grey wings and Priya swearing and throwing fire in short, careful bursts, the way you'd shoot a water pistol at a wasp. Every moth she hit went up like a twist of paper.

"Don't breathe it," Dez said. He had his fleece pulled up over his mouth and nose. "It's like gas. Breathe through your sleeve."

I had one sleeve left. I used it.

It took maybe a minute. It felt like ten. When it was over, the corridor floor was covered in grey ash and dead night-lights, and Priya was shaking out her hands, and my head felt as if I'd taken cold medicine and washed it down with gin.

"Thanks," I said to Dez. "For the slap."

"Any time."

"Please don't make it any time."

"Then don't sit down in a boss corridor."

Fair.

The doors behind us had swung shut on their own. Dez gave them a long look.

"Those are push doors," he said. "I've been pushing them for eleven years."

Beyond the moths, the corridor was dark. The murals were the same ones I remembered from my placement: a jungle on the left, an ocean on the right, a giraffe with a long, kind neck stretching up over the nurses' station. Except the giraffe's eyes had been painted over in grey. All the animals' had.

The lullaby was still playing. Quieter now, not from the PA but from somewhere ahead. Live.

We'd left Sam with Jonah and Mrs Adeyemi on Ward 2, behind the barricade, with strict instructions. Sam had not wanted to stay. I'd told him he was in charge of keeping Jonah awake, because of the head injury, and that it was a very important medical job, and he'd looked at me like he knew exactly what I was doing and agreed anyway.

So it was just three of us. A security guard with a leg that should have killed him an hour ago. A sixteen-year-old in fluffy slippers who could throw fire. And me, still blinking moth dust out of my eyes.

"Plan," I whispered. "We find the kid who screamed. We get them out. We don't fight anything we don't have to. If it goes bad, we run back to Ward 2. Yes?"

"Yes," Dez said.

"Boss fights usually don't let you run," Priya said.

"Then we'll be the first."

Priya fell into step beside me, a little in front.

"In games," she said quietly, "the healer's the one everyone protects. If the healer goes down, everyone goes down after." She didn't look at me. "So stay behind me. Okay?"

"You're sixteen."

"I'm a level three pyromancer. Combat classes level off kills. I've had a busy night." She flexed her fingers, and a spark ran across them and died. "You're a paramedic with scissors."

I wanted to argue. I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't just I'm the adult, and I wasn't sure that counted for much any more.

"Fine," I said. "But if you get hurt, I'm telling your mum."

"My mum's in Northfield."

"I'll find her."

She snorted, quietly. It helped more than she knew.

The corridor opened into the main ward. It was a long room with eight cots and beds down each side, the kind with bright rails and cartoon bedding. Every one of them was occupied.

Children. Sixteen of them, maybe more, lying very still under the covers. Each one was wrapped from shoulders to toes in grey bandages, neat and tight, like the pictures of mummies in a book. Their faces were uncovered. Their eyes were closed. Their chests rose and fell, slow and even, all at the same time.

All at the same time.

"Oh," I said. It came out very small.

At the far end of the ward, beside the last cot, someone was standing with her back to us, singing.

She was tall. Taller than Dez, and too thin, in an old-fashioned nurse's uniform with a starched white cap and an apron that went all the way to the floor. Her arms were too long. Much too long. They hung down past her knees, and the hands at the ends of them were very gentle as they tucked a blanket around the child in the last cot.

Above her head, in that same plain white font, floated her name: The Matron, Floor Boss, Level 9.

She finished the verse. She stopped before the cradle fell. And she turned around.

She didn't have a face. Where a face should have been, there was a smooth white oval like the face of a porcelain doll before anyone paints it, cracked once from the forehead to the chin.

"Visitors," she said, in the voice from the PA, soft and kind. "How lovely. But you're too late, dears. They're all asleep."

---

"Which one screamed?" I said. My voice shook. I didn't care. "There was a child screaming. Which one?"

The Matron tilted her head. The crack in her face seemed to widen, just a little, like a smile. "Little Lily. She didn't want to go to sleep. They never do, at first." One long hand gestured to the cot nearest us, on the left. "But she's better now. She's safe. Nothing will ever hurt her again."

The girl in the cot was about seven, with a plaster on her chin and her hair in two bunches. The bandages had only reached her waist. Her arms were still free, lying on top of the covers, and her fists were clenched.

Her fists were clenched. She was fighting it.

"She's not safe," I said. "She's stuck."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes," I said. "Safe means she gets to wake up. Safe means her mum comes in the morning and she complains about the breakfast and goes home."

"Home." The Matron said the word like it tasted strange. "Home is where they fall off walls and cut their legs on glass. Home is where they get ill. I've watched them come in, dear, for years and years and years. Bleeding. Crying. I patched them up and sent them back out, and back they came." Her hands folded together over her apron. "Now they stay. Now nothing hurts them. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what you're for?"

It was the worst thing she could have said, because for half a second, a small part of me understood her.

"No," I said. "That's what you're for."

Priya didn't wait for the conversation to finish. I should have known she wouldn't. She threw the biggest fireball I'd seen yet, a white-hot thing the size of a football, straight at the Matron's chest.

The Matron raised one long arm and caught it.

She just caught it, the way you'd catch a ball a child had thrown, and closed her fingers, and the fire went out. A thin wisp of smoke curled up between her knuckles.

"No running on the ward," she said.

Then she moved.

I've seen fast things. I'd seen the hound come through the windscreen. The Matron didn't move like that. She was just at one end of the ward, and then she was halfway down it, apron swishing, and her arm swept across the space where Priya had been standing. Dez got there first. He grabbed Priya by the back of her gown and hauled her sideways, and the Matron's hand closed on the air where her head had been.

"Back!" Dez shouted. "Back, back, out!"

He was right. I knew he was right. We'd agreed the plan. You don't fight what you can't hurt. Priya was already scrambling for the door, Dez behind her, and I was turning to go.

And Lily opened her eyes.

She looked straight at me. Her lips moved. I couldn't hear her, but I didn't need to. It was the same thing every patient says, sooner or later, in one way or another. Help.

I went back.

I didn't decide to. That's not an excuse. I'm telling you because it's true. My feet just went, two steps, three, to the side of the cot, and my hands were on the bandages at her waist, tearing, and the grey stuff was cold and tough as wet canvas and it did not want to come off.

"Mo!" Dez yelled.

I got one strip free. Then another. Lily's breath hitched, out of rhythm with all the others, ragged and real. The warmth came into my hands and went into her and the bandages loosened, and I thought, yes, yes, this works, I can do this.

The Matron's shadow fell across the cot.

"Naughty," she said.

She didn't hit me. That was the worst part. Dez hit her. He came from nowhere, from the door, where he should have been, where he'd been safe, and he hit her with his whole body, shoulder first, like he'd been doing to drunks for twenty years. It didn't move her an inch. But it turned her attention.

She looked down at him almost sadly. Then one long hand closed around his chest and lifted him off the floor, and threw him.

He hit the wall by the nurses' station hard enough to crack the giraffe. He slid down it. He didn't get up.

---

I don't remember crossing the ward. I remember Priya screaming my name and throwing fire, not at the Matron but at the floor between us, a wall of it that made her step back. I remember the smell of burning lino. I remember dropping to my knees beside Dez and both my hands going flat on his chest.

His ribs moved wrong under my palms. Broken, several of them. His breathing was short and wet and too fast, and on one side his chest wasn't rising at all.

Collapsed lung. Maybe both. Internal bleeding, almost certainly.

You can't press on that. There's nothing to press on.

"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't recognise my own voice. "I'm sorry, Dez, this is my fault. We had a plan and I broke it. I went back. You came back for me and it's my fault."

His eyes found mine. He tried to say something and blood came up instead.

"Don't talk," I said. "Don't talk. I've got you."

I didn't have him. Pressure Point needed a point. Somewhere to push. A wound I could close. This was everywhere, deep inside, a dozen small bleeds and a lung that wouldn't fill, and the warmth went into him and spread out thin and did nothing.

You did this, said the list. You did this, you did this. For once it was right.

Behind me, Priya's fire wall was dying down. I could hear the Matron's slow, swishing steps on the other side of it. Humming.

I put my hands flat on Dez's chest, both of them, spread as wide as they'd go. I stopped trying to find one point. I thought about all of it at once. Every broken rib, every torn vessel, the lung, his heart going too fast underneath it all. I didn't push. I held. The way you hold a door against a crowd, the way you hold someone's hand on the worst night of their life.

Stay, I thought. Stay. All of you, stay where you are and stop bleeding.

The warmth came up out of me like a wave. It went through my palms and into his chest and spread, not thin this time, but wide and even and strong, and kept spreading. I felt Priya stumble against my back as it washed over her too, and heard her gasp as the burns on her hands stopped spreading.

Skill evolved: Pressure Point → Stem the Tide (area · allies)
+50 XP: Dez (Critical) · Priya (Moderate)
[Triage Warden · Lv 5 · Ember Tier]

Dez's chest rose. The bad side still dragged, and I could feel the broken ribs grinding under my palms, but the air had stopped leaking and the blood had stopped filling him up. Nothing was mended. It was just holding. He coughed, a horrible wet cough, and then he breathed, short and ragged, but he breathed.

"Ow," he said.

I laughed. It came out as a sob.

Then I tried to take my hands off his chest and couldn't feel them. Both arms had gone numb from the fingertips to the elbow, dead and heavy, like I'd slept on them all night. When I made a fist, nothing happened. It took three tries.

So that was the price. Fine. I'd pay it.

---

We got out.

We didn't do it cleverly. Priya threw everything she had left at the ceiling over the Matron's head and brought down a shower of tiles and a sprinkler pipe, and the Matron stood in the spray with water running down her blank white face, waiting, patient as a cat. Dez and I staggered for the doors with his arm over my shoulders and my useless hands bunched in his fleece. Priya came last, walking backwards, throwing sparks.

The Matron didn't follow. She didn't need to.

"Come back at visiting hours," she called after us, as the doors swung shut on their own. "I'll be here. I'm always here."

We didn't stop until we got back to Ward 2. Jonah pulled the barricade bed aside to let us in and took one look at us and didn't ask. Mrs Adeyemi sat Dez down, strapped his ribs with a torn sheet and started checking his pupils like it was 1994 and she'd never retired. Sam came straight to me and wrapped both arms round my waist.

I made myself check the four patients before I did anything else, because that's the job, and because if I stopped moving I didn't know what would happen. Mrs Adeyemi was fine and furious. The young man in traction had gone back under his bed. The two brothers were playing cards on top of the commode. Everyone was breathing on their own rhythm, out of step with each other, messy and ordinary and real. I'd never been so glad to hear people breathe badly.

Then I sat down on the floor with my back to the wall and put my hands over my face.

"Mo," Jonah said quietly.

"I went back," I said through my fingers. "We said we'd run. I went back for Lily, and Dez came after me, and he nearly died. That's on me. Not the Matron. Me."

Nobody argued. I was grateful for that. If they'd told me it wasn't my fault I'd have known they were lying.

Mrs Adeyemi crouched in front of me, which at her age was an event, and took my wrist in a grip like a blood-pressure cuff. Feeling was coming back into my fingers in hot, prickling waves.

"When I was twenty-three," she said, "I was terrified every single shift. It doesn't get better. You just get used to being terrified and doing the job anyway." She let go. "And you learn when to wait for help."

It wasn't comforting, exactly. But it was true, and true was better.

"Did you get her?" Dez said from across the room. His voice was hoarse. "The kid."

I lowered my hands. "No. I got her arms free. That's all."

He was quiet for a while. Then: "Next time, tell me before you go back. I'll come with you on purpose. It's easier on purpose."

I looked at him. He looked back, level as ever, with water still dripping off his fleece.

"Okay," I said. "Deal."

Priya was standing at the window. She'd been very quiet since the ward, which wasn't like her.

"Mo," she said. "You need to see this."

I got up. Everyone did.

Outside, past the car park, past the dark roofs of Harbour City, the sky had changed. The pale letters from earlier were gone. In their place, huge and calm and white, the System had put up a clock. It filled the whole southern sky, so big that the numbers were clear even from here.

71:59:43.

71:59:42.

Beneath it, smaller, it said: Iron Tier descends.

And as we watched, high over the river, the sky split. A thin black line ran across it, jagged and silent, and through it came a light that was the dull grey of old metal.