Chapter FiveLast Light

We walked into the Children's Wing. Nobody ran.

That was the first rule, and I'd made everyone say it back to me twice at the barricade, Rook included. He'd looked at me like I'd asked him to wear a party hat. But he'd said it.

No running on the ward.

"If she makes rules, she keeps rules," I'd told them. "We don't break any we don't have to. Not until I say."

"And then?" Rook had asked.

"And then I break the big one."

He hadn't asked what the big one was. I think he'd decided that if I was wrong, it wouldn't matter, and if I was right, he didn't need to understand it. It was the most trust anyone had ever shown me while clearly thinking I was mad.

Mrs Adeyemi came too. She'd put on her cardigan and her reading glasses on a chain, and when Rook told her to stay behind the barricade, she'd looked at him over the glasses until he stopped talking.

"A discharge needs two signatures, Inspector," she'd said. "The clinician's and the nurse in charge. I've been the nurse in charge on this floor since before you were shaving. Until somebody tells me otherwise, I still am."

Jonah came because she did. He carried her handbag and didn't argue with anyone, which was how I knew he was frightened.

The double doors opened for us on their own. The night-lights glowed. The giraffe on the wall had a long crack down its neck where Dez had hit it, and someone had painted over the crack in grey.

The lullaby was louder now.

The ward was the same as before. Sixteen cots, sixteen children wrapped in grey, breathing in unison. Except now there were seventeen. In the cot nearest the door, the one Lily had been in, there was a smaller shape. A boy with a Harbour Hawks shirt three sizes too big for him, bandaged to the chest. His eyes were closed.

My throat closed up.

I'd promised his mum. At the patio door of their house, at the start of all this, a woman with her coat on over her pyjamas had grabbed my arm while we loaded him up and said Is he going to be all right? and I'd said Yes. I promise. Then she'd gone to find her purse for the taxi. You're trained not to say that. I'd said it anyway, because she needed to hear it, and because I'd believed it.

I made myself look away from his cot. If I looked at him any longer, I'd go to him, and if I went to him, I'd break the plan before it started. Tell me before you go back, Dez had said. It's easier on purpose.

"Dez," I said, quietly. "Sam's in the first cot."

"I see him."

"I'm going to want to go to him."

"I know." He shifted his weight, just slightly, so that he was between me and the cot. "Not yet."

"Not yet," I agreed.

Lily had been moved to the next cot along. Her arms were still free where I'd torn the bandages. Her fists were still clenched.

At the far end of the ward, the Matron turned around.

"Visitors," she said warmly. "Back again. And you've brought friends." The crack in her white face widened. "I'm afraid you're early. Visiting hours start at two."

"We're not visitors," Rook said, and raised his sledgehammer.

---

The plan was simple, because simple plans survive.

Rook's people would keep the Matron busy. Not win, just keep her busy, in the middle of the ward, away from the cots. Priya would burn anything that came off the ceiling. Dez would stay with me and Mrs Adeyemi. Jonah would hold the doors. And I'd walk, not run, to the nurses' station by the cracked giraffe, and find what Sam had told me about.

It went wrong within ten seconds.

Marcus went in first, helmet down, and the Matron's long arm swept him off his feet and slammed him into the floor so hard the lino split. I heard something in his chest go. Tash fired the nail gun, a burst of blue streaks that stuck in the Matron's apron like pins in a cushion and didn't slow her down. Kieran went for her legs. She stepped over him like he was a toy.

"Mo!" Rook shouted. "Now would be good!"

I stopped walking. I turned. I put both hands out, palms flat, the way I'd done with Dez on the floor of this same ward, and thought about all of them at once.

Stay.

Stem the Tide went out of me in a wave, across the ward, through Marcus on the floor and Tash at the edge and Kieran tangled in a cot rail, and Rook mid-swing, and Priya, and Dez beside me. I felt every one of them. Every cracked rib, every cut. I held them all.

Marcus stopped dying.

That's all it did. I'd worked that out on Ward 2, waiting for my arms to come back: Stem the Tide doesn't mend anything. It holds people where they are. Marcus's ribs were still broken. He rolled onto his side, wheezing, and crawled out of the fight to sit against a cot, and stayed there. A small number came off my hands. I didn't read it.

"That's it?" Rook said, wiping blood off his mouth.

"It stops dying," I said. "It doesn't stop hurting." My fingers had already gone numb. The numbness was creeping towards my wrists, the way it had in this same ward three hours ago. "And I don't get many."

"How many?"

"I don't know. Three? Then my arms stop working."

"Then don't waste them on me." He turned back to the Matron. "Go."

So I went. I walked, and I didn't run.

Behind me, the fight carried on. I stopped twice more on the way to the nurses' station and turned and held them. Once when the Matron caught Tash by the ankle and swung her into the wall. Once when Kieran went down and didn't get up. Both times they lived, and both times they stayed down, out of the fight, and the fighting line got shorter. Rook and Priya were the only ones still on their feet against her. The numbness reached my elbows. Somewhere in there I felt the small click behind my ribs again, like a seatbelt fastening, and knew without looking that I was level seven.

Then Kieran got up anyway, because he was twenty and an idiot, and went back in.

That was the fourth time, and I nearly didn't make it.

I was three steps from the nurses' station when Kieran screamed. I turned and saw him on the floor by the window, one long white hand pressed down flat on his back, pinning him like a moth to a board. His knives had skittered away under a cot. He wasn't fighting any more. He was just trying to breathe.

I put my hands out, and nothing came.

Not nothing. A trickle. A thin warmth that went out of my palms and fizzled halfway across the ward like a wet match. The ache behind my ribs had become a hole, and there wasn't anything left in it to pour.

You're empty, said the list, very calm, very reasonable. You've done all you can. Nobody could blame you.

I could blame me. I'd told Rook three, and this was four.

"Priya," I said. "His back. Her hand. Now."

Priya threw a fireball, low and fast, straight at the Matron's wrist. It didn't hurt her. But it made her lift her hand for half a second, the way you'd lift your hand off a hot stove, and Tash, still on her knees, grabbed Kieran by the collar and dragged him clear.

I walked to him. I didn't run. I knelt beside him and put my hands flat on his back. I couldn't feel them. I put them there anyway, close enough this time that the trickle was enough, and I held him until his breathing came back.

"Cheers, Medic," he wheezed.

"Don't do that again."

"No promises."

I got up. My legs were shaking. The nurses' station was three steps away, and I'd never been so tired in my life.

"Go," Dez said. "I've got him. I've got all of them. Go."

The nurses' station was exactly as I remembered it from placement. The swivel chair with the broken arm. The jar of stickers. And in the second drawer down, where it has been in every hospital I've ever worked in, a pad of forms.

Harbour General. Patient Discharge Summary.

I couldn't feel my hands at all now. I dropped the pen twice and picked it up the third time with my whole fist, like a toddler with a crayon.

"Mo," Dez said. He'd planted himself between me and the ward, arms spread, like a doorman at the end of a long night. "Whatever you're doing, do it fast."

"Discharging them," I said.

"You can do that?"

"Not on my own," I said. "Paramedics can't discharge anyone from a hospital. I'd lose my job." I tore the first form off the pad. "A discharge needs two signatures. The clinician's, and the nurse in charge."

"Which is me," said Mrs Adeyemi, and sat down in the swivel chair next to mine, and took the pen out of her cardigan pocket that she had apparently been carrying for thirty years.

---

I started with Sam.

Patient name: Samuel Teague. Ward: Children's. Condition on discharge: stable. Discharged to: home. I signed it. M. Okafor, Paramedic. My handwriting was terrible. I pushed what was left of Stem the Tide down my dead arms and into the paper as I wrote, without knowing if it would do anything. Then I slid it across.

Mrs Adeyemi signed underneath in neat, looping hospital cursive. Countersigned: G. Adeyemi, Ward Sister.

Across the ward, in the cot by the door, the grey bandages around Sam's chest went slack.

The Matron stopped.

Everyone stopped. Rook with his hammer raised, Priya with fire in her hand. The Matron's blank face turned slowly away from them, past the cots, until it was pointing at me.

"What are you doing?" she said. Her voice wasn't kind any more. It was quiet. Then her head tilted a fraction further, towards the woman beside me. "Sister," she said, and it sounded almost like respect.

"My job," I said, and started the next form.

Lily. I didn't know her surname. I wrote Lily, age seven, bunches, plaster on chin. I signed it. Mrs Adeyemi signed. In the second cot, the bandages loosened and fell away from her legs in long grey strips, and she opened her eyes and sat straight up and started to cry, loud and furious and alive.

The Matron came for me.

She didn't run. Of course she didn't. She walked, fast and smooth and terrible, her long arms reaching, and Rook threw himself in front of her and she flicked him aside. Priya hit her with everything she had, and it barely singed the apron. Dez braced himself in front of the nurses' station.

"Keep signing," he said, without looking back.

I kept signing.

Patient: girl, about ten, red pyjamas. Signed, countersigned. Patient: boy, about four, dinosaur blanket. Signed, countersigned. Patient: teenage boy, cast on left arm. Mrs Adeyemi's pen didn't shake once. The bandages fell. One cot after another, the children started breathing on their own, out of rhythm, ragged and messy, coughing and crying and calling for their mums. With every one, the Matron got slower. Her outline flickered, like a bad signal.

She reached Dez. Her hand closed on his shoulder. He didn't move.

"She'll send them back out," the Matron said to him, over his head, to me. "Do you understand? Out there, where the glass is, and the falls, and the fevers. Out there, where the monsters are now. They'll come back hurt. They always come back hurt."

"Yes," I said. I didn't stop writing. "They will. And we'll patch them up, and send them home again. That's how it works. That's what a hospital is for." I signed the fifteenth form. "You don't keep people safe by keeping them. You keep them safe by letting them go home."

Sixteen.

Seventeen.

I put the pen down.

The last of the grey bandages fell away in the last cot. Seventeen children, sitting up, crying, alive. Sam was out of his cot already, stumbling across the ward on his healed leg, and he crashed into my side so hard I nearly fell off the swivel chair.

+680 XP: 17 lives stabilised (Critical)
[Triage Warden · Lv 10 · Ember Tier · CAP]
Over cap: 561 XP held until Iron Tier

Seventeen lives in one go was more than I'd saved all night put together, and the System paid like it knew it. The levels went in one after another, click, click, and the last one wasn't a click at all. It was like stepping off a moving walkway onto solid ground: everything suddenly steady under me. Feeling flooded back into my arms, hot and prickling. My hands stopped shaking. For the first time since 3:12, I felt like the person in the room who knew what to do next.

The Matron let go of Dez.

She stood in the middle of the ward with her long arms hanging, and for the first time she looked small. The crack down her white face had spread into a web. Pieces of it were flaking away like old paint.

"Visiting hours are over," she whispered. It sounded like a question.

"Yes," I said. "They are. Everyone's going home."

She tilted her head towards me, and I knew, without knowing how, that if she had eyes, they'd be looking at my hands.

"You keep them alive," she said. "So did I." Another piece of her face fell away. Behind it was nothing at all. "Ask the System, little nurse. Ask it what it does with the ones it keeps."

Then she came apart. She just crumbled, quietly, like a sugar cube in hot tea, into a fine white dust that settled on the floor of the ward and was gone.

The lullaby stopped mid-verse. It didn't start again.

On the wall above the nurses' station, where the giraffe's painted-over eyes had been, two small words wrote themselves in plain white: Floor cleared. Far off, somewhere towards the north stairs, a door unlocked with a heavy clunk.

---

For a while, nobody said anything. Then Kieran let out a whoop that made three of the children jump, and Tash started laughing, and Marcus took his helmet off and sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands. Priya came over and stood next to me and leaned her shoulder against mine.

Rook walked across the ward to me. He looked at the pile of discharge forms on the desk. He looked at the seventeen children.

"You broke the rules," he said.

"Only the big one."

He picked up the top form, Sam's, and read it. When he put it down again, he put it down carefully, like it mattered.

"Gale Street," he said. "All of us. At the speed of whoever's slowest."

"That's the deal."

"That's the deal." He nodded, once. Then he turned and started giving orders, and his people started moving, and Dez started picking up children and handing them to whoever had free arms.

"Twenty staff on tonight," Dez said to nobody, a child on each hip, looking round the ward. "And not one of them in here."

Nobody had an answer. Jonah came in from the doors and stood beside Mrs Adeyemi, who was already counting children and writing their names on the backs of the forms, properly this time. He put a hand on her shoulder. She let him.

I sat at the nurses' station with Sam pressed against my side and let myself breathe.

"You came back," Sam said into my jacket.

"I said I would."

"You said you'd be at the back."

"I was at the back. Mostly. It's a big ward." I looked down at him. There were grey marks on his arms where the bandages had been, like faint bruises, already fading. "How do you feel?"

"Sleepy." He thought about it. "Not the bad sleepy. The normal kind."

"The normal kind's allowed."

Then, very small: "Where's my mum?"

I thought of the taxi, and the patio door, and the promise I'd already half broken and half kept.

"That's next," I said. "I promise." I was going to have to stop saying that. Not yet.

Lily had found her way over too. She stood a little way off, looking at me with enormous suspicious eyes, her bunches coming undone.

"Are you the one who wrote my name?" she asked.

"I am. I'm sorry I didn't know your surname. I wrote that you had a plaster on your chin."

She touched her chin. "Ellison," she said. "Lily Ellison. You should write it properly."

"I will," I said. "Next time I discharge you, I'll write it properly."

She considered this, decided it was acceptable, and climbed up onto the other half of the chair without asking.

That was when the System spoke again. It didn't arrive like the others. It slid in quietly at the edge of my vision, dimmer than the rest, in letters that flickered, like something it hadn't meant to show me.

Hidden class path unlocked: LAST LIGHT
Condition: Keep 1,000 alive before the city falls.
City integrity: 61%

I looked around. Nobody else had stopped. Nobody else was reading anything. Priya was helping Lily put her slippers on. Dez was carrying two children at once.

It was only for me.

A thousand. I counted. Sam. Dez. Mrs Adeyemi, the man in traction, the two brothers. Priya. Kieran, Rook and Marcus, and Tash. Sixteen more children, Lily among them.

Twenty-seven. Counting tonight, counting everyone, I'd kept twenty-seven people alive.

Nine hundred and seventy-three to go.

Sixty-one percent. Of what? Of a city that had been whole five hours ago?

Through the ward window, over the river, the sky clock had kept counting while we fought. 69:04. Iron Tier was still coming, and the crack in the sky had grown longer.

Across the ward, beside Jonah, Rook's radio crackled. He'd been trying it every half hour all night, getting nothing but that pure, patient tone. Now, for the first time, there was a voice. Thin and broken up, a man, out of breath.

"Gale Street to any unit. Any unit. We've lost contact with St Brendan's. And the Royal. And Northfield Infirmary." A burst of static. "Every hospital in the city has gone dark. Harbour General's the only one we can't confirm is gone. Is anyone there? Is anyone there?"

Then Rook turned slowly, the radio in his hand, and looked straight at me too.