A trio of dark-haired djamphir in white medical coats hovered uncertainly. Ash crouched in the corner, staring straight at the unspace my not-body occupied, his gaze disturbingly direct. He rocked back and forth, his hands flat on the floor, and someone had at least managed to get the grass out of his hair.
“We can’t afford to lose either of them.” Bruce ran his hands back through his dark hair. It stood up wildly, and that was wrong. He was always so calm. “The Maharaj will only negotiate with her. And it’s that Divakarun brat, the one Christophe cultivated.”
“Negotiate what?” Hiro sounded interested, but he was watching Christophe.
“They think she might be one of theirs. Or related, or something. I can’t even begin to guess.” Bruce took another step. “Good God, what a mess.”
Christophe slumped in the chair. The bruises were just shadows, but he hadn’t cleaned up and a mask of filth still clung to him. Even through the rosy haze I could see his color graying out, and that wasn’t good.
He swayed, and Dibs steadied him. The blond wulfen glanced at the machines, booping and beeping along. “Pulse still erratic. Her respiration’s down too. Graves, is she responding? At all?”
The excruciating tingle jolted all the way up my arms, suddenly. The body on the bed twitched again. My head tipped back, almost colliding with Graves’s. He jerked back, but his lips kept moving. His bruises were fading too, and his eyes flashed green for a moment. But there were heavy lines scored on his face. He looked older now—eighteen instead of maybe-sixteen-honest, except for the lines slicing down from the outside of his nostrils, bracketing his mouth. That looked a lot older, shocking when compared to the rest of his face.
He leaned in again, and with his free hand, he reached up, smoothing the hair away from my face. I tried to feel his fingers, couldn’t.
Dru?
The directionless voice went all through me. It wasn’t Gran, or Dad, for once. If I’d been in my body I would’ve jumped. As it was I jerked again, and the machines started beeping again.
“Pulse is up.” Dibs leaned forward, hovering over Christophe. “Just a little more.”
“More,” Christophe slurred, a long sigh of a word. “More. Everything.”
Dru. My darling, my brave little girl. The voice came again, wrapping around me with the comfort of a silken blanket. Now is not your time.
I was suddenly aware of my lips. The body on the bed sighed. Every djamphir in the room went still.
“Mommy?” A child’s voice, as if I was five years old and lost in a dream, and a sudden hot flush of embarrassment went through me. The machines went crazy, and Dibs let out a nervous sigh.
Christophe half-fell sideways. Dibs caught him.
“No more!” Bruce said, sharply. “It’s killing him!”
“Leave it.” Hiro had Bruce’s arm, and the tension between them bloomed a hurtful crimson. “Can’t you see it’s what he wants?”
Dru. My mother’s voice again, not sharp, but commanding. Now isn’t your time. Go back.
I struggled. I didn’t want to go back into that body on the bed. Here I was free. I could go toward that voice, and something inside me—maybe it was the touch, but I don’t think so—told me that if I did, clear rational light would break over me and this room would fade, and there would be something like flying. That light would enfold me, and they would be there. All of them. All the people I missed, all the people who hadn’t come back for me.
I hesitated for an endless moment. Christophe slumped further, and the rosiness of the scene faded. Now it looked like one of those hand-tinted old-timey photographs, faint blushes of color where the light hit, except for the scarlet ribbon between his arm and mine, looping in complicated swirls. That ribbon glowed with its own light, and Dibs glanced worriedly at my body on the bed, a line between his blond eyebrows.
“I’m taking him off,” Dibs announced. “He can’t take much more of this.”
“Don’t.” Hiro just said it, flatly, the way he would tell someone not to step in a pile of something foul.
“Hiro—” Bruce objected, surging forward.
The Japanese djamphir pulled him back. “Let him choose the manner of his death, Stirling. It is the least we owe him. He’s lucky.”
“Lucky?” Dibs actually rounded on them, his eyes sparking orange. “I’m taking him off—”
Christophe’s lips peeled back; his gums were bloodless, his fangs shrinking. He was losing his solidity, his outlines fuzzing. Graves’s fingers tensed in my hair as the machines went wild, beeping frantically.
And now I could hear what he was saying to that body on the bed. My body.
“Please. Don’t go.” He kept repeating it, over and over again. “Please, Dru. Please. Don’t go. Please.”
And I knew that tone, the pleading, the fear that was sitting like a spiked ball in his chest. He’d been left behind too, maybe more than I had.
If I left now, who would pick him up?
My good girl, my mother’s voice whispered. Live. Go back, and live.
I smelled her, then. Warm perfume and spice, her hair falling in my face as she picked me up. I was a little girl, nestled in her strong arms, and she was everything good and bright and clean. Every little girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world, but mine was.
She really was.
I love you, baby. It faded, that light and the sense of her presence, but I could still feel her arms around me. I love you so much. I am always with you.
The room spun around me, like soapy water sliding down a drain. Whirling, the earth’s rotation twisting everything, my unbody compressing as darkness ate the edges of the vision. Static roared in my ears, and I tilted, slid, spun, time stretching as Christophe’s eyes opened halfway and he stared as if he could see me too. His arm lay on the small table, the bright red ribbon unfurling from it, but his other hand reached out, toward me. Fingers outstretched, pleading.
Everything accelerated, the machines screaming and Bruce tearing his arm free of Hiro’s grasp, Dibs shouting as Christophe slid out of the folding chair and Graves making a sound that cut right through me. It wasn’t a cry or a moan or a scream, it was just the faint terrible snap of a heart breaking, snap—
—ped back into my body, flesh closing around me like heavy water dragging a tired swimmer down. I sat straight up, dried blood and dirt a crackglaze on my skin, and screamed. The three white-jacketed djamphir descended on me, Graves grabbing my shoulders and holding me down as I thrashed, saying my name over and over again. Ash let out a loud, exuberant yell, and Bruce actually yelled too, more out of surprise than anything else.
