Vicious Grace

“And is there a mental health service?” Chogyi Jake asked with his customary smile. “Possession can be mistaken for mental illness.”

“There are three, actually,” Kim said. “Adult, pediatric, and geriatric, but the psych wards are high privacy. They’re strict about keeping patient information away from anyone but physicians and family. If we get someone specifically that we want to look at, I can try to talk to the attending. But even then it’ll be tough.”

“Maybe just the commissary, then,” Chogyi Jake said. “Where the nurses and technicians would be likely to eat.”

“Is there something you’re looking for?” I asked.

He spread his hands in a gesture I took to mean anything interesting.

“I’d like to see Oonishi’s lab,” I said. “Dreamland. If that’s where this thing is showing up, that seems like a good place to start.”

“I’m fine with any of it,” Aubrey said. “How do you want to do this? All stick together, or split up the party?”

The last questions were directed at me. All gazes shifted. While it was true that I was responsible for signing all the checks, I still hadn’t quite gotten my head around being the boss. Moments like this one left me squirming inside, but I put my brave face on.

“Let’s split up,” I said. “Cover some ground. I figure the chaplain is going to be someone you can get to without going through restricted-access areas. The staff commissary, maybe not. So how about Ex tackles the priest, Aubrey and Chogyi Jake can go schmooze with the locals, and Kim can introduce me to Oonishi. It’s eight thirty now, so find out what you can, and we’ll plan to meet up for lunch and compare notes.”

“I think we have a plan,” Aubrey said.

“We should set a solid meeting place and time,” Kim said. “Cell phones are kind of tricky in the buildings.”

We settled on half past twelve in the main lobby. Kim wrote detailed maps to get Ex, Chogyi Jake, and Aubrey where they were going, and then we headed off. It didn’t take long before we were in the public parts of the hospital again. We passed a waiting room where an oversized television was blasting SpongeBob SquarePants to a shell-shocked, unsmiling family. In the hallway, a guy who was just about my age hunched over his cell phone, saying something about lab results and trying not to cry. The air smelled like cleaning solution. Outside the windows, blue sky and fluffy white clouds hung high above the buildings, pretending there had never been a storm. The Sears Tower—now officially the Willis Tower—peeked out from behind smaller, closer structures, and I tried to pay more attention to it than to the thousand small human dramas we were walking past. It seemed polite.

“What a difference a year makes,” Kim said. Her voice sounded tight. Clipped.

“You think?” It hung halfway between question and agreement, and it got a hint of a smile. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press.

Thinking about it as Kim led me confidently down the corridors and wards, I realized there was something to what she said. It wasn’t that the others wouldn’t have listened to me before—well, except Ex, and that was more about his own weird paternalistic streak. But when Kim had first met me, I’d been younger. And it was more than just the months and weeks. It was the mileage.

Being Eric—taking over the work he’d left behind—had put me in harm’s way more than once, but it had also given me chances to figure out who I was. To try being the sort of person I wanted to become. I was more confident than I’d been the first time she met me, more in control of myself and the people around me. I wondered if my parents would have recognized me as the same girl who’d hurried through the kitchen on her way to school and church, or if I’d become someone so alien to my own past that I’d be a stranger to them. I wasn’t sure if the idea left me sad or proud.

I was still lost in thought when it happened.

We passed through a set of automated swinging doors, a blue-and-white sign above them announcing the rooms within as the Cardiac Care Unit. The hallway marched out before us, the glass walls of patients’ rooms arrayed around a wide, high nurses’ station, the same panopticon architecture as a prison. Half a dozen men and women in hospital uniform and almost that many in civilian clothes stood behind the desk or before it, engaged in at least three separate conversations. I didn’t see the man until I bumped into him. It was like stumbling against a wall.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You,” he said, and then, “What the hell is your problem?”

He was red-haired and freckled, his jaw wide and starting to sag a little at the jowls. He stood a head and a half taller than me, which put him on the large side, even for a guy. His scrubs were powder blue, and an ID tag much like Kim’s hung from his neck. The rage in his eyes unsettled me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about some—”

He moved in front of me, blocking my way with an out-thrust chest. A red flush was climbing up his neck.

“You were thinking?” he said. “You’ve got to be shitting me. That’s you thinking?”

I looked at Kim looking back at me. I had hoped—expected, even—outrage and maybe an echo of my own sudden fear. Instead, she was considering me like I was an interesting bug. Everyone at the nurses’ station had turned toward us. All the conversations had stopped. A nervous glance over my shoulder, and I saw the patients in the fishbowl rooms staring at me too. I lifted my hands and took a step back.

“Look, I said I was sorry. I just bumped—”

“You piece of shit.”

His voice was low and shaking with rage. I felt the cold electricity of adrenaline hitting my bloodstream. Kim didn’t say anything.

“You piece of shit,” he said again.

The fear didn’t leave me—nothing simple as that—but an answering rage started to bubble up alongside it.

“Hey!” I said. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I’ve had about as much—”

The red-haired man drew in a long, rough breath.

And so did everyone else.

Each nurse at the station. Patients watching us through the open doorways of their rooms. Breath is a small thing, a subtle thing, until it’s coordinated, and then it’s devastating. A moment ago, I’d been having a surreal encounter with the poster boy for steroid rage. Now, that soft, vast sound made me something very small in the middle of an unexpected battleground. I felt myself go suddenly, dangerously calm. It wasn’t quite the I’m-not- driving experience of being in a fight, but I could feel myself leaning in toward that. The man’s breath quickened, and the other people matched it. I took a step back. His hands were balled into huge fists.

“Kim?” I said, but her breath was keeping time with the sharp panting that rose up all around me. Whatever this was, it had taken her too. I licked my lips and pulled my qi—the vital energy that fuels magic and life—up from my belly and into my throat.

“Kim,” I said, pushing the power out into my voice. “Wake up.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the red-haired man, but in my peripheral vision, I saw her fall out of the pattern. She put a hand to her head and looked around. The red-haired man was trembling now, shaking with barely restrained violence. Two of the nurses behind the station put down long gray folders and stepped out into the hallway behind him. A blond woman in a business suit came out of one of the patient care rooms, her hands at her sides like claws. King Mob, closing ranks. Their synchronized breath filled the space: a single, huge, animal sound.

“Jayné?” Kim said.

“Just stay cool, and when I tell you to run, run,” I said. And then, “Okay. Run! ”

FIVE