Gabi staggered down the dim hallway toward the D Wing entrance, wiping her sweaty hands on her thighs. She extracted the passcard from her pocket and swiped it with a jerky motion. The light on the scanner glowed red, and Gabi fought the urge to bang wildly on the doors with her fists. Instead she swiped again, taking care to do so in one smooth motion. The light glowed green, the doors shushed open, and Gabi toppled through them. She could just make out the outline of the orderly where he hunched over his desk at the nurses’ station.
Wake up, Gabi begged mutely, no longer caring if her presence roused suspicion. As she took a step toward the orderly, the tiled floor opened up beneath her. Vertigo unleashed the vomit in her throat as she hit the floor on her hands and knees. She heaved until there was nothing left, her body clinging to consciousness to make sure she didn’t choke on her own sick.
Somewhere above her a voice was shouting, but the floor spun so crazily that she couldn’t look up, feeling as ephemeral as a bird carcass of sinew, feathers, and hollow bones. Gabi felt herself being scooped up just as she began to sink into the pool of vomit. The arms were strong, and stubble abraded the place where her forehead tucked into the neck of whoever held her. Now she would be placed in a bed, and doctors in white lab coats would hover at her side with their pitiless eyes and sharp, shiny instruments. Gabi opened her mouth to scream, but the sound died as blackness consumed her—a lid on a shoebox closing over sinew, feathers, and hollow bones.
“GABI? GABRIELA?” A light shone against her eyelids, making them glow a vein-crossed pink. Gabi cracked one eye open, and the light lanced through it, triggering a pain that stretched from the bridge of her nose to the nape of her neck. “She’s awake. Call in Brother Sam.”
“Dad?” she croaked.
“I’m here, Gabriela” came her father’s voice, taut with concern. “I’m right here.”
Gabi opened her eyes wider as her pupils tried to adjust to the glare of the room, but it hurt too much, so she closed them again. Chirps and beeps punctuated the air, and the smooth outline of an oxygen mask circumscribed her lower face. She was in a bed. A bed just like the one—Gabi’s eyes flew open and she ripped off the mask. She tried to flail her arms and kick her feet beneath the tightly tucked sheets, but they refused to obey. “Help!” she rasped. “Dad, help!” The beeps and chirps sped up. Her father hovered at her bedside, a young male doctor at his elbow. Sam placed his hands on Gabi’s shoulders and urged her back onto the mattress.
“Shhh, honey, it’s okay now. You’re going to be fine.” There were no curtains in this room, just solid, chalk-white walls and two large windows that overlooked the plaza. The door to her room was open, and orderlies wheeled patients down the hall, chatting breezily. She was no longer on the ninth floor, but how did she get here? She could remember nothing after falling through the metal doors. Had she been caught? Gabi tried to read her father’s face for signs of anger or disappointment but saw only worry and the slow dawning of relief. He picked up her hand and covered it with his, the motion causing a tug at the IV needle inserted at the crease of her elbow. It was connected to delicate tubing that led to a pouch of amber liquid hanging by her head. The pouch was only a quarter full, unlike the bulging bags of electrolyte fluids she’d seen in Marcus’s curtained room. Even this shallow dive into her memory made her wince.
“Gabriela, are you in pain?” her father asked, shooting a look at the doctor beside him. “Can’t we give her something?”
“No,” Gabi whispered. “I’m okay. I don’t want anything.”
“It’s probably better to hold off if we can,” the doctor said as he scanned his clipboard. “It will make it easier to assess how she’s responding to the new dose.” He scribbled a few notes, took a reading from the monitor at her bedside, and nodded at Sam before exiting. Gabi was crumbling under the weight of what she’d seen, yet the echo of Gram’s note stopped her from sharing it with her father. “You will know soon whether or not your father—” But Gabi didn’t know anything anymore. She didn’t know what the rest of Gram’s sentence might have been or why torture and murder were happening right here in the Care Center, and most of all she had absolutely no idea who to trust with this awful secret. It was her father’s passcard that had gotten her into D Wing, after all. Could it be that he already knew what Yancy and Gearhart were up to? Taking a sip from the cup of water Sam offered her, Gabi kept her eyes averted as she spoke.
“What happened? How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember? An orderly found you by the nurses’ station on the ninth floor. He brought you down here, then sent someone to the temple to find me.” Gabi cringed at the image of her father being pulled away in the midst of his mother’s memorial to be told that his daughter was lying unconscious in a Care Center bed.
“Gabriela, I need you to tell me what you were doing on the ninth floor. You know you’re not supposed to go wandering around the Care Center like that. What were you even doing over here during the memorial?” As he said this, Sam glanced over his shoulder and Gabi saw the bright roll of Officer Katz’s chignon. Her back was to them, just outside the door, and she was speaking to the young
