She woke to the sound of a man saying, quite calmly, "Please don't move, you're going to rip the line out," and to the smell of burnt hair, which turned out to be her own.
The ceiling was the padded white of an ambulance. A drip bag swung over her face. The rattle of the road came up through the stretcher in little jolts, and on her left a man with a close dark beard was taping a cannula to the back of her hand with the absorbed tenderness of someone wrapping a gift he didn't expect to be thanked for.
"Yusuf," she said.
"You remembered." He didn't look up. "Good. That's the third question on the checklist. Do you know what day it is?"
"The ninth. October."
"Good. Do you know who's the Chair of the Cableway Authority?"
"Neil."
"Do you like him?"
"That," said Dez, "isn't on the checklist."
"It isn't." His mouth moved. He had the kind of face that looked sorry in repose and hadn't had a chance to correct it. He was perhaps thirty-four, with the grey under-eye shadows of a man for whom sleep was a rumour, and a name badge on his jacket that read DEMIR, U. FLOOR RESCUE. "I just wanted to see if you'd say yes. Most people say no. You said it isn't on the checklist. That's a very interesting answer."
"I get that a lot."
"I'll bet." He checked the monitor. The numbers on it were not, she saw, the numbers of someone who had just had a burning beam laid on her back. "Right. You've got a left collarbone that I'm fairly sure is in two pieces, burns over your hand and across the back of your shoulder, a lot of smoke. You were not screaming. I want you to know I'm taking that as professional offence."
"Sorry."
"I'm kidding. Mostly."
In front of her face, pale green, patient as a bank clerk, the menu hung where she had left it.
RANK 2. YOU HAVE 2 POINTS TO ASSIGN. BRACE 1. REACH 0. READ 0. MEND 0.
She looked at the words with the serene, floaty detachment of someone on morphine she had not been given. *Brace,* she thought. *More Brace.* That was the obvious answer. Less Weight meant less hurt, and less hurt meant she could take more. But she lay there on the stretcher feeling every one of the eleven points of damage the menu had logged, in the shoulder and the hand and the long hot stripe of her back, and she thought about nine o'clock, and a black suit, and a man in a cardigan who would say *you should have been there.*
She thought, *I have to be upright at nine.*
Without lifting a hand, she put her attention on the word MEND. A little box opened beside it.
MEND: Heals your Damage faster. Each point restores 1 Damage per 10 minutes while you are at rest. Natural recovery continues alongside. This does not stop Damage from happening. ASSIGN? Points are PERMANENT.
"Permanent," Dez murmured. "Of course."
"What's permanent?" said Yusuf.
"Nothing. Everything. Do you ever get a message that asks if you're sure, and you're not?"
"Constantly. I have a phone. Dez, are you with me? Your pupils are fine, but you're talking to the ceiling."
She assigned one point to MEND and watched it go in, a small bright click like a seat belt. The remaining point hovered. She went back and forth, and then, because it seemed like the sort of choice a person had to make quickly to keep it honest, she put it in BRACE.
BRACE 2. REACH 0. READ 0. MEND 1. CREDIT 0 / 40. NEXT RANK: 40.
*Forty.* She nearly laughed. Twenty had taken her one thermos, one can, a fire, a ceiling, a broken bone and a night's sleep, and now they wanted forty. The menu did not seem to feel there was anything unreasonable about this.
"You're smiling," said Yusuf.
"It's a nervous thing."
"It's very unnerving. Please stop." But he was smiling, too, a very small one, and a sudden warmth passed through her like a hand on a stove. It faded. She couldn't tell whether it was the bond or the drugs or just a human being, at three in the morning, being kind.
---
Floor General was a low sprawl of brick and yellow light at the bottom of the canyon, lit like an aquarium. They put her in a curtained cubicle in the emergency department and took her X-ray and gave her something that tasted of aspirin and chalk. Yusuf stayed. He was off at six, he told her, with the flat satisfaction of a man reading a prison sentence. He sat on a plastic chair at the foot of her bed writing a report with a pen on his knee, and every so often he looked up at her and then, very quickly, back down.
She felt it start at about twenty to four.
It was a tingle first, on her left hand, like pins and needles. Then a warmth across her back, deep, gentle, as though somebody had laid a hot water bottle along her spine. She lay still. The menu didn't say anything, because it didn't have to; she could count. One damage every ten minutes. Then another. By four, she judged, she had shed two of the eleven, and by half past she was up to four, and the stripe across her shoulders had stopped hurting like a brand and begun to hurt like a very bad sunburn.
"Huh," said Yusuf.
He was standing beside the bed. He had put the clipboard down. In his hand was a penlight, and he'd turned back the hospital gown at her shoulder with two fingers, very gently, to look at the burn.
"What?" said Dez.
"It was blistered when I brought you in. It was blistered *quite a lot.* I put a dressing on it myself." He looked at the dressing. He lifted a corner. "That's a second degree burn. I know it was, I remember being annoyed by it. That is now pink."
"I heal well."
"Not that well." He said it softly. His voice had not changed at all; that was what gave her the chill. "Do you do this a lot?"
"Not a lot."
"Do you want to tell me anything?"
She was a poor liar, in daylight and in the dark. She had always been better at saying nothing. "I'd like you to think I'm a good patient."
He looked at her for a long moment. The lights in the ward hummed. She heard, in the next cubicle, an old man begin to cough, and somebody, a nurse, say "There you go, Mr Kowalczyk, there you go." Yusuf Demir lowered the gown back over her shoulder with exquisite care, as though it had suddenly become a different material.
"I think," he said, "I'm too tired to be alarmed. I'm going to put this in a drawer. I'm going to take it out at nine tomorrow morning when I've slept, and look at it, and if it's still strange, I'll ask you again. That's my deal."
"That's a good deal."
"I'm told so." He tore off a strip of tape. "Your fracture isn't a fracture any more, by the way. Radiology just rang. They want to know whether the first scan was swapped with someone else's."
"Oh."
"Yes. Oh."
---
The curtain moved a little after four.
She heard the voice first, before it came round the edge: warm, fast, a little hoarse from shouting at a street full of smoke. "No, honestly, I'm family. I'm her cousin. Her cousin by, by, circumstance."
"Miss, it's visitors' hours at seven."
"I know. I was *there.* I'm the one who ran for the hose." The curtain slid back. "Hi."
She was shorter than she looked on a screen, in the way that people who are famous for their voices often are. She wore a hooded sweatshirt over what had been a nightshirt, soot up to the elbows, a yellow scarf round her neck, and her curls had been shoved back under a headband that left a black thumbprint on her forehead. There were no ring lights here. The only light was the white hospital strip overhead, and in it Lucia Paredes looked tired and sharp and very young, like a student who has run through the night to catch a train.
Yusuf stood up. "She's resting."
"I'm aware, Yusuf, we've met. You pulled my cousin out of the Weir in March." She did not look at him. She was looking at Dez. "I was on the pavement. I filmed all of it. I filmed you coming out with the old lady, and I filmed you going back in, and I filmed the beam coming down on the stairs, and I want to say, first, and I'm saying it with no camera on, that was the bravest stupid thing I have ever seen a person do. Hepzibah Ibekwe taught my mother to read."
"She's all right?"
"She's *furious.* She's asking for her slippers." Lucia's mouth twisted. "She told the whole street you were the Angel Gabriel, in a Plumbline jacket. She does not mean it as a compliment to the firm."
Dez sat up. The cubicle swayed once, then steadied. The collarbone didn't object. She realized that her left hand, which had been a raw red claw an hour before, was lying in her lap, soft and unmarked.
She hid it under the blanket.
Lucia noticed. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything; it was why she had two million followers. But she only looked at the blanket for a second and then up again, directly, with an expression Dez would later struggle to describe. It wasn't hostile. It was a kind of terrible, patient attention, like someone reading a bill.
"Here's what I don't understand," Lucia said. She sat down on the end of the bed, unasked, with her soot on the sheet. "You live on the Terraces. You were off the clock. Your face has been on every phone in the city since yesterday morning. And at two forty-four a.m. on the ninth of October, nine hours before your boss's boss is due to lay a wreath on this exact street, you walked into a burning building *before the fire brigade.*"
"I got a feeling."
"A feeling." She nodded. "Tell me about the feeling."
Dez opened her mouth. In her chest, faint and calm, two other pulses were going, an old woman's and a girl's, and she knew what would happen if she said *a menu in the air told me.* She'd seen the face Yusuf made for ten seconds before he put the question in a drawer.
"Miss Paredes," she said.
"Lucia."
"I can't tell you."
"No," Lucia agreed pleasantly, "I didn't think you could." She stood, and picked a flake of ash from her scarf, and flicked it onto Dez's blanket. "That's okay. I'll find out. I always do. See you at nine, Wall."
