White.
Noise—a high thin ringing from inside my skull.
Movement. Vibration beneath me. Something hard and narrow under my back.
I open my eyes.
A ceiling. Curved, white, close. Strips of harsh light. A face above me—young, a woman in green, hands moving efficiently across my body, attaching things, pressing things, her mouth moving but the words arriving underwater, distorted, wrong.
A mask on my face. Hissing. Cold air.
Something warm running down the side of my head into my ear.
I reach up. Someone catches my hand before it gets there and places it back down firmly, without unkindness, the way you'dredirect a child. There is a clip on my finger. A cuff around my arm, tightening, releasing.
The vehicle lurches. Siren above me, very loud, then muffled, then loud again.
Baby Alex.
I panic and try to sit up. The woman in green puts one hand flat on my sternum and shakes her head. Her mouth is still moving. I catch a word—still—and another—okay—and I don't know which order they go in or what they mean together.
Alex. Brumilde.
The blue light pulses through the small window above me.
The ringing won't stop.
I close my eyes.
CHAPTER 17
Three Bodies
ALISTAIR
I don't remember the drive.
I am aware of Henderson beside me, the car moving, the roads, but none of it registers as anything other than distance between me and the hospital, distance that is closing too slowly, distance that is the only thing standing between me and knowing whether my small family is alive.
Three bodies.
The security operative's voice on the phone, controlled, but only just.I'm seeing three bodies.Three. Ivy, Alex, Brumilde. All three of them in that house when the nursery wall came down. All three of them on the floor when his men got inside.
I have been a controlled man my entire adult life. Control is not something I practice; it is something I am, something built into the architecture of me by necessity and by loss and by twenty years of being the person in the room who can’t afford to come apart. I’ve held myself together through things that would havebroken other men and I have done it without effort because the alternative was never available to me.
Right now it’s taking everything I have.
Henderson pulls up outside the entrance. I am out of the car before it has fully stopped.
The hospital smell hits me first: antiseptic, recycled air, the particular quality of a building full of people at their worst moments—and I am moving through it before my eyes have adjusted to the light, Henderson at my shoulder, his voice low and fast acquiring information from the desk, a bay number, a direction, and then I am walking down a corridor that is too long, past curtained bays, past a nurses' station, past everything that is not her.
Henderson stops outside a curtain.
I push through it.
Ivy is on the bed.
Alive.
