This time, it’s Lane who speaks, breathless in a way that tells me I might be lucky to be here.
I suck in another breath, coughing hard as my chest spasms.
“Yeah,” I rasp. “Felt that.”
I blink rapidly, trying to focus, but the world doesn’t come back the way it should. It fractures and overlaps. The room is still here—the lights, the equipment, Harrison and Lane moving around checking my vitals—but there’s something else threaded throughout it all. Lines and patterns and flickers of…binary code.
1s and 0s stutter across my vision like they’re trying toexplainwhat I’m seeing. Or maybe rewrite it.
“Whoa.” I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing the heels of my palms against them. “Okay. No. No, that’s…new.”
Of course, coming back differently is the outcome Ihopedfor, but I’m not quite sure what else I was expecting. It certainly wasn’t the sensory overload I’m experiencing now.
“Hey, hey,” Lane says softly. “Stay with us.”
“I am,” I mutter on a breath. “I just…there’s…everything’s loud.”
Not with sound. With information. Too much of it, all at once. I canfeelthe machines around me. Not just hear them, not just see them. Literallyfeel them. The steady pulse of the heart monitor, the electrical current running through the wires still taped to my chest, the systems humming in the walls.
It’s like they’re…talking.
And I can understand them.
I gasp, my hand jerking off the bed, searching for somethingto hold onto to ground myself. The second my fingers brush the metal edge of the nearest machine, something clicks. Data explodes and floods my system. Not through my eyes, but through my hand. Throughme. I see the monitor and the screen but also everything else behind it. The signals, the processing, the exact rhythm of my heartbeat translated into perfect, clean binary.
“Fuck!”
I rip my hand away like I’ve been burned. The connection snaps, and the world drops back into something almost normal. Bringing my hand up in front of my face, I stare at it like it betrayed me.
Holy fucking shit.
“Case?”
I look up to see Lane watching me like he’s concerned I might die again. Harrison is beside him now, typing on a laptop, his hands visibly shaking.
“I’m good,” I say, even though my voice is shaking too. “You two good?”
Lane lets out a breath and runs a hand through his loose curls. “We almost lost you.”
I wince. “Yeah, I got that vibe.”
“You were gone longer than we planned.” Harrison’s voice is tight even though the worst of it is over, and he doesn’t look up from his laptop. “Your heart didn’t—”
“He panicked,” Lane interrupts, glancing at his husband with a grin.
Harrison rolls his eyes. “Only because I didn’t want you to be an accomplice to murder, angel.”
Lane leans over me, lowering his voice. “He was worried about you.”
“I heard that,” Harrison snaps.
I smirk weakly. “Aw. You do care.”
“Don’t push it.”
I do anyway, pushing myself up onto my elbows while ignoring the aches and pains from dying and coming back to life. The lingering cold is still buried somewhere deep in my bones.
“Well, the good news is that I died.”
