Page 18 of What We Become

The monitor beeps differently. My eyes snap to the screen.

Eighty-three.

“That’s better,” Clarke says. “The bronchodilator is working.”

I let out a slow breath, my chest loosening. Knox gives my hand another squeeze and lets go.

Eighty-five.

She’s going to make it.

I wipe my eyes with the back of my wrist. The foam crust scratches my cheekbone.

I’m going to wash this shit off my arms, find her a warm blanket, sit beside her bed, and hold her hand for as long as she’ll let me. When she opens her eyes, I’ll be there.

My hands keep shaking.

I clasp them between my knees and try to breathe through this, find my own strength. But I’ve never felt as weak—as powerless—as I do right now.

Part of becoming a Hangman was believing I’d never feel that powerless again. But here we are. It found her anyway. It keeps finding her.

I’ve sat on kitchen floors at two in the morning telling Eli he’s allowed to have something good. That the dark doesn’t get to charge us rent on the rest of it. Watching her breathe through a mask at maximum flow, I can’t find one word of that I’d say out loud again.

Maybe Eli was right all along.

Maybe we can’t have this.

Lights appear below us, resolving into a compound of stone and glass buildings set among the trees. White lights flare around the landing pad, figures already moving on the ground.

It looks like someone built a luxury retreat in the mountains for the rich and powerful. The kind of place you’d go to recover from burnout or heartbreak if you were a tech billionaire. Or where you’d go to disappear.

Twenty minutes ago, this was only a destination. Seeing it now, I add it to everything else I’ve learned about Odin—his reach, his resources, the pieces of his world he reveals only when we need them.

Clarke speaks into her headset. Medical jargon. Numbers I’ve been tracking and numbers I haven’t. The helicopter begins its descent and Sage’s hand twitches.

Her fingers curl slightly. It’s a reflex, maybe. Or the drugs. Or the oxygen finally reaching the parts of her brain that remember how to move.

I reach out, because I can’t stop myself, and touch her shin above the ankle. The foam on my fingers brushes rough against the foam on her skin, but it’s real. I can feel her heat, the living pulse under the surface. She’s in there. She’s coming back.

We can have this.

“I’m here, baby girl. I’m right here.”

Her fingers curl again.

The helicopter touches down. The doors open. People in scrubs rush the stretcher, and Clarke is talking fast. The night air hits my face, and it smells like pine and cold dirt and nothing like the ocean.

A doctor meets us on the pad. He’s short and bespectacled, already snapping on gloves. One look at Sage and his face settles into controlled concern—calibrated urgency.

“Dr. Shahid,” he tells me, then turns to Clarke. “Talk to me.”

They move. The stretcher rolls. Knox and I follow. The fluorescent lights make everything look clinical and strange after the dark of the helicopter. Inside, it looks nothing like the luxury retreat I saw from the sky.

The medical team pushes through a set of double doors, and Knox and I move to follow.

A nurse steps into the gap. She’s a head shorter than me and entirely unbothered by that. She places one firm hand on my chest, halting me.

“Family can wait here,” she says. “Dr. Shahid will update you as soon as she’s stabilized.”