Page 2 of Starfighter’s Salvation

The monitor stopped making the noise I hated most and went back to one I only disliked. Progress.

“Reyes.” Dr. Okafor leaned around the curtain from the next bay. “You were supposed to leave two hours ago.”

“Tell that to that poor kid’s mother.”

“Go home.”

“When he stops trying to die.”

“He stopped ten minutes ago. You simply haven’t accepted it.”

I checked the kid’s pupils again anyway. Even. Reactive. His pressure was holding. His mother stood against the wall with both hands over her mouth, afraid to breathe in case she used up air he needed. I crossed the bay and took one of those hands.

“He’s stable,” I told her. “We got the bleeding stopped. The surgeon thinks he can save the leg. You can breathe now, Mom.”

She burst into tears and wrapped both arms around me. I hugged her with one arm and entered an order into the computer with the other. In the E.R., you learn to multitask. Two minutes later I was in bay six with Walter, eighty-one, congestive heart failure, third visit this month. Walter enjoyed fishing, hated diuretics, and considered every medical instruction the opening bid in a negotiation.

“You take those pills tomorrow,” I said, adjusting his oxygen. “All of them.”

“Can’t fish if I’m peeing every ten minutes.”

“Can’t fish if you’re dead either. Pee in the lake. The fish won’t mind. They do it, too.”

He thought about that and chuckled. “Fair point.”

“I’m putting it in the chart that you agreed to take your medicine, Walter.”

“Before you do, answer a question.”

That tone meant trouble. “No.”

“You got somebody at home, Gina?”

The question sank a little deeper than it should have. With one of my best friends missing for three weeks, I’d been thinking about my life—or lack of one—a lot more than I normally did. “I knew I should’ve let that big, grumpy therapist from respiratory handle you.”

“Pretty woman like you shouldn’t eat dinner alone. I have a nephew. History teacher. Just got divorced.…”

“No thank you, Walter. I have a charge desk full of charts and a granola bar with my name on it.”

“That’s sad, Gina.”

“That granola bar is peanut butter chocolate chip.” I looked away and told him a half-truth. “Besides, I’m kind of in a long-distance relationship.” Did being in love with a make-believe, alien, video game companion count? Probably not. Even if I totally believed he was real? Anyone I told about Corvan and the Elite Starfighter program thought I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But I didn’t tell Walter any of that.

Walter snorted, then coughed, and I escaped before he could start in on the nephew again.

Fourteen hours after I clocked in, I ate the granola bar standing in the break room, where stale coffee and alcohol wipes had fused into my official perfume. It tasted like sweet drywall. My feet had progressed from painful to numb, which every nurse knows isn’t good news. Every time I thought about Priya, or the game, or Corvan, a suspicious heat simmered behind my burning eyes.

Dr. Okafor walked in while I was touching the back of my wrist to my forehead.

“You running a fever?” He took the granola bar wrapper out of my hand, threw it away, and pointed toward the door. “Go home, Reyes. Before I have security remove you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I absolutely would.” That was true. And I was caught up. Mostly. The next shift had been on for two hours, everyone was up to speed, and to be perfectly honest, I was totally exhausted.

Maybe I was actually tired enough to sleep. Maybe.

So… I went home. My apartment was small but comfortable, and the couch was excellent. I’d kept it after the last boyfriend moved out because he had terrible taste in almost everything but furniture. The refrigerator contained mustard, two kinds of hot sauce, a bottle of wine old enough to vote, and a level of optimism unsupported by actual groceries.