Eighteen

I met her at the airport just at sunset. In person, Kim looked a little less like Nicole Kidman. She wore gray slacks and a simple cream blouse that would have looked perfectly in place at a baseball game or a boardroom. Her eyes were a sharp blue, her mouth tight and a little angry. She came through baggage claim without pausing at the carousel, a generic black carry-on wheeling behind her and a tasteful black purse on her arm. She only looked around for a moment before homing in on me. When she stood before me, her head cocked to the left, her eyes clicking over me like a specimen she was trying to identify, I was surprised to see she was half a head shorter than me.

"You look like him," she said. She spoke sharply, like she was trying to bite off the last letter of every word. "I mean, not like him like him. But the family resemblance is there."

"Thanks," I said.

"I didn't like Eric. I always knew that something like this was going to happen."

"Well, he's dead now, so I guess it won't happen twice," I said, more harshly than I'd intended. "And he wasn't the one who got Aubrey in trouble. I was."

"Aubrey is always the one who gets Aubrey in trouble. It's his superpower. Are we waiting on something? I don't have any other luggage."

I nodded and led the way back out to the minivan. Kim was silent, but her shoes tapping on the concrete behind me seemed to carry accusation and disapproval. I was probably overreacting. She didn't say anything about my driving Aubrey's car, so either she didn't care or she didn't know it was his. We'd known each other for ten minutes, and I was already certain she wasn't the sort of person to hold back an opinion.

"We're staying in Eric's old house," I said as we pulled out of the parking space. "It's got protections on it, and the Invisible College is looking for us pretty hard, so I'm trying not to go out if I don't have to."

"I want to go to the hospital," Kim said. "I need to see him."

"Aubrey's all right," I said, fumbling with a parking stub and a few loose dollars to pay the charge. "I called the doctors again just before I came out here, and they said-"

"I need to see him," she said again.

"I don't think it's safe."

"I didn't ask if it was."

I clenched my teeth. I didn't want to go back to the hospital. But she was here because I asked her. Because I needed her.

"Fine," I said. "But we can't stay long."

The hospital was out of our way, and we didn't talk. The few times I glanced over at her, her eyes were on the city sliding by. I wondered whether I should have told her about my night with Aubrey, whether her story about their marriage would match the one he'd given me. I parked on the street, and Kim was out of the car almost before the engine died. I had to trot to catch up with her.

Aubrey's room hadn't changed much since I'd left it. His heart rate was steady and slow. His mumbling roommate still mumbled. Kim stood beside him, looking down with her eyes half closed. Her expression betrayed nothing.

"How long has he been like this?" she asked.

"Since last Saturday," I said, "so a week tomorrow."

A nurse came into the room, a strong-looking black woman in her midfifties. I remembered her vaguely from the earlier times I'd been here. She smiled at me, kindness and sympathy in her expression, and started changing out the roommate's saline drip.

"Excuse me," Kim said. "Where's his chart?"

"I'm sorry," the nurse said, "but we can't give out his medical information to-"

"I'm his wife. You can give it to me," Kim said. The nurse looked surprised and glanced at me. I shrugged and nodded. The nurse's eyebrows rose a millimeter, but she gave no other sign of surprise. Fianc¨¦e and wife visiting together was apparently not the strangest thing she'd seen that day.

"I'll see if I can get the doctor for you," she said, and went back to her task. I went to look out the window, feeling awkward and out of place. I didn't see it when the nurse left. Kim didn't speak to me. I let the silence press on me for as long as I could stand it.

"He'd been in a fight a few days before," I said. "A rider took over this guy's body, and we wound up in a fight. Aubrey did something that knocked the bad guy out, but it weakened the connection between him and his body. When Coin fought back, it hit Aubrey really hard. That's why..."

That's why he's hurt and I'm not. That's why you're here. That's why this is all my fault. Kim made a small sound of agreement so perfunctory that I didn't know whether she was aware of it. She touched Aubrey's cheek with the detachment of someone preparing for a dissection, then ground the knuckle of her right index finger into Aubrey's sternum, hard enough to make the bed under him creak.

"Hey!" I said. "What are you doing?"

"Sternal rub." She nodded to the heart monitor. Fifty-five. "He still responds to pain. That's very good. It would have been better if he'd flinched, but this is something."

"Oh," I said.

"I don't hurt him for the joy of it," she said.

I didn't know how to respond, and a second nurse came in the room to save me. He was a huge man, wide as a horse across the shoulders, with a shaven head and broad lips. He looked at me, his eyes barely widening. I had the sudden, overwhelming memory of the tattooed attackers breaking into Midian's apartment and the moment of surprise that followed breaking in the door.

I've seen him before, I thought, my body already in motion. I scooped up the little plastic visitor's chair and swung hard. The huge man blocked the attack but fell a step back as I remembered where. He was the one who'd been with Coin that first day when Ex took me to see the warehouse. He was part of the Invisible College.

It was a trap.

"Kim!" I shouted. "Run!"

She was already moving. She slipped over the murmuring man's bed, putting one of us on either side of the false nurse. I tried to remember how to use the training Midian and Chogyi Jake had given me while I kicked at the man's kneecap. He moved fast as a cat, taking the impact on his shin instead. He drew in a deep breath, and I felt a prickling that had nothing to do with the physical as he drew in his willpower.

Kim punched at his back. He staggered, surprise on his face. I shouted as I turned, kicked like something out of a martial arts film, and drove my foot into the bridge of his nose. Something gave, and the huge head snapped back, the man dropping to the floor like we'd Tasered him. Kim unclenched her fists. There was blood where her fingernails had cut into her palm.

"There are probably others," I said, but she was already heading out the door and I was already following her. The black nurse was heading toward the room, with a look of concern and annoyance. We blew past her. At the intersection of two halls, I paused, drawing my qi up behind my eyes, feeling the shift in my consciousness, and then swept the halls before and behind us. The world had taken on an almost surreal level of detail. I could see the dust hanging in the air, hear the high-pitched whine of the computer monitors harmonizing poorly with the hum of fluorescent lights, smell the corruption and shit under the antiseptic hospital scent, feel my clothes grating against my body. Kim paused, looking back at me. She wore contact lenses. I hadn't noticed that before. She looked at my eyes, and I could see she understood what I was doing.

"Well?" she asked.

"None here. None that I see."

"Stairs or elevator?" she asked, gesturing down one of the hallways. A bank of brushed-steel elevators stood at the end of the hall like temple guards, a marked stairwell beside it. The leftmost doors began to open, and I caught a glimpse of tattooed skin.

"Stairs," I said, "but not the ones down there."

We ran. I felt things tugging at me, the wizards of the Invisible College pulling at me with their minds, the separation between reality and Next Door thinning. As we dodged angry doctors and confused patients, I tried to keep myself between our pursuers and Kim. I thought that if Eric had put some protections on me, they might shield her too.

We found another stairwell and Kim started down it, but I caught her hand.

"Up," I said. "Let them pass us by."

She nodded. We ascended. We'd gotten a floor and a half up when the door we'd come through burst open. I froze and then slowly turned back, ready to launch myself at any attacker. But the wizards' footsteps retreated, heading down toward the first floor. Some grunting marked when they ran into some poor bystander on the stairs, and then we heard a metal door slamming open. The sound was so assaultingly loud, the echoes in the concrete shaft so disorienting, that my focus failed, my qi dissipated, and my senses began to return to normal.

I was shaking. Behind and above me, Kim's breath was ragged.

"Let's go find another stairwell."

"Okay," she said.

I led the way up another flight of stairs, but the door there required a pass code, so we kept going up. On the sixth floor, we got lucky. A nurse was going out the door, and we caught it before it could close. We stepped into the new ward, walking quickly but not running. We got a couple stares, but no one tried to stop us. I put my hands in my pockets, lifted my chin, and tried to look like I knew where I was going. We passed rooms with men and women lying in bed, the low-level murmur of televisions punctuated by groans and weeping.

As we turned a corner, Kim took a quick double-step to come next to me. At the end of the corridor, an exit sign glowed green.

"I shouldn't have insisted that we come here," she said. It wasn't phrased as an apology. It was like she was telling me some trivial fact I might not have known.

"I shouldn't have let you," I said, and we reached the new stairwell. I opened the door with a clank, cutting off whatever she'd begun to say next. I went down the stairs quickly, leaning over at each landing to look for hands on the ascending rails below us. If there was anyone there, they were being quiet.

"They'll be watching for us," she said. "They'll be watching the exits."

"I know," I said.

"You have a plan?"

"I'm thinking of one," I said. It wasn't true. Between immediate animal panic, concentration required by my still-unfamiliar magic, and anger at Kim, I hadn't come up with anything more sophisticated than get down and get out. I wasn't about to tell her that.

We got to the ground floor and stepped out into the wide lobby from a passage I had never noticed on my previous visits. The place was built like a labyrinth, which was probably why we'd gotten this far without being discovered. Weird architecture and blind luck weren't going to help much now. Three men stood at the information desk, talking into cell phones, but their eyes didn't have the veiled awareness that comes from being in a conversation. They were looking for something. For us. Two were young men, broad across the shoulders and thick in the neck. The third man was smaller, older, with his back to us. When he turned, I wanted to scream.

Power radiated from Coin like heat from a fire. His face was set in an expression of cold concentration. Bubbling panic rose up in my throat. He was here. He was waiting for me. I smelled something like burning.

"What?" Kim murmured. "What is it?"

I hoped Midian had been right when he'd said I was hard to notice. I took her elbow and angled her down a side hallway. I didn't dare look back, but no one seemed to be coming after us. We passed a gift shop full of stuffed animals and snacks, the cashier looking at us incuriously as we passed.

"Do you think they've spotted your car?" Kim asked.

"Probably," I said.

"My things are in it."

"Yes, they are."

We turned left. Signs offered us paths to the emergency room, the bathrooms, security. I walked toward the emergency room and slid through a set of doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONEL ONLY. Curtained cubicles lined the wide room, the sounds of crying and pain making a hellish background. No one challenged us. We weren't an obvious problem, and we were in the land of great big obvious problems. I peeked past the intake nurse and toward the lobby.

The big man from Aubrey's room was sitting by the emergency entrance, his expression deathly grim, black eyes still starting to form where I'd kicked him. Two men and a thin-faced woman were sitting with him. I backed up. The trap was sprung, and we weren't getting anywhere. A soft chiming sound announced the arrival of an oversize elevator. I was trembling.

The wide steel doors slid open, and four paramedics pushed out a gurney. The woman being wheeled past was drenched in blood, her neck encased in a stabilizing collar like something from an Egyptian tomb. The shreds of her jeans trailed after her like rags. Her eyes were blank. The paramedics moved quickly, professionally, into the emergency room. The doors clapped closed behind them even before the elevator began to close. The feeling hit my gut, a fist of fear and hope that tried to take my breath away.

"Come on," I said, pulling Kim into the elevator.

"What are..."

"That one," I said, nodding to the injured woman. "She came from upstairs."

The doors hissed closed and I slid my fingers over the worn plastic buttons until the numbers stopped getting higher. There was one unnumbered button at the top. It was marked H. I pushed it.

"Medevac," Kim said.

"Yeah," I said. "There's a helicopter up there."

The elevator lurched, dropped a few inches, and then started to rise. I willed it to go faster, but the numbers continued their stately progress.

"He's your lover, isn't he?" Kim asked.

"What?"

"Aubrey? He's your lover."

"We went out once," I said.

"I still care for him," Kim said. Her chin jutted out, but her eyes were all apology. I stared at her, and a floor later she looked down. "I haven't told him that since...since we split. He doesn't know."

"Okay," I said.

"I thought I should tell someone. In case we're about to die."

I didn't mean to take her hand. It just seemed the right thing in the moment.

"I can see that," I said, and then, "I was really hoping to have a little more time before we got into the heavy emotional intimacy thing."

"Me too," Kim said, and shrugged. "Sorry."

"It's a fallen world. You do what you can."

The elevator lurched again, stopped. We turned toward the doors together, our hands still clasped. When they opened, the helipad was before us, the beacons burning red in the darkness. The transport helicopter was still there, two men in uniform standing before it in obvious conversation. No wizards descended upon us. No sense of riders pressing in from Next Door assailed us.

I didn't know what I was going to say, but as we walked forward, Kim dropped my hand, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward.

"You," she barked as we came near. "You're the pilot?"

The nearer man's head snapped straight. His companion edged away as if hoping to avoid the conversation.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

Kim dug in her purse for a moment, then handed the man an identification card. I saw her picture on it and the words Grace Memorial Hospital. The place she worked in Chicago, I thought.

"I'm here consulting on a very delicate transplantation," she said. "I need you to take us to the airport."

The pilot glanced down at the identification card, back over Kim's shoulder at me, and then down at the card again. He was shaking his head even before he spoke.

"I can't do that, ma'am. We're a medevac unit, not a transport. I'm not allowed."

"It's important. A child could die," Kim said, and I felt something when she did. A prickling on my skin like someone had brushed me with a feather. Even with the August heat still radiating from the tarmac, I had goose bumps. The pilot shuddered, nodded, and turned to his helicopter, then paused.

"There isn't room for you in the cockpit, ma'am," he said. "We're gonna have to strap you two down."

Kim paled, but nodded. I saw her swallow. The pilot waved to his companion, and the two trotted to the helicopter's sides to prepare little fiberglass pods, just big enough for a dreadfully injured person.

"Magic?" I asked. "That was a cantrip?"

"It isn't hard," Kim said. "People want to do what they're told. Men especially want to help women, and God knows you're pretty enough that he wanted to show off. I just...nudged him a bit. It's not like telling him we aren't the droids he's looking for."

I laughed, relief giving the sound a warmth I was surprised to feel. Her smile was less wintry.

"I don't think I've said thank you," I said. "For coming. For helping me with this. For helping Aubrey."

Her expression went thin and brittle. It would have been as if the moment's vulnerability in the elevator had never happened, except that I saw something softer in her eyes.

"If we survive all this, I'm going to kill Aubrey myself," she said. "Or at least wound him seriously."

"Fair enough," I said. "Of course, we're not out of here yet. The helicopter could still get shot down by the Invisible College."

"Cheerful thought," Kim said, and the pilot waved us over.

They strapped me in first, wide canvas bands with industrial steel buckles cinching me in against the aluminum frame. A fiberglass pod closed over me like a coffin; a small clear space let me look out and up at the swimming stars overhead. The pilot climbed into the cockpit and started up the engines. I could feel it through the frame of the helicopter when his companion closed the pod on Kim's side. The engine whined, and the rotors began to turn. The noise was so overwhelming it was like silence.

Like a balloon with its string cut, we rose into the sky.