Chapter 30
Exiting Rest Mode
Levi woke up without a gasp.
But he could taste, and what he tasted was plastic and sour along a weight at the back of his throat that wouldn’t let him swallow. A hand pressed gently on his chest, warm through a thin layer of cotton, and a voice above him pitched low said, “Easy. Easy. You’re okay.”
The voice was gentle and probably a kind voice, but kindness had no meaning.
That’s not Asher.
His chest moved under the hand and the movement didn’t feel like his, as though his lungs had been running without him and only just remembered he was attached to them.
Where am I?
His eyes opened in increments, adjusting to dim yellow lamplight.
A ceiling came into focus — pressed plaster worked into a pattern of small repeating flowers, four petals each.
Not a hospital ceiling. The equipment humming somewhere near his head said hospital, but the ceiling said someone’s office.
“You’re alright,” the voice said. “I’m going to take this tube out. On three, you’re going to cough, and it’s going to feel awful, and then it’s going to feel better. Can you hear me, son?”
Son.
He tried to nod. His neck answered late with a small motion he wasn’t sure the man had seen, but the hand on his chest stayed and the voice kept going.
The thing in his mouth moved.
It didn’t slide. It dragged up through his throat, scraping tissue he could feel all the way down into his chest, thick and wet and catching on things it shouldn’t catch on.
His body seized around it. He gagged hard, the gag pulling his whole torso off the bed, and then he gagged again as liquid came up with it that was saliva or bile or both.
His eyes watered and the dragging pain kept coming.
It was longer than it should have been — in his throat, in his mouth, then past his teeth, dragging across his tongue.
His jaw was locked open around it, and even when it came fully out, his jaw stayed open, his throat convulsing around nothing as his body tried to reject the thing that was already gone.
He coughed. The cough was a full-body thing, ribs folding, stomach clenching, but the hand on his chest did not move through any of it.
“Good. You did good. Breathe,” the kind voice said.
He breathed. It burned.
A chip of ice pressed against his lower lip and melted past his teeth. The cold was so sharp and so real, his eyes watered again. He swallowed, his throat a wound, but he swallowed again.
The sheets under his fingers were cotton — real cotton, worn soft, not the stiff institutional kind.
His body was on a real mattress in a real room and the realness of it was so ordinary it almost hurt.
The man’s face came into his field of vision.
Older, steel-gray at the temples, deep creases around warm brown eyes.
“A-Ash…” he tried, and the word came out a scrape. He tried again. “Ash-sher —”
From somewhere to his right, past a drawn privacy curtain, something tore with a wet sound, followed by a machine chirping in a pitch that made his own heart monitor climb like a response.
A woman’s voice cut across the room, and he knew that voice, immediately.
It was the voice that said put him back under.
“Paul.”
The hand lifted off his chest and the face went away. Levi turned his head toward the sound of the curtain being drawn, slowly, because his muscles didn’t seem to enjoy doing what he wanted them to.
Asher.
Swaying in the next bed, both of his hands on the tube in his own mouth, ripping it out.
He wasn’t careful about it at all; he was red in the face, his eyes watering, and he dropped the tube without looking at it.
The IV line had already torn loose from his hand as his whole body jerked, his hair longer than it ever was in the game, wild and vibrating as he shook.
Levi’s heart monitor beeped faster.
Asher.
A woman had both hands on Asher’s shoulders — Levi couldn’t see her well, she was on the far side of the bed, mostly turned away — but her voice carried. “Asher. Asher, stop it! Paul, help me.”
He’s real. He’s actually real. We made it. We fucking did it. Levi tried to sob, but his body wasn’t responding properly. His chest and stomach just clenched.
Paul got to Asher’s other side, grabbing his arm, but it didn’t matter because Asher pivoted his whole body, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and forcing himself to stand.
His legs didn’t look like they should hold him.
He took one step away from the bed, his eyes sweeping the room, and Levi felt them coming before they landed.
They landed — brown and green, wide, locked on Levi’s.
“Levi,” he rasped, breaking on the second syllable of Levi’s name.
Levi tried to say Asher again, but a cough that felt like pins and needles up his throat took it.
Asher’s face changed — Levi couldn’t name how, only that something went out of his eyes as his legs buckled, dropping him hard.
Paul caught most of him but not all, and they ended up on the floor together.
Asher did not look at Paul. He did not look at the woman.
His right hand was out across the floor toward Levi. “Levi.”
Levi’s hand moved on the sheet — not much, an inch, his fingers opening toward the gap between the beds. His arm wouldn’t do more than that. The distance between his hand and Asher’s hand was maybe six feet and it might as well have been the white void.
The woman straightened and stepped back. She looked down at Asher and her voice, when it came, was flat. “Asher. Stop being dramatic.”
Asher kept reaching.
She looked up and her eyes landed on Levi’s. Her heels clacked across the ground as she stepped over Asher, her hand in her pocket, and she produced a syringe, pulling off the cap and tossing it on the floor.
“Don —” Levi’s mouth and throat still didn’t want to cooperate. “Don’t —”
Warmth spread from where the needle jabbed in, climbing — his thigh, his hip, his back, his chest — and his body softened into it instead of fighting it. It rose into his throat and his jaw, and across the room Asher was still on the floor saying his name, and his name was getting further away.
The flowers on the ceiling were going soft at the edges.
Four petals.
He tried to count them. He lost the count.
Asher.
He tried. His mouth was somewhere else now.
The last thing he heard was his name, one more time, further away than before.
Warm. Warmer.
Gone.