Chapter 4 Nil
Nil
A day earlier
Waking up should feel like I defied all the rules for one more breath. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. Instead, it feels sort of like waves, slow and relentless. A peeling back from the void, one shaky exhale at a time.
First thing I pick up on is sound. A mechanical, constant noise. Then scent’s next, clean like fresh air. But then there’s this aching weight pressed against my chest.
My eyelids drag upward. Light pierces through. It’s dim, but my body isn’t ready for it. My brows painfully flinch from the light above me, even though it’s low.
A weak groan escapes my dry mouth. My throat’s tight. My chest is sore. It hurts to breathe, but I can feel a plastic mask over my nose and mouth, forcing me to take in oxygen.
With another groan, I blink awake.
I don’t recognize this room, but the sky outside the window is familiar. Gray clouds, sage seawaves. It’s the color I saw last, before everything went quiet.
I remember the cliff. The wind. My sister’s voice cutting through all the noise in my head.
I didn’t let go. I went down with the monster.
I thought that was the only way to end it.
For some reason, I’m here.
My lungs feel like they belong to someone else, but they work. Air drags in and out with that dull ache. My body feels heavy and wrong, like my bones got taken apart and put back together by someone who was guessing.
I blink until the ceiling stops looking like it might slide away. And I slowly look to the side.
A paper calendar sits crooked on the nightstand, the current date flipped open to a picture of a black cat hanging off a tree branch. Something’s scrawled across the bottom, but my head’s too heavy to read it.
Machines beep beside me. A monitor traces a line that rises and falls in time with my heartbeat. I watch it for a while, just to make sure it keeps going.
Soon, a nurse comes in, sounding frantic but acting calm. She looks surprised to see my eyes open.
While she helps me drink some water through a straw, she tells me I’ve been asleep for months. That I’m stable. That my muscles will learn how to work again, faster than expected ‘cause they’ve been treating me in my sleep.
I listen and nod, even though the words reach me really slow.
At some point, she hands me a phone with a number already dialed.
“Emergency contact on file,” she says. My sister.
Something tugs at my chest. It’s a feeling I always got before I called her. Before I ran to her room. Before I did anything I thought might make her worry.
I need to hear her voice. That’s all I know.
The nurse puts it on speaker, then slips toward the door. She murmurs something about getting the doctor.
The phone rings for a second.
“Hello?” my sister says, her voice shaking.
Still, the sound of her voice calms me like when we were kids, when the house was too loud, when everyone else got in my head.
My throat locks up. I don’t say anything at first. I just listen.
“Is it really you?” she asks.
I can picture her, holding the phone tight. “Yeah,” I manage, my voice raspy like the words are ripped out of me.
Her inhale shudders through the line. “I knew you’d wake up,” she says. “I felt it.”
Something inside me loosens up. My shoulders sink into the pillow. My lungs start to work on their own like they remember how to live.
“You’re okay?” she asks. “Are you in any pain?”
There’s plenty of pain, but I’m not going to tell her that. “I’m okay,” I whisper, and it itches my throat. “I’m breathing.”
“You don’t have to do anything else.” She has a way of talking like the rest of the world can wait. “Your earring… Did they keep it on?”
My arm feels heavy and wrong, but I force myself to move it. The motion sends spiking pain up my shoulder, but eventually, my fingers brush my ear, and I feel…
Cool metal. The familiar touch of the piece of gold that’s still there. The one she gave me when we were kids trying to survive family. We’ve survived even worse since then.
Anger licks up my spine, but the warmth in my chest spreads faster. So fast it steals my breath, sharper than pain, stronger than exhaustion. The gold’s proof that she’s always cared. That I wasn’t stripped down to just a body on a bed. Even after, when I left her without looking back.
“It’s still on,” I tell her, trying to clear my throat.
“I’m glad,” she whispers with a relieved little laugh that feels huge for my heart. “I missed your voice.”
My eyes sting. I swallow. I want to say the same, but I’m afraid she’ll hear me cry. I can’t worry her the second I wake up.
“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she goes on. “I’ll start with the most important one.”
I hear her take a deep breath that breaks from the sound of her light laugh.
“I got married,” she says, trying to contain her excitement.
Relief hits harder than any pain in my body. That’s what I’d hoped for, back when I went over that cliff. That she’d live the life she deserved.
“I talk to Sterling about you a lot,” she says with a breathless giggle. “We’d really like to see you again.”
I can’t tell if the tightness in my throat is guilt or gratitude.
We fall into quiet that’s comforting. When we were kids, we would sit for long stretches without needing to fill the air. Knowing she was there was more than enough.
“My memories have been coming back. Have yours?” she asks.
I wanna speak, but words get stuck behind my tongue. I don’t want to remember much. Just her.
“You told me, last October, you couldn’t recall our names. But I remember yours,” she says. “Do you want me to use it?”
The name feels like lead in my head. “No,” I say a second later. “Not yet.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t question it. Instead, her voice carries warmth like the sun’s peeking out, even though it’s gray outside the window.
“I’m proud of you,” she whispers, sniffling. “For surviving this. For surviving everything.”
What she said punches deep, in the part of me that still thinks I don’t deserve to hear it. “Thanks,” I say, doing my damnedest not to cry.
“When you’re ready,” she says, and her voice sounds thick with tears. I hope they’re from happiness. I hope it’s not because of me. “You’re always welcome to stay with us.”
My vision blurs. I blink it clear. “I don’t want to mess anything up for you,” I confess. The idea of stepping into her new life with all my baggage feels selfish.
“You won’t,” she says. “You’re my baby brother. My door’s always open to you.”
I press my eyes shut and try to breathe around this feeling hammering in my ribs.
“Yeah…? I’ll think about it,” I whisper. “I want to see you. I just…want you to be happy first.”
“I am happy,” she says. “But I’ll be happier when I can hug you.”
That rips a broken laugh out of me. My throat burns, but I have to say it. “I love you,” I say before I can talk myself out of it.
“I love you too,” she says back, voice cracking on every word.
The line goes quiet again. I don’t know who hangs up. Maybe neither of us does and the call times out on its own.
But the room feels different now. Less like a box and more like a place I’m allowed to exist in. The sea outside the window is still restless, but I look at it without feeling pulled toward it.
The cliff didn’t win. Clo didn’t win.
I may not know exactly who I am yet, but I know I’m still her brother. That has to count for something.
Eventually, they fit me into new clothes and sit me down to talk about “next steps” and “options” like any of this—waking up from a four-month coma with barely any scars—is normal. The world kept going without me. Now I’m the one who has to catch up.
Later that night, my phone rings. For a heartbeat, I think it’s her again. I answer faster than I should.
But it isn’t her. It’s a man named Idris who tells me about second chances.
Then a woman named Em who goes over a few things with me.
Her voice is so calm, almost soothing, and sounding so precise and sure, like she deals in facts more than feelings.
She sounds like someone who decided I’m useful without a second’s hesitation.
They tell me about a ship. Their experiment. A chance to do something with the thing that tore my family apart.
I don’t act like I understand all of it. But I know I don’t want to spend another night lying flat on my back, waiting for guilt to crush me. So I say, “Yeah, okay. Sign me up.”
Maybe it doesn’t matter why I said yes. What matters is I’m moving.
***
They discharge me with a clean bill of health, even though nothing about me feels clean.
But I can’t argue with the facts. My chart shows flawless numbers.
Specialists worked my muscles while I slept, rotating my limbs, reminding nerves to remember me.
Gave me top-tier medication. Round-the-clock monitoring. Zero expense spared.
The doctor explains all this in calm, technical phrases, but the words blur the moment they hit my ears.
I nod like I’m following along. But really, my brain feels too new to hold anything that complicated.
I keep the thought to myself—that I don’t know how they expect someone waking from a coma to remember terms like muscle electro-whatever or what the hell a specialized mattress system is.
All of it sounds expensive. I don’t ask who paid for it. Don’t need to. No one else would’ve done this except the Song-Smiths. And I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that kind of care, but the evidence is stitched into every part of me that actually healed while I wouldn’t wake up.
They saved me. After everything. And I tried to die with Clo, their matriarch or whatever. So yeah, there isn’t a good way to settle that sort of messed-up math. But all I have is breath I didn’t expect to keep and a body that feels borrowed even though I know it’s mine.