Chapter 6 （continued）
Nika
I reached for my glasses with a groan.
My hand moved across the nightstand—cool surface, unfamiliar texture—and found nothing.
Then something was pressed into my palm.
I blinked against the light, slow and reluctant, until a woman came into focus.
White uniform. Dark hair pulled back. Holding my glasses out with the practiced patience of someone who’d done this many times before.
“Doktore, budna je.” Her voice was urgent, low.
I caught doktore. Doctor. That was about as far as my Croatian stretched.
“Ah, she awakens.”
The second voice was English—accented, warm. I turned my head too fast and regretted it immediately. The room tilted. Pale walls, the soft beep of something monitoring something, afternoon light pressing through half-closed blinds. A small hospital room. Clean. Quiet.
A woman in a white coat stood at the foot of the bed, clipboard in hand, looking at me with measured calm.
I relaxed slightly against the pillow.
“I was bitten by a dog,” I said, already pulling at the covers. “On my calf. It was—it was big, it came out of nowhere, I need you to look at—”
“Ne. Ne.” The doctor’s frown was gentle but firm as she glanced at her clipboard. “You were found by a passerby in the park. Unconscious. There was no dog. No bite.”
I stared at her.
“I can show you.”
She gestured—go ahead—and I pushed the covers back and bent my leg to present the back of my calf.
Nothing.
I stared.
Nothing.
Zilch. Nada. Not even a mark. Skin smooth and unbroken as if nothing had locked its teeth into me and shaken me like I weighed nothing at all.
I’d felt it. The puncture, the tearing, the way my whole body had moved with the force of it. I’d felt every single second.
I pulled the covers back slowly.
On autopilot I reached for my glasses and put them on.
Blurry. Everything blurry.
I took them off, turned them over. Checked them. My glasses—I’d had them long enough to know every scratch on the frame, the slight asymmetry where I’d sat on them once and bent them back into almost-straight. Dark brown, curved rectangular frames. Mine without question.
I put them on again.
Still nothing. Soft, useless blur.
I took them off.
And the room snapped into perfect, sharp, impossible focus.
The doctor’s clipboard. The small print on the IV bag. The individual threads in the weave of the hospital blanket. The tiny chip in the paint on the wall behind the nurse’s head.
I could see everything.
“I can see,” I breathed. “Oh my god. I can see.”
The doctor and nurse exchanged a look over my head. It was the kind of look that came before words like psychiatric assessment or what has she taken.
“Never mind,” I said quickly. “Never mind, ignore that.”
I set my glasses on the nightstand and pressed my fingertips to my temples.
Seventeen years. I’d been wearing glasses since I was eleven years old—through school, through university, through three years of staring at black screens full of code in a swanky open-plan office. Glasses were as much a part of my face as my nose.
And I could currently read the fine print on a medical form from across the room.
The bite was gone.
My vision was gone—fixed, apparently, without anyone’s consent or input.
Did I touch or eat psychedelic mushrooms in the forest?
No. That would have made everything all colourful and melty. Probably. I didn’t actually know—that was just what it looked like on TV and I was working with limited data right now.
“We checked your head,” the doctor said, still watching me carefully. “There was a small bump.”
Oh, thank god. A bump. A perfectly normal bump. I had concussion.
“We also found your inhaler in your bag. Any other medical conditions we should know about?”
“No,” I said then prompted the doctor. “The bump?”
“The bump went down on its own. There was no treatment required,” she said.
I nodded. Said nothing.
“We’d like to wait for the IV drip to finish and run a few checks before we discharge you.”
She kept talking. I kept nodding. The words reached me from a slight distance—vitals, observation, standard procedure—while my eyes kept drifting back to my glasses sitting on the nightstand.
Small. Folded. Completely redundant.
Get a hold of yourself.
I snapped my attention back to the doctor.
Stay calm and we can get out of here.
I nibbled my lip.
I stopped.
Replayed that.
We.
Who the fuck were we?