4. Isla
ISLA
Renee had a coffee waiting and an agenda before I'd even hung up my jacket.
"Okay, so, hear me out." She fell into step beside me, tablet tucked under one arm like a weapon she hadn't decided to draw yet. "What if the guard has a first name that isn't Nikolai?"
"It's on his ID."
"IDs can say anything. Mine says I'm five foot six."
"You are five foot six."
"That's true on a good day. It helps to have the right shoes, too." She sipped her own coffee, watching me over the rim of it.
"You're deflecting. I've been charting you for days now. I know the signs."
"There's nothing to deflect from."
"There's a man who's been standing outside a door for days like it personally offended him, and you walk past him fourteen times a shift, and every single time your voice does a thing."
"My voice does not do a thing."
"It goes up half a step. It's very cute, and I hate that I noticed it before you did."
I didn't dignify that with an answer, mostly because I didn't have a good one ready. Renee took my silence as the win it clearly was.
She let the subject drop, at least for the moment, already scrolling ahead to the overnight handoff.
Ward mornings had their own gravity, same as always. Vitals, dressing changes, eight patients who each needed something different in the same forty minutes.
I liked the noise of it. The constant low hum of people needing things and getting them was the closest thing I had to quiet.
I was three charts deep when Miles found me, still in his station boots, a grease-stained bakery box balanced on one palm like he was serving fine dining.
"Contraband." He set it down on the nurses' station with the flourish of a man delivering state secrets. "Don't tell the captain I left mid-shift for this."
"You left mid-shift for donuts?"
"For my sister, who happens to work near donuts. The donuts are incidental."
Renee had the box open before he finished the sentence. She was already claiming the one with sprinkles like it had her name on it.
Miles didn't fight her for it, never did.
Years out of the burn unit now, and he still moved like someone who'd learned early that some things weren't worth the energy of arguing over.
"How's the house treating you?" I asked.
"Captain still doesn't trust me near the good equipment." He shrugged, reaching past Renee for a plain glazed. "Everyone still calls me Rookie even though Delgado joined two months after me."
"That seems unfair."
"It's tradition. Delgado had to call the last guy Rookie for a year and a half."
He took a bite, unbothered. "I've got time."
"It's good. I like it. You'd hate it."
"I wouldn't hate it."
"You'd hate the hours. You complain about twelve-hour shifts here like they're a personal insult."
"They are a personal insult."
He laughed at that, the easy, unguarded laugh that still surprised me sometimes, given everything he'd survived to get to make it. He didn't remember most of the burn unit the way I did.
He'd been eight. I'd been fifteen, and old enough to keep every detail whether I wanted them or not.
"Anyway." He nodded toward the hallway, toward the general shape of the floor. "Heard you've got a guard dog posted up here now?"
"He's protecting a patient. That's the whole story."
"That's never the whole story," Miles said, grinning, already backing toward the elevator before I could throw anything at him. "Gotta run. Captain thinks I'm getting supplies for the rig."
"You're going to get caught."
"I'm always going to get caught. I'm just very fast." He was gone before I could argue, the elevator doors closing on the last of his laugh.
Renee watched him go with the fondness she reserved only for him. "Your brother is a menace."
"My brother is a delight, and you're just annoyed he didn't bring you two."
"I would've settled for one, if I'm honest."
The rest of the morning moved the way most of them did, fast and then not. Dressing changes, a discharge, a new admit that ate most of an hour.
Somewhere in the middle of it, a kid named Toby, seven years old and two weeks into a scald recovery, decided he'd rather chew through his own arm than let me change his dressing again.
"It's going to hurt less than you think," I told him, crouching to his eye level instead of looming over the bed the way most adults did without noticing.
"That's what you said last time."
"And was I right?"
He considered that with the deep, wounded suspicion only a seven-year-old could summon. "A little."
"A little counts. Let's go for a lot this time." I held up the fresh gauze so he could see exactly what was coming, no surprises, no hands appearing out of nowhere.
"You tell me when. Not me."
He made me wait almost a full minute before he nodded, jaw set in a way that looked, for one unsettling second, exactly like someone else's jaw down the hall.
The change went easier than the last three times combined, and he informed me solemnly, once it was over, that I was allowed to be his favorite today.
I told him that was a great honor and meant it more than I let on. It was, most days, the whole reason I kept doing this job long past the point where it stopped being easy.
I found myself glancing toward Room 814 more than the job strictly required, checking without meaning to that Nikolai was still where he was supposed to be.
He wasn't, not the second time I checked. The chair against the wall sat empty, and the hallway outside 814 held nobody at all.
That alone was enough to put a knot of cold in my chest, because since he'd shown up, he hadn't left that spot for anything shorter than a bathroom break timed like a military maneuver.
I checked Reyes first, out of instinct more than logic. He was fine, asleep, monitor ticking along in its usual rhythm, no sign that anything on this floor had gone wrong.
Whatever had pulled Nikolai away from his post, it wasn't Reyes.
I found him three doors down, in the supply closet, the door only half shut behind him.
He had his sleeve rolled to the elbow and a roll of gauze in his teeth, trying to wind it one-handed around his own forearm. His jaw was set hard enough that a muscle jumped along the side of it.
The skin under the gauze was scarred deep, old burn tissue pulled tight and shining under the fluorescent light, the kind of scarring that needed no explanation at all.
He caught me looking and went very still, the way a man goes still when he does not want to be seen, not by anyone, not even by accident.
"I did not hear you," he said.
"That's usually the idea, with me." I stepped in and closed the door the rest of the way, giving us both the privacy neither of us had asked for out loud. "Give me that."
"I have it handled."
"You have it in your teeth."
He didn't argue further, which told me more than any answer would have. I took the roll out of his hand before he could decide otherwise, and he let me, arm still extended, watching my face instead of what I was doing to it.
I didn't make a thing of it. I told myself I'd unwrapped a hundred arms worse than this one, and mostly believed it.
I went to work the way I would've on anyone else on this floor, brisk and clinical and entirely unbothered.
"How long since the graft?" I asked, checking the tension of the skin along his forearm before I started wrapping.
"It has been six years."
"Does the tightness get worse in cold weather?"
"Yes." A pause, like the honesty cost him something small. "It grows noticeably worse."
"That's normal." I kept my voice even, kept my hands moving, the same rhythm I used on every dressing change I'd ever done.
"Scar tissue doesn't regulate temperature the way real skin does. It pulls harder when it's cold, especially somewhere this close to the joint."
"I am aware of the mechanism."
"Awareness doesn't count for much if you're not doing anything with it."
"I do the exercises."
"You do them badly, or you wouldn't be in here alone with your teeth as a second pair of hands." I didn't look up from the wrap to deliver that one, letting the work speak for how little patience I had left for the argument. "How often does that happen?"
"Often enough."
"That's not a number."
"It is the only one you are getting."
I let it go, filing the deflection away the same way I catalogued everything else about him, and finished the last pass of gauze in silence.
"Then you should be stretching it daily, not fighting a roll of gauze in a supply closet with your teeth."
Something in his shoulders came down, just slightly, the tension easing the way it does in a patient who's finally stopped bracing for pain that isn't coming. I didn't look up to watch it.
Noticing it too hard would only spook it back into hiding.
"You are doing this like it is nothing," he said.
"It is nothing. It's a dressing change." I finished the wrap, tucked the end in clean, and smoothed it flat with two fingers.
"I do about forty of these a week. Yours isn't special just because you're difficult about it."
"I am not difficult."
"You're currently the most difficult patient on this floor, and you're not even my patient."
That got something close to a real exhale out of him, not quite a laugh, but close enough to its neighborhood that I counted it. He rolled his sleeve back down over the fresh wrap, slow, careful, the same old habit I'd clocked on him days ago.
"Nobody has touched it without me starting it in longer than I would like to admit," he said, quiet enough that I understood exactly what it had cost him to say it out loud.
"I know." I didn't make it bigger than it needed to be.
I just started gathering the loose gauze off the shelf where he'd left it, giving him somewhere else to look besides me. "You don't have to explain that part."
"I was not explaining. I was stating a fact."
"Sure you were."
He almost smiled at that, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did when he was fighting it and losing.
"For what it's worth," I said, "it's healing clean. Whoever did the original graft work knew what they were doing."
"It was a long time ago."
That was as much as he offered, and I didn't push for more. Some doors you knock on gently and then wait, and some you don't knock on at all until the person on the other side decides to open it themselves.
The closet had gone quiet in the comfortable way, the kind of silence two people share when neither one feels obligated to fill it. I found I didn't mind it half as much as I probably should have.
I was reaching for the trash bin, my hands still full of gauze, when the intercom cut across the whole floor at once, flat and urgent, code words I recognized before I'd finished processing the sentence.
Unauthorized transport, eighth floor, patient in room eight fourteen.
Nikolai was already moving before the alarm finished its first tone, out the supply closet door before I'd even registered he'd left my side.
I stood there in the doorway, the roll of gauze still in my hand, staring at the empty space where he'd been standing a second ago.