The door hit the wall hard enough to bounce.
Ren came through first.
Stopped.
For one naked second, she just stood there with one hand still on the handle and the whole room spread in front of her—blood on the painted window, blood on the bed, blood up the wall in a spray too wide and high to be a knife or a gun or anything sane, and Isaac in the middle of it with his hand still raised and his pinky still crooked.
Mina came in behind her.
She saw.
Then the doctor disappeared.
What stood in her place was the woman who'd kept a hospital alive through the end of the world by refusing to waste one second on shock where orders would fit.
"Door."
Ren moved again.
The latch slammed.
Mina was already at the narrow window in it, yanking the privacy shade down so hard it snapped off one side and still covered enough.
Outside, voices started immediately.
"What happened?"
"Doctor?"
"We heard—"
Mina didn't even turn around.
"Containment exposure," she snapped through the door. "No one enters. Get me plastic screens and a bleach crew. Not one person opens this door unless I say it with my face attached."
Silence.
Then hurried footsteps.
Good.
The room stayed.
Wrong.
Too red.
Too wet.
Too empty in the middle.
Isaac hadn't moved.
Not really.
His chest was working in ugly little catches, breath finding him in scraps, but everything else looked paused wrong, like his body had made it to the moment after and his mind had not.
His mouth moved.
Nothing came out the first time.
Then, small and ruined:
"Jadah."
Ren looked at the bed.
Not at the blood.
At the space where a person should still have been.
The part of her face that knew how to stay unreadable held for maybe half a second.
Then cracked.
Just once.
Small.
Human.
Mina crossed the room and stopped two feet from Isaac.
Not touching him yet.
Not crowding him.
Her eyes moved once, fast and clinical.
No breach in the wall.
No attacker.
No broken glass.
No blast mark.
No shrapnel.
Just outward.
From the bed.
From the point of contact.
From him.
She understood enough.
Not all of it.
Enough.
"Isaac."
He didn't answer.
His eyes had dropped to the mattress, to the torn edge of hoodie cloth clinging wet to the sheet, to the blood soaking into everything it could find.
He whispered again, voice catching and splitting on the name.
"Ja—Jadah…"
Then he reached.
Ren got to him before Mina did.
Not rough.
Her hand caught his wrist halfway down and held it there.
"Don't."
He looked at her like he didn't know her.
Not because memory was gone.
Because the room had become too impossible to hold names correctly.
"She was here," he said.
Ren swallowed once.
Hard enough that he saw it.
"Yeah."
That answer made him blink.
Once.
Twice.
Like maybe if she had lied, the floor might still have held.
Mina turned away from him long enough to grab the blanket off the foot of the bed and throw it over the worst of the spray on the far wall. Not because it helped. Because seeing less sometimes kept the mind from making one more bad jump.
Outside, wheels rattled close. Plastic screens, probably. Someone asked whether they needed security. Someone else asked if this was another altered event. Someone in the hall was already crying.
Mina ignored all of it.
"Ren."
Ren didn't look away from Isaac.
"What."
"Get the sink running."
"There's no fixture."
"The bathroom."
Ren let go of Isaac's wrist slowly, like she didn't trust what would happen the second skin stopped grounding skin.
Then she crossed the room, pushed the bathroom door wider, and vanished inside long enough for pipes to kick and water to start.
Normal sound.
Wrong room.
Useful sound.
Isaac stared at the bathroom doorway like he had forgotten taps existed.
His hand was still half lifted.
Pinky still bent.
Mina saw that and something cold moved behind her eyes.
"Isaac."
Nothing.
She lowered herself, very carefully, until she was in his line of sight without forcing him to move his head.
"You are going to listen to me now."
His eyes shifted.
Finally found her.
Red-rimmed.
Vacant in the middle.
Too awake at the edges.
"Did you hit your head?"
He frowned like that was an insult.
"No."
Good.
Enough language left to be offended.
Mina nodded once.
"Then stay with that." She kept her voice flat and clean. "You are in St. Agnes. You are in my room. Marlon is alive."
That landed.
Not enough to fix him.
Enough to catch.
"Marlon," he repeated.
"Yes."
Still no promises.
No false comfort.
Just one true thing at a time.
The bathroom sink shut off.
Ren came back with a wet towel and stopped when she saw Mina's face.
Not now.
Not yet.
She got it.
Waited.
Isaac's gaze had dropped again.
To his hand.
The bent pinky.
For one awful second Mina thought he might remember the motion before the meaning, and then the meaning before the cause, and then say something that made the whole room worse.
He did remember.
His mouth opened.
The words came out flayed raw.
"I promised."
Ren moved fast then.
Not toward the blood.
Toward his face.
She caught his jaw in one hand hard enough to make him look at her.
"Don't finish anything."
He stared at her.
She held it.
"Do you hear me?"
He blinked once.
Maybe yes.
Maybe the sound of her voice reaching some part of him still willing to obey the living.
Mina heard the change in the air before she saw it.
The overhead light buzzed once.
A hair too bright.
Then steady.
Interesting.
Dangerous.
She filed it and kept moving.
"Ren, towel."
Ren handed it over.
Mina pressed the wet cloth into Isaac's hand herself, closing his fingers around it.
"Hold this."
He did.
Automatically.
Good.
"Now keep holding it."
He looked down at the towel like it had appeared from a different story.
Mina stood.
Her knees complained.
She ignored them.
Outside, somebody knocked once on the door and called for status.
"Breathing," Mina said without opening. "Keep it that way."
Another voice asked if the patient was altered.
Mina's eyes went to Isaac.
Then to the blood.
Then to Ren.
"No," she said through the door. "Not in a way you're trained for."
That bought silence.
Useful.
Ren looked back at the bed.
At the sheet.
At the blanket over the wall.
At the floor around the bed legs.
"Do we move him."
"Not yet."
"He can't stay in this room."
"I know."
Isaac was listening now.
Or at least hearing enough to flinch at the word move.
"No."
Both women looked at him.
He tightened around the towel. Water ran down over blood and onto his wrist in pink threads.
"No," he said again, stronger this time. "She—"
The sentence broke before he could say what was left of it.
She's here.
She was here.
She can't be gone.
Pick any version. All knives.
Ren looked like she wanted to cross the room and shake him and hold him in the same motion and hated both options equally.
Mina took the cleaner one.
"Marlon is alive," she said again. "If you come apart in here, you do not get to him. So choose."
Cruel sentence.
Accurate sentence.
Isaac looked at her with something like hate in it, which was good. Hate meant purchase. Hate meant he was back inside himself enough to direct it.
His voice dropped low and dangerous and broken all at once.
"I killed her."
No one answered.
Because lying would have broken the room worse than blood already had.
Ren looked away first.
Mina didn't.
"You did something," she said. "I don't know what yet."
That was the most mercy she had.
He laughed once.
It came out almost like choking.
"There was a promise."
Mina's face did not change.
Her mind did.
You could see it happen.
The warning in the alcove.
Her own sentence at the door.
Don't make promises you can't keep.
The timing.
God.
"Ren," she said, very quietly.
Ren already knew.
"You heard him."
"Yeah."
Mina dragged both hands down over her face and came away with fresh blood across one glove and old fatigue under both eyes.
"Of course it would be something that small."
Isaac looked up.
"What."
She did not answer that.
Could not. Not honestly. Not yet. Not when every explanation sounded like a superstition wearing a lab coat.
Ren went to the bed then.
Slow.
Visible.
Not grabbing.
She sat on the edge opposite the worst of the red and looked at him the way you looked at somebody standing on the lip of a roof pretending they weren't.
"Isaac."
He didn't move.
"You need to stand up."
He stared at the towel in his hands.
"No."
"Yeah."
"No."
"Yeah."
That finally pulled his eyes to hers.
Ren held the look.
"I am not cleaning this room with you in it."
Something in him flinched at the word cleaning.
Good.
Better than the void.
"She's—"
"I know."
Not soft.
Not kind.
Just not a lie.
Ren leaned in by an inch.
"If you stay in this bed, you're going to start thinking. And if you start thinking hard in here, I don't know what happens next." Her eyes dropped once to his hand, then back up. "Neither do you."
That landed.
Because it was true.
Because the room had already answered too much tonight.
Mina heard movement in the hall—plastic screens locking into place, mop crew wheels, somebody giving too many orders at once—and made the next call before anyone could object.
"We take him to the decon shower room beside sterile two. Tile, drains, plastic curtain, no hard edges, no witnesses." Her eyes went to Ren. "You stay with him. I clear the hall."
Isaac finally looked at the blood on his shirt.
At the towel.
At the room.
At the place where Jadah had been.
His face changed then.
Not louder.
Worse.
The full truth getting through in sections.
He stood up too fast.
The room tilted.
He hit the wall with one hand.
Blood from his shirt printed there in a red palm.
Ren was on him instantly, one hand on his elbow, not letting him fall and not letting him bolt.
"There."
He shook her off by reflex.
Not hard.
Enough.
Then froze like he'd only just realized he'd touched another person and they had stayed solid.
Mina opened the door three inches and barked orders into the hall so fast the staff outside barely had time to be shocked by her tone.
"Screens to the far end. No one looks in. You"—a point, a command—"get me bleach and linen. You—tell trauma recovery I am off floor for ten minutes and if anybody dies from administrative hurt feelings they can wait."
One weak yes ma'am later, she shut the door again.
Isaac was staring at the wall where his bloody handprint had landed.
At it as if a wall keeping the shape of him was a kind of accusation.
Mina looked at Ren.
Ren looked back.
Neither said the obvious thing.
He cannot be left alone.
Not now.
Maybe not again.
Mina stepped close enough for him to hear without turning.
"You can scream again when we move you," she said. "But you are moving."
He shut his eyes.
The towel in his hand dripped steadily onto the floor.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then he said, very small, almost like a child reporting damage because there was no other language left:
"She asked me."
Mina looked down.
Ren's jaw flexed once.
"I know," she said.
"I said yes."
Ren's voice thinned around the edges and hardened in the middle.
"I know."
He opened his eyes and finally looked at her full on.
"If I think it hard enough," he said, and now the words were coming from somewhere deep enough to scare both women at once, "can I bring her back?"
The overhead light buzzed.
Once.
Mina's whole body went still.
Ren did not blink.
And in the blood-wet room, with the wall still marked by his hand and the bed still holding what was left of the promise, neither of them answered him fast enough.