Nobody answered him.
Not because they didn't hear.
Because there wasn't a right answer in a room like that.
Can I bring her back.
The question stayed there between the blood on the wall and the blood on his shirt and the bed that still held the shape of a person who no longer existed.
Mina was the first to move.
Not toward the answer.
Toward the next thing.
"Ren."
Ren looked at her.
"Decon. Now."
Isaac didn't remember agreeing.
One second he was standing there with the towel dripping pink through his fingers, staring at the wall handprint like maybe it would accuse him in words if he looked long enough.
The next, Ren had the case under one arm and her other hand locked around the back of his elbow.
Not gentle.
Not rough either.
Just unavoidable.
"Walk."
He looked at her.
Didn't understand the word for a second.
Then his legs did it anyway.
Mina opened the door into the screened-off hall. Plastic dividers had already gone up. Staff moved around the edges with their eyes carefully turned the wrong way, giving the room the kind of privacy people only got when everyone nearby already knew it was bad enough to be catching.
Nobody looked at him.
Good.
If one person had looked at him too directly, he might have come apart right there on the threshold and saved everybody the walk.
Ren steered him through the white tunnel of plastic screens and bleach smell and hushed emergency voices. Mina moved ahead, clearing the path with nothing but her face and the authority of a woman too tired to be challenged by anybody who still wanted to keep breathing.
The decon room sat just off sterile two.
Tile floor.
Drain in the center.
A plastic curtain pushed back.
Bench bolted to the wall.
Shower head overhead.
A stack of hospital scrubs in a wire basket outside the wet zone.
No blood in here yet.
That felt rude.
Ren got him inside and kicked the door shut with her heel.
"Shirt," she said.
He looked down.
The front of it was gone dark and sticky. Not all Jadah's. Enough of her that his stomach turned over in one cold ugly wave.
He didn't move.
Ren set the case down by the bench and stepped in close enough to take the hem of his shirt in both hands.
"Isaac."
He looked at her.
Not her name, not her face, not the person.
Just the fact that something in front of him was still shaped like solid matter and asking things.
"We are taking that off now," she said.
He let her do it.
The shirt peeled away wet and reluctant. Blood cooled as air hit it. Some of it had already dried against his ribs and forearm wrap and the inside of his elbow. She pulled the shirt over his head carefully around the bad shoulder and for one second the room flashed white because pain still had rights, apparently.
Then the shirt dropped to the tile with a soft, soaked sound.
He stared at it.
There was a piece of black thread stuck to the shoulder seam from Jadah's hoodie.
He knew it instantly.
His breath caught wrong.
Ren shoved him under the shower before he could pick it up.
Water hit him hard and cold first, then warmed too slowly to feel like mercy.
Pink ran off him.
Then red.
Then thinner pink again.
He watched the drain and thought stupidly, mechanically, that the hospital would hate what went down it.
Behind him, the door opened and shut once.
Mina's voice.
"Marlon's still alive."
The words hit him like they had to travel through three rooms and somebody else's skull first.
"Okay," he said.
Or thought he did. Hard to tell over the water.
Mina said something lower to Ren. Ren answered even lower. The kind of conversation people had when they didn't want the patient hearing the shape of their concern.
Patient.
He almost laughed.
The water kept hitting him in one steady line.
He could not get warm.
He could not get clean.
He rubbed once at his face and came away with no blood this time, just water and the sting where tears had been and maybe still were. He couldn't tell anymore. His whole head felt like it had been wrapped in wet cloth and left somewhere bright.
"Isaac."
Ren again.
He turned his head.
She stood just outside the spray holding a towel and a set of blue scrubs.
"You're done."
He looked at the drain.
The water still carried faint pink around the edges.
Done seemed ambitious.
But the shower shut off anyway.
Ren handed him the towel.
He dried by reflex more than intention. Chest. Face. Hair. Arms. His skin came back underneath in pieces. Bruises on ribs. The forearm cut. Shoulder flare. A new red mark where blood had dried under his collarbone.
Human body.
Still here.
Wrong person.
The scrubs were too big in the shirt and too small in the drawstring pants. He put them on slowly, fingers clumsy and stupid. The hospital logo over the chest pocket read ST. AGNES WEST in faded embroidery like it had survived a lot less than this and still somehow made it into tonight.
Ren stayed in the room.
Not watching every second.
Not leaving either.
When he was dressed, she held out the towel again for his hair and he took it without comment because comment required more structure than he had.
Mina was gone now.
Good.
Bad.
Nothing.
Ren looked him over once the way Mina would have if Mina had time for bedside things.
"You staying upright?"
He nodded.
Lie.
She knew it was a lie.
Didn't fight him on it.
Instead she said, "Sit."
He sat on the bench.
The tile wall behind him was cool through the thin scrub shirt. He looked at his hands.
No blood now.
Just red in the cuticles.
Towel marks.
One faint tremor in the right pinky he wanted to cut off at the knuckle.
Ren crouched in front of him for one second and set a plastic cup of water at his feet.
"You drink that. Then I come back and decide if you get to move."
He looked up.
"Where are you going."
"Mina wants the room sealed and the cleanup handled before somebody starts asking smart questions." She stood. "I'll be right outside."
He nodded because that was what heads did when words failed.
She picked up the case.
Paused at the door.
Looked back at him.
Not soft.
Not hard.
Just direct enough to matter.
"Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."
Then she left.
The latch clicked.
Water dripped once from the shower head.
Then stopped.
He sat there for maybe ten seconds.
Maybe two minutes.
No way to know.
The cup at his feet went untouched.
The room was too clean now. Too blank. The kind of place where no one had exploded and no one had screamed and no one had reached for his hand with tears in her eyes asking for something simple and impossible and young.
That was the problem.
The decon room had no proof.
Nothing in here showed him what had happened.
That made the blood-room feel unreal.
That made the promise feel unreal.
That made his own hands feel like props attached to the wrong actor.
He stood up.
Not fast.
Not with purpose.
Just because sitting there had started to feel like waiting for someone to tell him what reality to use.
He opened the door.
No one stopped him.
Ren stood fifteen feet down the hall with Mina and two staff members inside the screened-off corridor, one hand on the case, the other cutting sharp little gestures through the air while Mina talked over her and nobody in the group looked remotely available for more disaster.
Good.
He didn't want to explain where he was going.
Because he didn't know.
He just knew it wasn't here.
He walked.
No run.
No hurry.
Bare feet would've made more sense, maybe. Instead his borrowed hospital shoes whispered against the floor in slow uneven lines as he moved away from sterile two and into the larger body of St. Agnes West.
Hand up over half his face.
Eyes too wide.
Mind racing so fast it had burned through words and landed on noise.
Promise.
Blood.
Jadah.
No.
No.
No.
Marlon alive.
Mother dead.
Ty in the street.
No one is going to save you.
No.
No.
A nurse coming around the bend nearly hit him with a supply tote and only muttered, "Sir, not this hall," before she saw his face and changed it to, "Sorry."
He kept walking.
Past recovery.
Past a family huddled under blankets on the floor outside a locked ward.
Past a priest asleep sitting up with his chin on his chest and both hands red to the wrists.
Past a row of wheelchairs with their metal footrests stripped off and stacked in a plastic bin labeled DO NOT RETURN.
He did not limp.
He also did not walk straight.
His shoulder brushed one wall.
Then the other.
Then corrected halfway through the next corridor like his body had remembered balance too late.
Twice he nearly fell.
The first time, his hand hit a painted cinder block wall and stayed there until the hallway stopped tilting.
The second time, he caught the edge of a plastic linen cart and stared at his own reflection warped in the glossy side panel long enough to think, for one horrible instant, that he should still be red.
But the scrubs were blue.
His face was clean enough to lie.
His eyes were not.
Tears kept coming down anyway.
Quiet.
Annoying.
Unhelpful.
He wiped at them with the heel of his palm and they came back as if the room inside his head had finally decided the floor was open.
Somebody asked if he needed a medic.
He kept walking.
Somebody else asked where his band was.
He kept walking.
A volunteer in hospital pink crocs pressed a blanket into his hands and he took it automatically and dropped it five steps later without noticing until it was behind him and already someone else's problem.
The hospital changed around him as he went.
Bright surgical corridors giving way to dimmer wings.
Pediatrics murals with cartoon suns.
A chapel turned sleep ward.
A stairwell landing with six cots and one man vomiting into a plastic basin while his daughter held his shoulders and looked older than he did.
Everywhere people were staying alive on purpose.
Everywhere people were failing at it.
The building smelled like bleach, sweat, hot wiring, blood gone old at the edges, burned coffee, wet linen, and the strange sour-metal smell of too many frightened bodies in one place.
Somewhere a woman was laughing and crying at the same time behind a closed door.
Somewhere else a baby had finally stopped.
He didn't know where he was trying to go until he reached the ambulance connector and cold air hit him through the cracked loading doors.
Out.
That was the shape.
Not destination.
Not plan.
Just out.
He pushed through the swinging plastic flaps and into the half-covered loading lane between the main building and the outer barricade. Night air slapped his damp face. Diesel exhaust sat low under the overhead awning. Floodlights painted the concrete too white. Ambulances idled nose-out behind reinforced screens. Two volunteers were unloading saline crates from a box truck and arguing softly about route closures like the whole city hadn't gone to hell.
No one stopped him here either.
He was just one more stunned face in hospital clothes.
One more blood-rinsed survivor moving the wrong direction.
One more person with his hand over his face because if he took it off the world might see too much.
He walked past the ambulance bay.
Past the triage tents.
Past the taped lines on the ground that separated incoming from deadhold from family wait.
Past a nurse on a smoke break who took one look at him and put the cigarette out without ever lifting it to her mouth.
The outer gate stood open just long enough to let a supply van through.
He slipped past while the guards were waving it in.
One shouted something.
Maybe at him.
Maybe at the driver.
He didn't look back to find out.
Then he was outside the St. Agnes perimeter.
Actually outside.
Past the flood towers.
Past the welded barricades.
Past the reach of the hospital's ugly little island of order.
The city took him back all at once.
Cold.
Bruise-light sky.
Distant sirens.
Glass underfoot.
A burned-out sedan at the curb.
A storefront window turned black mirror.
He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at nothing.
The hospital behind him kept moving.
People shouted.
Engines idled.
Someone called for stretchers.
Someone else prayed in a voice gone flat from overuse.
Ahead of him, the street stretched away in bad light and no instructions.
He put his hand back over half his face.
Breathed.
Forgot how.
Breathed again.
His mind kept trying to land on one thing and slipping off all of them.
Jadah on the bed.
Jadah crying.
Jadah's pinky reaching.
The warning.
The spray.
His scream.
Not real.
Real.
Not real.
Real.
He took another step.
Then another.
No direction now.
Just distance.
Somewhere far behind him, a door slammed and somebody shouted his name.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it was only the city making one more sound he couldn't hold long enough to understand.
Isaac kept walking anyway, crooked and unsteady and nowhere near straight, into the bruise-lit dark beyond the hospital lights, like he was done with life and hadn't yet told his body to stop.