The Fifth Healer

7.1

I feel a chill of cool terror as I lean away from Sloan. His face, glaring at me, inches from my own, turns out to be a distraction from the real threat. In my periphery I spot the glint of something thin and shiny. A needle. In his hand. Lighting speed. Into my neck. Before my hands reach up to stop him, I hear the plastic click of the plunger reaching the bottom of the syringe, the contents emptied into my bloodstream.

The room begins the fade.

Not this again.

Sunday
4:32 PM

Awareness returning to my body. A tingle down my arms, into my fingers. I smack my lips. Slowly, I pry my eyelids open and blink away the fog.

It feels like I'm lying on a hard, cold metal floor.

I'm startled to find a girl, about my age standing over me. I sit up and scoot backward, frantic, immediately colliding hard with a metal wall behind me. We are in a small room, every surface made of a metal polished to a mirror finish. In any direction, the first thing I see is my reflection to infinity.

That is, except for a single door.

The door is on the opposite wall. It's narrow, barely wide enough for one person. And, oh yeah, it's embedded with hundreds of pieces of broken glass, pointy and razer-blade sharp.

Waves of dread crash through my chest. "Wha-what's going on?"

She takes a step toward me.

I hold up a hand. "Stay back!"

She makes a calm down motion.

"Let me out!" I jump to my feet. She just stands there.

"How did I get here?" I demand.

"Bro, I'm gonna stop you right there. Look around. I'm trapped in the same horror movie you are."

The two of us aren't alone. There's another guy on the ground. He hasn't woken up yet.

I run over to the door. There's no knob or handle. Nothing but skin-slicing glass.

"Hey! Let me save us the oxygen you're wasting by running around. We're trapped."

It hadn't occurred to me that we are going to run out of air. "How do you know we're trapped?"

"I woke up eight minutes and seventeen second before you. So I've had time to look around."

"Then how are you so calm?"

"We all gotta go sometime. Granted, neither suffocation nor death by a million glass shards hadn't really on my radar. I was more expecting to go out in the blazing haze of a glorious morphine drip."

She shrugs, sending a ripple through shoulder-length hair that matches the color of her freckles. Along with the startling casualness with which she wears her mortality, she's also dressed in a chunky cream-colored sweater that matches the color of her skin. I glance down at my own clothes and smooth out the sleeves of my ruffled white shirt. I'm wearing a metal band on one of my wrists, a perfect circle with no clasp. It wasn't there in the hospital. Ainsley has one too.

I realize I should check my pockets. Watch and letter. All intact. Good.

"Did they take your phone, too?" she asks.

I reach into my trouser pocket. "Yeah," I lie.

"Confession, I already knew that. I checked your pockets. Creepy, I know, you weren't exactly capable of consent. But in my defense, I thought you might be dead."