Page 12 of Bad Girl
“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 werewe?
Chapter 7
Nika
Nothing had changed at my lodgings.
Same narrow street outside the window. Same warm evening noise drifting up—tourists, natives, the clatter of trade, the occasional vehicle squeezing through a gap it had no business fitting through. The city was entirely itself, completely unbothered, carrying on as it always had.
I was the thing that had changed.
I knew it the moment I stepped off the bus and walked back through the door. No breathlessness from the steps. No reaching for my inhaler out of habit. I stood in the middle of my small rented room and took a long, experimental breath.
Clean. Easy. Like breathing had always been this simple and I’d simply forgotten.
I rolled my shoulders.
Then I ran on the spot for a few seconds. Hopped. Did a small experimental leap that was frankly higher than it had any right to be.
Then—I don’t know what possessed me—I attempted a pirouette.
I toppled over at the end.
But that was shock. The pirouette itself was fine.
I stood at the window and looked out over the rooftops, over the terracotta and the shimmer of the water in the distance, further than I should have been able to see without my glasses perched on my nose. Every detail was crisp and clean and impossibly sharp. I kept catching my hands drifting up to fidget with frames that weren’t there. Seventeen years of muscle memory, reaching for something I no longer needed.
