The man shrugs placidly and pushes his glasses up his nose. “The human nervous system is a strange creature,” he says. “Physically, your wound looks to be healing on a normal timeline. Exceptionally fast, actually, I should say. But sometimes… Well, sometimes, nerves do as they please.”
I regret not punching Kir in the face when I had the chance at the speakeasy earlier. It would’ve helped relieve some of the desire I feel to slugthispompous, unhelpfulmudakright now.
“Did you not hear me when I came in?” I growl. “I fell over in my fucking living room last week out of nowhere because it felt like I was being stabbed all over again.”
“I heard you, sir, and I’d ask you to please mind your profanity when you’re—” He must see the bloodlust written on my face, because he pales and turns away to pretend to rinse his hands at the sink. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Satyrin. My professional assessment is that you’ve suffered intercostal neuralgia as a result of penetrating trauma from sharp force injury. In time, your nerves may heal to their prior condition, but nothing is guaranteed. If you’d like, I can prescribe you?—”
I swat the prescription pad out of his hands as I stand upright, my open shirt flapping around my ribs. “I don’t want your fucking pills. Christ. This was a waste of my goddamn time.”
Then I storm out.
The hospital hallway is dark at this hour. I had to call in a favor to get this specialist to see me late at night, because work requires my full attention during the day.
I march down, buttoning my shirt as I go, shrugging my jacket back into place, smoothing down my hair with both hands.
I’m deep in my own thoughts, scarcely noticing the world around me. I have work to do. A mystery syndicate to hunt down. A fifteen-year-old debt to fulfill.
I might’ve stayed mired in those thoughts all the way home if I didn’t get stopped with a hand in my chest when I’m almost outside of the hospital doors. I look down at the offending appendage, ready to rip it straight off its owner, when I see that it’s gloved.
It belongs to an EMT, a tall, strapping Black man with a shaved head and no-nonsense eyes. “Gurney coming through,” he explains when he sees the furious question in my eyes.
We both stand aside to make room as two other paramedics come pushing a stretcher through the doors. “Excuse us,” mumbles one of them as he backs up at the head of the stretcher. When he pivots to help tug it across the bump in the entryway, I get a glimpse of the stretcher’s occupant.
There, lying on the gurney, is Cassandra.
Half of her face is bruised almost black.
7
CASS
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I tripped.
On the rug.
And fell.
I learned a phrase during a linguistics course in college. It’s called “semantic satiation”: when you say a word or phrase too many times in a row and it loses its meaning. A famous psychologist came up with it in the 1960s. He said it had something to do with your neurons getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again.
I understand how my neurons feel.
Because I’m getting tired of doing this same thing over and over again, too.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I’ve been repeating this lie for an hour again, trying it with different accents and inflections and points of emphasis, until it sounds natural and nonchalant in a way that won’t raise any red flags.
It’s not just that I’m tired of, though. It’s this whole routine. The anger. The argument. The blow. The apologies that follow.
And then the lies that follow that, one after the other, so many of them that I start to lose track of where the lies stop and the truth begins.
I do know where this most recent downward spiral began, though.
It started the night I came home from Khaza.