The IV pump clicked every few seconds, and Ami had started counting the clicks to avoid counting anything else.
Her sketchbook was still in the drawer beside the bed. She hadn't been able to hold a pencil for three weeks. Her fingers had gone thin and clumsy, and the last line she'd drawn wandered off the page like it belonged to someone else.
The monitor beeped, slow and uneven. The blanket was too thin, and the cold had settled somewhere behind her ribs.
Nobody was coming. She had known that for a while now.
Her father had not visited once since the diagnosis. Maxim Vale had a real family to attend to, and Ami had stopped being counted as part of it a long time ago.
Aron had come exactly once. He stood at the foot of the bed with her chart in his hands, a cardiologist reading her numbers instead of looking at her. "You'll pull through," he said to the clipboard.
He was a doctor. He knew better. That was what made it a lie.
Alia had come the same week, smiling the way she did for photos. She picked up the silver moon pendant from the bedside table, the one Mama had given Ami, and turned it over in her fingers.
"You won't need this anymore, right?"
She didn't wait for an answer. The chain slid into her pocket with a soft little sound, and Ami watched it go without saying a word.
That should have been the worst of it. It wasn't.
Nyra. Ron.
Ami didn't let herself finish the thought. It was the one she had learned to step around, the way you step around a broken tile in the dark. Her best friend, who had promised I'll never leave you. Her husband, who had stood in the doorway of this room three weeks ago and said, "I can't handle this," and then simply left, as if she were a bill he'd decided not to pay.
A dry, ugly laugh scraped out of her chapped lips. The monitor slowed again.
*So this is how it ends.*
Something hot rose in her chest. It wasn't grief. Grief would have been easier. It was rage, thick enough to choke on, and it made her fingers twitch against the sheets.
She had never believed in miracles. But the room was very quiet, and she had run out of other options.
"If anyone is listening," she whispered, and her voice cracked down the middle, "give me one more chance. I'll make them pay. Every last one."
The monitor stopped beeping. The line went flat.
Darkness took her.
She was standing. That was the first wrong thing. There was no floor under her feet, no ceiling above, just a black so complete it had weight.
"What a shame."
The voice came from everywhere at once. It wasn't kind, and it wasn't holy. It sounded entertained.
A figure waited ahead of her, made of shadow, its edges bleeding into the dark.
"You could have been magnificent," it said. "Instead you let them break you."
Ami's nails bit into her palms. She noticed, distantly, that her hands worked. "Who are you?"
"Someone who hates wasted potential."
The shadows shifted, and something caught the light that wasn't there. A smile, or a blade. She couldn't tell, and she suspected it didn't matter.
"One chance," the voice said. "But nothing is free."
Ami didn't hesitate. She had nothing left to bargain with anyway.
"Take whatever you want."
"Oh, I will." The darkness curled around her like a hand closing. "Starting with your mercy."
Light.
Pain.
And then air, sharp and sudden, filling her lungs as she gasped.