She woke to rain counting her pulse on the glass.
No lights. No ceiling. Just the black press of a high-windowed ward, machines breathing in their corners, the taste of copper lodged under her tongue like a coin she couldn't spit out. She tried to breathe around it and her ribs answered with a bright, tidy pain that suggested a committee had voted her lung capacity down to two-thirds.
The curtain beside her bed wasn't drawn all the way. Neon seeped through the gap from some distant sign, green one heartbeat, pink the next, painting the floor in slow-moving bars like a prison that couldn't make up its mind. The rest of the room held itself in a hush that wasn't silence—rubber soles far down the corridor, an IV drip ticking with the self-importance of a metronome, the soft chuff of an oxygen concentrator talking itself to sleep.
She turned a fraction, and pain pried her mouth open, then let it close again. The act felt like lifting masonry with her teeth.
Kwan snored once, softly, and stopped as if embarrassed. He was slumped in the visitor chair with the posture of a man who had fallen asleep while still pretending not to. Jacket on the back, tie stuffed in a pocket, his shirt still ironed enough to look like a threat. One arm folded. One hand loose on his thigh as if he might wake and arrest something. He'd angled the chair so his shoulder cut the line between her and the door. Even in sleep, he was theater meant for witnesses.
The thought arrived before the panic. Habit more than anything: reach for the warm weight, the smug little furnace pressed against ribs, the greedy, capital-letter solidity of his voice.
"—Wulong," she tried, and what came out was a scraped-hollow syllable that might have been a stranger's name. The sound coming out was akin to Iris gargling sandpaper.
Nothing answered. No thunder-baby voice punching through her skull. No MOTHER. I CRAVE statements. No petulant fish demands. Just the IV drip counting coins.
Nurses had opinions about animals. They arrived at the same speed as forms and left twice as slow. If the kitten had been here, the kitten had been corrected. She pictured a plastic box with a airholes and a sighing poster about "safety", maybe a biohazard sign on it. She pictured Wulong in it, inventing new ways to mutiny.
She dragged air into her chest and laid it down again without spending it. The effort made the ceiling tilt, or the idea of a ceiling. The night got heavier.
Somewhere the ward's PA woke wrong and muttered a horoscope in a polite monotone—SOUTH WIND UNLUCKY—then found its shame and went mute. A drone drifted past the far doors, fan a mosquito whine, optics skimming each bed like idle fingers. It ghosted her and moved on. Her aura didn't mind. The drone did.
Kwan shifted. His hand tightened once and relaxed. She could have hated him for sleeping. She didn't. He would wake when it mattered. He always did. She wanted him awake now anyway.
"Hey," she tried again, and got less than before.
The curtain lifted a fraction in a draft that shouldn't have existed. Not AC. Not the ordinary invitation of airflow. The fabric rose, held, and fell like breath measured by a careful hand.
He was there. Not by the door. Not with footsteps. Simply a new shadow inside old ones.
The shinobi didn't belong to the ward. He belonged to the blank spaces between wards, the ones that mapped as maintenance on the hospital's internal grid and as superstition in the brains of people who worked here too long. Black on black, edges clean enough to convince the dark to sharpen itself. Mask to the nose. Hands at rest. He did nothing. He was the kind of presence that rearranged every other object in the room to accommodate it.
Wei's people never made more space than they took.
Iris moved her head a centimeter and learned an entirely new color of light. The pain that followed had a taste. She let it wash through and left her skull where it had started. Her breath found a different path around the ribs and tried that one instead.
The shinobi tilted his head.
There were a hundred reasons for him to be there. All of them honorable, all of them threats. He didn't reach for anything. He didn't carry flowers. His attention felt like a thumb on a bruise—measuring, not comforting.
"Get lost," she whispered, because humor at the wrong volume was cheaper than fear.
He didn't answer. The mask made a suggestion of a shape that might have been pity and might have been a shadow.
Kwan sighed in his sleep and turned his face toward the wall, obligingly mortal. The shinobi's gaze flicked once to the visitor chair and back to her. Didn't look like he wanted Kwan awake, and yet he did nothing.
She tried again with a different part of her mouth. "Where—"
Instead of answering, he dissolved. Not a trick. The shadow thickened around him the way smoke does when a door opens in winter, then folded in on itself. For an instant the place where he'd stood wore a rectangle darker than its neighbors, a hole cut out of the hospital's night. Then neon filled it and the shape belonged to the curtain again.
She let her eyes rest in the dark where the shinobi had been and waited for movement that didn't come. It was ridiculous to be sure he'd been real. It was more ridiculous to be sure he hadn't.
Kwan's phone lit his thigh with a pale square and then went dark. His hand tightened around nothing. He slept through it as if obedience extended to notifications.
Her body reported in small bullet points. Left hip: road. Shoulder: road. Ribs: road with opinions. Knuckles: sanded. Tongue: copper coin. Head: cathedral that had been moved a street over and nobody told the floor. The thought of the bike swam up and tried to breathe. She pushed it under with the heel of her mind and told it to wait until morning.
She reached for Wulong again the way you reach for a cigarette with your mind after you've quit: automatic, stupid, comforting. The return was blank, like paperwork that hadn't been filed yet. If the nurses had boxed him, he'd be inventing verbs to describe his displeasure. If he'd slipped away, he'd be something worse than wet. Either way, she couldn't call him. The part of her skull where he sat when he felt like it had put up the sign: DO NOT DISTURB, OUT COLLECTING FISH. The debt band on her wrist blinked, decided she was still worth not unplugging, and went back to proving it.
A curtain track clicked far away as someone rearranged privacy. A woman laughed once, small and sharp, then apologized to nobody. A nurse murmured, "hush, hush," in Cantonese, and paper moved—the particular sound of a charm being coaxed into a new job over a vent.
The ward's dark gathered in the corners and negotiated with itself. The machines breathed and were proud of it. The neon bars changed color with the patience of old gods.
The darkness gave her back rain and a small, offended mewl from the memory of yesterday that wasn't this room. It was almost something. It was nothing.
Outside, a siren thought about doing its job and then remembered the weather. The building shrugged. The night stayed.
She slept and woke and slept in the shallow way of people who can't afford either, dreaming of seven crowns, their afterimage burned into her retina.
No lights. No bells. Just the hospital learning the shape of her refusing to die. And, somewhere between two breaths, a shadow that had come to make note of it.