The darkness had been thick and strange and without edges.
Ruby had moved through it the way you move through deep water slowly, heavily, with the dim awareness that there was a surface somewhere above you but no particular ability to reach it.
There had been fragments. Voices that didn't quite resolve into words. The sensation of being moved, of a door closing, of something cool pressed against her arm that she hadn't had the consciousness to question.
And then nothing. Long, seamless, unnatural nothing.
Until now.
She came back slowly, the way consciousness returns when the body has been under longer than it wanted to be, not all at once but in pieces, arriving in no particular order.
The ceiling first. White and unfamiliar, with a small crack running diagonally from the light fitting toward the left corner.
Then sound, the low, ambient noise of a street outside a window, vehicles, distant voices, and the indifferent life of a place she didn't recognize.
