“You looked like you were running away, too.”
“I…wait. You ran away from the hospital? Why?” She didn’t look like a wounded vet to him, not at all. No way was she old enough, for starters. And she was too perky to be someone who’d been turned away from an experimental study that was attempting to correct significant battle injuries.
No, not turned away. She’d run away, she said.
“Look, kid,” he said, willing himself to be patient. She was just a little thing, and Ashley had been on his case about being kinder to the people around him. “I dunno why you ran away, but your mom’s probably real worried.”
If it was possible, her eyes got even wider. “Oh. I don’t have a mom.”
Shit. “Your dad, then. Your grandma. Whoever took you to that place.”
She shook her head. “Nobody took me. I was born there.”
“Born?”
“At the Institute.”
“You were…born at the Institute.”
“Yes. I’m one of the LCs.”
Something ugly was churning in his belly, the same dark premonition that had accompanied him into that room on his last deployment, on the day he’d saved Deshawn’s life and lost most of his own.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “I can call somebody. Or you can use my phone.”
Her expression grew almost comically solemn. “I don’t want to go back.”
He had no idea what so say. So he said, “Okay.” Like an idiot.
They stared at one another. At another point in his life, when he’d actually had his shit together, he might have done the right thing. Or, at least, the Responsible Thing. Called some sort of authority; offered to take her somewhere.
But he was tired, and confused. So fuck it.
“Uh,” he said. “You wanna come in?” He pointed toward the stairs, intending to go up to the front door and let her in.
But, quick as a little mouse, she chirped, “Yes, please,” and dropped down through the window to land on the floor.
Rooster reacted badly.
That was a nice way of putting it.
He startled back, tripped over his own feet, and landed on his ass on the thin, industrial carpet of the basement floor.
As quickly as it happened, he berated himself, which sent him into one of his now-normal shame spirals. He’d been strong once. Physically; mentally. Fit, tan, hardened, deadly. He’d been a model Marine – for so long that he no longer knew how to be anything else.
But then he’d gotten blown up, and he was a ghost of his former self. Weak, stiff, staggering. Vulnerable. And so he flinched, when he’d never flinched before, and he drank, and he worried, and was a piece of shit in general.
Oh. He’d gotten stuck in his head again. The girl stood over him now, her lips moving. She was talking to him.
“What?” he asked, and his voice faded from a strange echo to something that sounded halfway normal – given his situation on the floor.
Now that she was standing, he could see that the girl did indeed wear hospital scrubs, white and too thin for the weather outside. She held her hands clasped together in front of her; her hair fell in two thick curtains on either side of her narrow, freckled face.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah. Um. Yeah.” He got laboriously to his feet, wincing, cursing internally. He grabbed for a handhold that wasn’t there, felt his core muscles crunch and strain.
The girl stepped in close, too close. “Oh,” she said. “You’re hurt.” And before he could react, she reached out and laid a hand on his bad arm.
