I can’t move.
My feet feel bolted to the floor, my hands useless at my sides. The words still ring in my head, repeating over and over, drowning everything else out.
The gurney rattles under the force of his seizing body. His chest rises and falls in uneven, desperate gasps, his eyes rolling back for a split second before snapping open again, wild, unfocused. His breath hitches, catching on something unseen, something internal.
Ada shoves an oxygen mask over his face, fingers flying as she checks his pulse, as she calls out numbers I can’t quite process. Her movements are fast, practiced, but there’s an edge to them, a sharpness that only comes when you know, when you know it’s slipping away.
“Come on,” she mutters, voice tight with determination. “Stay with me.”
The beeping monitor turns into a shrill, continuous wail.
Flatline.
A sharp sound cracks through the air as Ada grabs the defibrillator. The pads press against his chest, the machine whines, charging, waiting for the command.
Then—shock.
His body jerks violently. The gurney creaks under the force, but the monitor doesn’t change.
No pulse.
Another shock. Another desperate attempt.
Nothing.
Like a radio caught between stations, white noise pressing in,curling around my skull, making everything feel wrong.
I press my palms against my ears, squeezing my eyes shut, willing it to stop. But it doesn’t. It won’t.
The air in the room grows heavier, colder.
The last breath he took lingers for a moment, a ghost of sound, before dissolving into silence.
He’s gone.
Ada exhales sharply, sitting back on her heels, hands still pressing against his lifeless chest as if she can force him to stay. But she doesn’t move again. She doesn’t try another shock.
Because there’s no point.
The silence is deafening.
It wraps around me, thick and suffocating, pressing in on my lungs until I can’t tell if I’m breathing anymore. My heartbeat slams against my ribs, wild and uneven, the only sound I can register beneath the endless, droning wail of the flatline.
My feet shift back instinctively, but the floor beneath me feels wrong, like I’m not really standing here, like I’m watching this from somewhere outside my body.
The room sways.
The walls stretch, shrink, blur. My breath is shallow, too fast, like I’m trying to suck in air through a straw. The static in my head grows louder, filling every crevice of my skull, drowning out everything else.
I stumble. My shoulder hits the wall, but I barely feel it. My vision tilts, smearing into something senseless, something wrong.
“Isabella.” Ada’s voice barely cuts through the haze.
I shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut. The words of the now-dead man claw at the inside of my skull, looping over and over, twisting into something heavier, something unbearable.
The edges of my vision go black. The air feels wrong in my throat, too thick, too sharp. My stomach churns violently,and then I’m moving, stumbling, half-blind, crashing into the doorframe as I barely make it into the bathroom.
I fall to my knees in front of the toilet, fingers gripping the cold porcelain as my stomach heaves.
