The IV pump clicks every few seconds, and Ami has started counting the clicks to avoid counting anything else.
Her sketchbook is still in the drawer beside the bed. She hasn't been able to hold a pencil for three weeks. Her fingers have gone thin and clumsy, and the last line she drew wandered off the page like it belonged to someone else.
The monitor beeps, slow and uneven. The blanket is too thin, and the cold has settled somewhere behind her ribs.
Nobody is coming. She has known that for a while now.
Her father hasn't visited once since the diagnosis. Maxim Vale has a real family to attend to, and Ami stopped being counted as part of it a long time ago.
Aron came 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's a doctor. He knows better. That's what made it a lie.
Alia came the same week, smiling the way she does 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 doesn't let herself finish the thought. It's the one she has learned to step around, the way you step around a broken tile in the dark. Her best friend, who promised I'll never leave you. Her husband, who 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 scrapes out of her chapped lips. The monitor slows again.
*So this is how it ends.*
Something hot rises in her chest. It isn't grief. Grief would be easier. It's rage, thick enough to choke on, and it makes her fingers twitch against the sheets.
She has never believed in miracles. But the room is very quiet, and she has run out of other options.
"If anyone is listening," she whispers, and her voice cracks down the middle, "give me one more chance. I'll make them pay. Every last one."
The monitor stops beeping. The line goes flat.
Darkness takes her.
She is standing. That's the first wrong thing. There's no floor under her feet, no ceiling above, just a black so complete it has weight.
"What a shame."
The voice comes from everywhere at once. It isn't kind, and it isn't holy. It sounds entertained.
A figure waits ahead of her, made of shadow, its edges bleeding into the dark.
"You could have been magnificent," it says. "Instead you let them break you."
Ami's nails bite into her palms. She notices, distantly, that her hands work. "Who are you?"
"Someone who hates wasted potential."
The shadows shift, and something catches a light that isn't there. A smile, or a blade. She can't tell, and she suspects it doesn't matter.
"One chance," the voice says. "But nothing is free."
Ami doesn't hesitate. She has nothing left to bargain with anyway.
"Take whatever you want."
"Oh, I will." The darkness curls around her like a hand closing. "Starting with your mercy."
Light.
Pain.
And then air, sharp and sudden, filling her lungs as she gasps.