I don’t remember anything of the rest of the day. How Kappelman flagged down a state patrol car and got us an eighty-mile-an-hour escort to Lotty’s clinic, Mr. Contreras stubbornly insisting he wouldn’t let them take me to a hospital without her say-so. Or how Lotty, taking one look at me in the back of the car, summoned an ambulance to take me to Beth Israel at top speed. Or even how Peppy wouldn’t relinquish me to the paramedics. She apparently seized a wrist in her strong jaw and refused to let go. They tell me they woke me up long enough to make her drop the guy’s arm, but I don’t have any memory of it, not even as a dream fragment.

I finally resurfaced around six Thursday morning. After a few puzzled minutes I realized I was in a hospital bed, but I couldn’t imagine what I was doing there or how I’d come to be there. As soon as I tried sitting up, though, my shoulders sent out so severe a message of pain that memory came flooding back.

Dead Stick Pond. That horrible cocoon of death. I held my arms out in front of me, despite the agony moving them brought. My wrists and hands were wrapped in gauze; my fingers looked like bright red sausages emerging from the white bandages. An IV needle was taped to my left forearm above the gauze. I followed it to a series of bags overhead and squinted at the labels. D5.45NS. That told me a lot.

I touched my fingertips gently together. They were swollen, but I could feel. I lay back again, filled with a peaceful satisfaction. I had survived. My hands were all right. They had tried to kill me, tried to humiliate me at the moment of my death, but I was alive. I fell back into sleep.

When I woke again it was to the full bustle of morning hospital routine—blood pressure, temperature, rounds—and no questions answered: doctor will tell you. After the nurses came a brisk intern who looked at my eyes and stuck pins into my feet. The pin seems to be neuroscience’s most advanced piece of technology. Another intern was busy with my roommate, a woman my age who’d just had cosmetic surgery. After they’d finished Lotty herself swept in, dark eyes bright with nonclinical feeling. My intern hovered at her elbow, anxious to tell her his findings on my body. She listened for a minute, then dismissed him with an imperious wave.

“I’m sure your reflexes are all in perfect order, but let me see for myself. First let’s have your chest. Breathe. Hold it. Exhale. Yes.” She listened to me fore and aft, then had me shut my eyes and touch my hands together, get out of bed—a slow, lurching process—and walk on my heels, then my toes. It wasn’t much compared to my usual workout, but it left me panting.

“You really should have children, Victoria—you could produce a whole new breed of superheroes. Why you are even alive at this point is a medical miracle, let alone that you can walk.”