“Hell,” Sunny Rico breathed, and it sounded less like an epithet than a description of the circumstances.

“Bolt Street emergency, and not much time.” Linn pulled his helmet back on and throttled the Norton into the street and around the corner.

Rico turned to me. “I can’t take you home right away. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said, suspecting that whatever was going on was not all right for somebody. We sped off in pursuit of Linn.

The clinic on Bolt Street was almost a real hospital, certainly as close as you were likely to get south of Ho. Sometimes they even charged patients for treatment, when it seemed like they could afford it. Four doctors kept their offices there for outpatients, but there were also a few recovery rooms and a surprisingly well-outfitted ER. It was outside this that Rico bumped her front wheels up over the sidewalk. I hadn’t exactly been invited, but when she came flying in the door, making everyone in the hall leap back with startled looks at her shoulder holster, I was pretty close behind.

She grabbed the first person in white she came to, a middle-aged woman in tunic and trousers, and said, “You had an O.D. admitted, very recently. Where?”

“You’re with Detective Linn?”

“Yes. Where?”

“That hall, third door. And who the hell are you?” she said to me, straight-arming me in the chest.

“I’m with her,” I answered, and dodged past.

By the time I reached the door, the place had caught up with me. There was the smell, of course: alcohol, disinfectant, the spoiled-yeast smell of some medication; and under those, the frightening scents, the smells of sickness and wounds and fear. There was the relentless.

bright light that bounced off surfaces that were easy to clean but hard, hard to look at. And the sounds, of people trying to hurry quietly, to talk of urgent things calmly, and to muffle the noise of pain as if it were a germ that could spread. I bit my tongue against a familiar twinge of anxiety and slid into the room before the door closed behind Rico.

There was a human girl in the bed. Or maybe she’d been a woman, before whatever this was had dragged her back to the helplessness of childhood. Her hair was white and thinning, but the face beneath was unlined. Her skin was the color of old paper against the pillowcase. Her eyes seemed to be retreating down blue-black tunnels in her skull, and her cheeks might have been hollowed out with spoons. Under the sheet, her body was long and bony, and the proportion of leg and arm to torso seemed wrong. She had a tube down her nose and an IV drip in her arm.