I tell her.

“I’m going to tell you three words right now and in a couple of minutes I want you to repeat them to me, O.K.? Cowboy, marshmallow, sailboat.”

“What about the guards?”

“They’ve discovered Nurse Annibal. I don’t know if she’s two-minute cute or ten-minute cute, so we’ve got to be fast.”

“Fast for what?”

She pricks my right big toe with a needle. “Can you feel this?”

“Ouch. Yes.”

She pricks something else. Its contact registers, but it’s not painful. The startling thing is that it seems to be registering in . . .

“Yes,” I say, looking down. “Oh my God! My leg! I still have my leg!”

“Of course you do. Can you feel this, too?”

“Sort of. It doesn’t hurt, but I know it’s there.”

“Move your toes for me.” I do. “Congratulations, Mr. Starks.”

When I stop crying, I say, “I think I’ve been hallucinating. Is that normal?”

“You have quite a concussion.”

“I imagined Nunes was here. Was that true?” She nods. “And you? This is real, too? I still have my leg? How do I know?”

Dr. Zandipour pinches me. The pinch may or may not have some flirt in it.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Name six months for me, going backwards from March.”

“March, February, January, December, November, October.”

“Good.”

“You could get in trouble, you know.”

“You’re an interesting case, Mr. Starks. There is so much going on here I’ve never seen before. You took one hundred milligrams of nixolophan and not only survived it but seem to have suffered only partial nerve damage. Can you explain that?”

“Lucky?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I drink a lot of milk?”

“I think this might have more to do with it.” She lifts the sheet and shows me my leg—my beautiful, extant leg—and around the needle mark is a black circle drawn in Sharpie with the caption 100mg Nix.

“What the . . .”

“Someone at the scene administered some antitoxin before we got there.”

“Must have been Herk,” I say to myself.

“Nine-one-one also received an anonymous call from a samaritan giving them the details. We were able to prep the ambulance with antitoxin—not exactly the sort of thing an EMT usually carries—and we rerouted to this facility, which is probably the only reason you might ever walk again.”

“I might walk? But I thought—”

“Quiet,” she says, nodding over her shoulder at the cops flirting with Nurse Annibal. “Can you feel this?”

“Yes,” I say, thrilled that the needle in my thigh hurts even a little bit. “Doc, why are you covering for me? Didn’t you hear that I’m the accomplice of a notorious thief?”

“The Polecat isn’t a thief,” she says.

“What?”

“You of all people know what he has done for Iraq.”