30

Sakura stood with her arms folded over her chest, staring at the nurse. “No,” she said firmly, looking at the syringe in the woman’s hand. “I don’t need it.”

The nurse’s phone had rung just a few moments earlier, and the woman had had a terse conversation with whoever it was on the other end of the line. She guessed it was the doctor. Sakura could not understand what they were talking about, but, from how the nurse kept gesturing, it had obviously been about her.

The nurse held up the syringe.

“I don’t need another injection.”

“Dr. Edwin say you do. He say you get very, very sick without it.”

“But I feel fine.”

The nurse took a step toward her, a determined expression on her face. It was evident that she was not going to take no for an answer.

“I don’t want a needle,” Sakura said.

“No needle,” the nurse replied, pointing at the cannula in Sakura’s forearm. “It go in there. The drugs you swallowed, they last long time. You get sick again. Dr. Edwin says so.”

Sakura swallowed a mouthful of acrid bile. What the nurse said made sense, and the last thing she wanted to do was to get ill again. She needed to call Katsuro; she needed to speak to him so that he could come and collect the drugs.

“I need some fresh air first,” she said. “Let me go outside for a few minutes. Then you can inject me with whatever Dr. Edwin says I need.” Sakura expected that the woman would say no, like before, but, this time, she relented.

“I come too,” she said. Her expression made it very obvious that it wasn’t a suggestion.

“Fine.”

Sakura picked up her clutch bag, opened the door to the hotel room, and walked out into the corridor. She glanced left and right and, seeing a fire door at the end, headed toward it, the nurse close behind. There was a small parking lot behind the fire door, with a couple of beaten-up old cars illuminated by a single orange street lamp. Sakura saw two white plastic chairs next to a large catering tin that was full of sand and cigarette butts. She sat on one of the chairs and took out her phone. There were several text messages and missed calls. She thumbed out a text to Katsuro. She had seen the name of the hotel on a half-used notepad inside the room, so she entered that now with a message for him to come and pick her up as soon as possible.