But the work boot never reached her. At the last moment, it vanished. There was another pair of boots there now. Brown boots. Well-made. Familiar. They stepped and pivoted and spun, and then all the other feet ran away. The brown boots bent, and a leather-clad knee came down, and gentle hands touched her face.

“Val,” Tanith said. “Val, can you hear me?”

Valkyrie felt her head being moved, and she tried focusing on Tanith’s worried face, but she couldn’t. Then she was being lifted, hoisted up over Tanith’s shoulder. A fireman’s lift, it was called.

Tanith started running.

She crossed the rubble smoothly, like she was skating on ice. She ran up the sides of broken buildings so that Valkyrie was looking straight down at the far-below ground. Tanith’s balance was impeccable. She crossed narrow beams in ruined houses, leaped from rooftop to rooftop, landing so gracefully Valkyrie could have been floating on a cloud. She blacked out a few times, but that wasn’t Tanith’s fault. That was just her approaching death.

And then they were inside, in the Sanctuary, and she was being laid out on a bed in the Medical Wing and a light was being shone in her eyes.

“Multiple fractures,” Synecdoche was saying. “Concussion. Valkyrie, can you hear me?”

There were people screaming. The Medical Wing was full of injured people. On the bed beside her, Valkyrie saw Saracen Rue hooked up to a respirator. She tried to sit up, but a pair of strong hands held her down. Tanith’s face swam into view.

“Steady on, OK? They’re helping you. Just stay there. Val, that explosion. Were you there? What was it? Is Darquesse dead?”

Synecdoche came back, shouldered Tanith out of the way and jabbed a needle into Valkyrie’s arm. Warmth flooded her body so suddenly it made her gasp, and the pain fell away.

“I need an X-ray,” Synecdoche shouted to one of her assistants as she lifted Valkyrie’s shirt. “We’ve got internal bleeding here.”

There was movement all around and someone was holding a scanner and there was a bright blue light, and Valkyrie lay there and looked up at the ceiling. She coughed suddenly, but it didn’t hurt. It didn’t even alarm her when she tasted blood. It should have, though. Coughing blood should have alarmed her.

She frowned. The warm feeling was nice. It was too nice. It wanted her to sink into it, to surrender completely. But she had things to do. She couldn’t lie here and bleed. What was it that guy said in that movie?

“I ain’t got time to bleed,” Valkyrie muttered, sitting up.

Synecdoche looked horrified. “Valkyrie, lie down, you have serious injuries.”

Now that she was sitting up, her head was starting to clear. She held out her left hand. Her fingers were swollen and purple. “Bandage me.”

“Lie down.”

“I’ll lie down when I’m done.”