“Just running through,” he said. “I’d like to get this costume top off you, so we can get a better look at that. Nurse? If you could help Miss—help Antares here with her costume.”

“I got it,” I said.

The nurse hesitated.

My forcefield peeled away from me, moving me as little as possible. Forcefield hands brushed my hair off to the side, over my good shoulder, tugging it where blood made it stick to cloth or skin. I began pulling it off in increments.

“I’ll give you a moment of privacy while I check things,” Doctor Close told me. “Help her if she needs it, Leah.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Did I scare him? I wondered.

I didn’t need it. I debated tearing at the cloth, but, for one thing, I didn’t want to scare them, and for another, I wasn’t sure it was actually easier. It was sticking to my body from armpit to waist.

Besides, I liked my costume, even if it was soaked in blood.

I let her hold my arms, gently raising and bracing them, holding them with a strength that didn’t let them waver or shake. Handprints stood out against my skin.

“Do you have water?” I asked. “And a cloth or paper towel?”

“We have bottled water. Why?” Nurse Leah asked.

“Please,” I said, my voice tense and my words curt because breathing was hard in this position, the breaks and fractures making every sound an effort.

She left, and I worked on extricating myself from my costume. Forcefield hands removed the breastplate, setting it aside.

She returned with the water and a bit more of the cotton pad bandage.

With forcefield hands, I wet the cloth and used it to soak the parts of me where sweat didn’t reach but blood had. It had clotted, and clung to tiny, translucent body hairs all down my back, until skin, costume, and clotted blood were inextricable. The water helped.

Once I got past the small of my back and my stomach, it was easier.

My costume and the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing were inexorably bound together. I put them to one side, folding them.

Nurse Leah touched the forcefield, and I stopped.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She reached out tentatively, touching it again, a hand on a shoulder.

The Fragile One slipped out of her grip, moving up to the bed, sitting just behind and around me. It was like I was the Wretch again, but only a part of me that was still shaped like ordinary two-arms, two-legs, one-headed Victoria was there. The rest was invisible, invincible, and fragile.

“She’s out of your way now.”

“She?”

“Secret,” I said. The Fragile One lifted the wet, scrunched-together cotton cloth to my lips, the fold in roughly the dimensions and length of a finger.

Not that secrets matter anymore.

“Bra off too. I have a paper gown for you.”