The world was looking much grayer than usual.
Shannon knew that was partially due to the painkillers the doctors had given her, and partially because the lights in the hospital room she was in were dimmed. She wondered if maybe it was in an effort to conserve electricity, or because the hospital was probably running on generators after all the earthquakes. It didn’t seem worth asking—not that there was anyone around to ask.
The room was filled with four other patients in cots all pushed up next to one another. The doctors and nurses moved from one to the next quickly, their fingers shaking from fatigue, or maybe too much caffeine.
The whole hospital was running on its last legs.
It had been less than a week since the sky turned orange, and already LA had reached its breaking point. Shannon saw it in the faces around her—the other patients, the doctors, the newscasters on TV, her own parents—the heavy grayness of the room wasn’t just an issue of lighting, it was a feeling. The time for panic was passing.
Now was the time to cut losses and get the hell out.
A thin figure slipped through the doorway and made its way over to Shannon’s bed.
“Merek?”
He smiled, pulling up a chair near Shannon’s side.
“How did you get here? My parents . . .”
Her parents hadn’t left her side since Merek and Joe had brought her home, slightly bruised and just a bit broken. They’d yelled at Joe until he left, stammering apologies and dragging Merek behind him, and then they’d immediately rushed her to the hospital.
“Joe dropped me here,” Merek said. “Don’t worry—I did not let your parents see me. They finally left your room to talk with the healers, so I took the opportunity to sneak inside.”
“If they find you here, heads will roll. I’m serious.”
“I will take my chances.” Merek was still smiling, still making jokes. But his eyes were heavy—they had been ever since the Ralphs’s parking lot. Shannon gestured around the room again.
“Feels like we were just here, doesn’t it?” Next to her, a patient coughed in his sleep. Another moaned across the room. “Guess it’s a bit different this time.”
Merek’s eyes were still focused only on her. “Yes. It is.”
“Did you get your stitches fixed?” Shannon reached one hand up to the bandage on Merek’s collarbone, pulling it gently to see. He didn’t flinch as the light fabric pulled away, revealing the cut underneath. He still stared at her in that strange, intense way.
“I will be fine,” he said. “And you?”
His eyes fell down to Shannon’s right wrist, which was wrapped up in a cast.
“Broken. But I’ll only need the cast for a month. Then the doctors will be able to take it off.” She sighed, knowing it would be easier to pull the Band-Aid off fast. “In Utah. Which is . . . far from here.”
But Merek didn’t look even a little surprised.
“You were eavesdropping, weren’t you?”
“Your parents were not exactly being quiet about their decision.”
Shannon gave a small laugh. “And they say I’m the loud one.” She was trying to make light of it, but the truth was that her parents’ terror had terrified her. They’d been acting strange ever since the sky turned orange, sure, but when they saw Shannon come home with a broken wrist and a bruise on the side of her face, the fear in her mom’s eyes had stopped Shannon cold. She couldn’t even argue with them when they told her they’d decided to leave Los Angeles immediately. At that point, to ask them to stay seemed cruel.
“It’s not that I want to go,” Shannon said, looking down at her busted wrist. She couldn’t even feel it through all the wrappings—or, no, it was probably the drugs blunting the pain. She wondered if they were affecting her decision making, too. At that moment, she didn’t care. All she wanted now was to make sure she never saw that look on her mom’s face ever again—that she never caused her mom to look that way ever again.
“But they’re my parents,” she whispered.
Merek was silent for a moment. “I understand.”
Shannon couldn’t guess what he might be thinking. He’d called her brave at the grocery store. Did he think she was a coward now? Or maybe he was thinking of his own parents, in another world and surely worrying about him also?
“Are you going to go home, too?” she asked. “Joe could open you a portal.”
But Merek shook his head. “No. There is nothing I could do at home that Cedric and Kat are not already doing. But this world . . .” Merek sighed, lifting his head toward the room’s single window. “In this world, I might do some good. I might be of real use for once, more than just some second son or sidekick.”
“Merek . . . you’re not a sidekick.”
Merek gave a small smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “We shall see.”
He looked down, his eyes hardening when they met Shannon’s cast. “Besides, Joe will still need help. And someone needs to find the Knight who did this to you—”
“And get some answers?” Shannon raised an eyebrow. “There’s no need to get all revenge-y when there’s so much left to do.”
Merek shrugged, and Shannon felt nervous for a moment. But then he smiled. “You are probably right.”
“Probably? Try always.”
Merek laughed. After a moment, the sound faded away, and he finally met her eyes. “Shannon, I . . . this time here, on Earth, it has not been totally unbearable, and I think that is because—”
Merek’s head suddenly whipped toward the door, as if he’d heard something. A second later, Shannon heard it, too—footsteps, and voices. Her parents.
Shannon wanted, more than anything else, to hear how Merek was going to finish that sentence. But there was no time. Her parents had been livid with the stranger who’d brought her home with a broken wrist, and if they caught him in her room now, they might call hospital security.
“You have to go,” Shannon said, forcing the words out. “Before they get here.”
Merek looked at her once and nodded before turning to slip out the door, taking his unsaid words with him.