It was good, in a way, this sudden emergency. It caused such a frenzied response that she had no time to recap the events of the past hour. She wasn’t yet forced to loathe her depravity, to question it, to ask why she could so easily cast aside any semblance of rational thought when it came to Jasper. That was their dynamic, exciting yet completely fucked, him drawing things out of her that she never thought existed.

When would she have ever done something so impulsive and stupid? And to whom? Who else but Jasper would have her just about commit a sex act in front of a trainee nurse? And then, despite finally coming to her good senses—as brief as it was—returning to the scene of the crime. Worst of all, she had been determined to do a lot more, a lot worse, the acts ranging far more intensely than a simple bed bath. At least until she was saved by whatever emergency had just sounded.

She only hoped now that her returning to Jasper hadn’t come at the cost of someone else.

“Fiona!” someone called. “Go check on 413!”

The lights in the hallway dimmed and almost completely faded to black, which was followed by a wave of nervous cries from patients and hospital staff alike. The power had never gone out like that before. Patients could be heard calling for nurses, asking the question du jour, “What’s going on?”

The emergency lights flickered on seconds later, the voices calming somewhat by their return. The hallway was once again fully lit, but there still remained a seething undercurrent of tension.

Along her way to room 413, she heard currents of nervous chatter wafting about like a poisonous gas, infecting everyone they touched. Deeply troubling concerns. Rumors about life-support machines in the ICU shutting down. A terrorist attack on Washington’s power grid. Everything grave and apocalyptic.

Fiona, herself, assumed that room 413 housed some dire circumstance that hinged on tragedy. Someone suffocating on fluids that could no longer be pumped out of their body, the lack of power choking off an air supply. She expected, with such an alarm, to meet death head-on. Or at least someone knocking on its door.

She entered the room to find an elderly gentleman who was perhaps close to that door on his own. He was sprawled out on the ground like a drunken cyclist. There had already been a nurse there, trying to speak with him, asking him questions, calling his name. Was this her emergency?

It looked slightly precarious, but certainly not enough for a full-scale alarm.

“What’s wrong with him?” Fiona asked the nurse.

“Slip and fall.”

The man started mumbling, then garbling something louder as he struggled against the nurse.

But she kept talking over him. “He might have gotten scared about the alarm and then got out of bed too fast.”

He was clearly disoriented, looking like he wouldn’t have been able to stay standing if it were even possible for the nurses to get him there.

“Are you sure he didn’t have a stroke?” asked Fiona.

“Well, how can I be sure about that?” asked the nurse.

Fiona thought of her training, the questions to ask a potential stroke victim. An acronym: FAST.

F – Was his face drooping, could he smile?

She asked if he could smile. And the question, probably because it sounded so absolutely ludicrous to everyone involved, was swiftly ignored.

A – Could he raise his arms?

The man struggled to raise his left arm. His right followed suit.

S – Speech difficulties. Could he talk?

Fiona asked him for his name and he replied, not with his name but instead something that sounded more like, “Why the fuck am I doing this?”

T – Time. Get help immediately.

In this case, there was no need to call for a doctor, or anyone really. If the curse words he was still muttering through his dry, cracked lips were any indication, the man was old, but just fine.

“I think he just fell,” said the nurse.

“I fell,” said the man. Finally, he could speak.

They had lifted the man to his feet and pretty much carried his weight to the lowered bed, propping him up on top of the mattress—all while Fiona couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been needed elsewhere. Despite the need for two people to lift the man, his emergency seemed to pale in comparison to whatever was happening across the hospital.

Fiona left 413 as soon as she could, racing down the hall toward the nurses’ station. The scene there had been just as frenzied. Phones ringing. Staff running about.

She saw Wendy.

“Do they need me in ICU?” she asked.

Wendy, sitting at the desk, held the phone away from her face for a moment and said, “It’s a false alarm.”

“What? What kind of alarm was it?”

“It’s fine,” said Wendy. “Just see if anyone needs help.” And then she returned to her call.

Fiona hardly noticed that the alarm had stopped. She looked back at Wendy, who gave her a big wide-eyed stare as if to say, “Get a move on!”

So Fiona got a move on, walking back down the hall, a little slower this time, a little more methodically than her initial blind rushing. She stopped at Jasper’s room, finding him sitting at a table by the window. He was dressed and working on a laptop.

“Any idea what’s going on?” Fiona asked him from the doorway.

“Not yet,” he said, keeping his back turned, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an attack.”

She kept moving down the hall, checking in to each room that didn’t already have a nurse inside. With the emergency gone, her new mission had shifted into damage control—which was more or less just reassuring her patients that the world wasn’t ending.

Mr. Dawes was particularly grumpy about the situation. But not because of any apparent threat to his well-being, but because his internet service had been interrupted. “It’s how I read my news,” he kept saying. “And my horse betting. I keep my eye on things here and then email my son over at Pimloco.”

“But you’re okay, otherwise?”

“Fuck no,” he barked. “It’s three minutes to post.”

Nodding as she walked out, Fiona moved on to other rooms where there might be more serious issues than how a grumpy old man’s quasi-illegal hobbies had been affected. Where there any patients on this floor hooked up to medical devices? And of those, which had life-threatening conditions? She spun around in the hallway, looking back to the nurses’ station, when she saw Jasper bolting out of his room. He crossed the hallway in a flash and was gone. Where had he gone? A service closet?

She began walking toward whatever room he had disappeared into, when she suddenly remembered. Marva!

How could she have forgotten to check on Marva?

Her room was eerily quiet, lacking the usual fanfare that would greet Fiona upon entry. The nice old lady would usually have something extra sweet to say, some exuberant exclamation of how glad she was to see Fiona. Or at least a hello. But the lack of anything was strange, especially since Marva was lying wide awake and starting at Fiona. Rather, starting past Fiona.

“Marva?”

No response. Not even movement.

“Marva, can you hear me?”

She looked very pale.

Fiona’s stomach tightened into a knot, one all too familiar that occurred with some grim discovery. Over the years she had found several patients this way, lying peacefully dead. Marva indeed looked peaceful, more so than any other time.

“Marva,” she called again. This time her hands were at the woman’s shoulders, shaking them gently, her silver-topped head rocking loosely against the pillow, her eyelids still open. But the eyes weren’t looking at anything in particular.

Fiona was so accustomed to feeling their warm, purposeful gaze, the energy of her consciousness relayed effortlessly into Fiona’s heart. She was also accustomed to the playful, if not practical-joking Marva. But the reality and conviction of this act seemed beyond the old woman’s repertoire of jokes.

And then something happened that, to the untrained eye, might appear as a joke. But Fiona had seen enough seizures to know the truth, to know that she was looking at a grand mal. Marva’s face grimaced tightly, eyebrows jumping up and down with each pulse, each wave of energy flowing through her body like electricity and blowing her limbs outward with a sad but impressive force. It was like some great motor had been turned on at the base of her spine, a rambling, gyrating mess of shocks that rocked the bed back and forth like the woman had been possessed by some demonic entity.

It took Fiona a split second to find and press the emergency button, and then scream into the hallway for good measure, screaming for help, anyone.

Jasper.

And then she refocused her attention back to poor Marva, her body still blasting against the bed, the locked wheels at the bed’s feet scraping loudly across the tile floor. From somewhere deep in the woman’s frail body, Fiona could hear tiny groans escape with each gyration, puffs of air rasping through clenched and chattering teeth.

Instinct, or perhaps myth, would dictate that you stick an object or even your fingers into the victim’s mouth to prevent them from choking. The classic pencil between the teeth. It was something that crossed Fiona’s mind every time she’d witnessed a seizure, that split-second impulse of wanting to jam the side of her hand in the person’s mouth lest they swallow their own tongue.

But if someone had done that with Marva, or anyone else having a seizure, they’d likely suffer some real damage. It was like a saying she’d once heard about separating two fighting dogs. Never put anything in the way that you wouldn’t want to lose. So instead of losing anything, including her head, Fiona calmly rolled Marva onto her side. Until help arrived, that was all she could do.

Marva’s convulsions had lessened by the time Jasper ran into the room. Like a passing storm, the jolts became softer and more spaced apart. She was still unconscious, but at least now the bed had stopped moving. And then there was Jasper, taking control of the situation. His fingers were at Marva’s neck. And then the back of his hand in front of her nose and mouth. And then he suddenly did something out of character, though perhaps more like an Army Medical Sergeant than the doctors she was used to. He spat out, “Oh, fuck,” before rolling her over onto her opposite side.

Fiona tried to ask what he was doing, or if he needed help. But his actions became obvious with a quick tug of his hand on something. The insulin pump. It was dangling in his hands like a broken MP3 player.

The fucking insulin pump . . .

How could she have forgotten about it?

He ran out of the room, gone for just seconds before returning with a glucagon syringe.

“Just to be safe,” he said while injecting Marva, his voice returning to his usual sure and smooth cadence.

But he was probably right. It was a good guess. A seizure like that, especially for someone with no history of such, could easily be explained by an unplanned and uncontrolled dose of insulin. An overdose. Thanks, perhaps, to Fiona.

“Oh, my God,” she cried. “Can that thing be hacked?”

He nodded, grimacing, his eyebrows pinching together. “Anything can be hacked.” He kept inspecting the device, turning quickly when the sound of Marva’s sudden snoring filled the room. It came on quickly, and frighteningly loud, a deep rattling snore like that of an overweight, middle-aged truck driver.

“Marva’s really blue,” said Fiona.

“That’s okay,” Jasper said, tossing the device aside. “It’s all going to her brain.”

By “it,” he’d meant her blood, all of it rushing to her brain and leaving her furthest extremities—her hands and feet—a deathly shade. But that was a natural after-effect. As was the snoring.

“She’s still breathing,” said Jasper. “So let’s just keep her steady and breathing, and she’ll come around.”

Marva’s coming around wasn’t a guarantee, no matter how strong and confident Jasper sounded about it. But the good news was that her tremors had ended and she was now lying still, her chest heaving with long, even breaths.

“Okay,” Jasper said, rolling Marva onto her back. “That’s good. You’re doing well, Marva.”

Her eyelids were closed, but there was eye movement beneath them; her lids vibrated with each twitch.

“I think she’s gonna make it,” said Jasper. “But she should still get checked out by a doctor.”

Right on cue, a gang of footsteps pounded into the room.

Nurses and doctors entered the room. Wendy was one of them, asking Fiona to describe the event.

Fiona gave a quick glance at Jasper, who seemed to look away and hide from the attention. Then she turned back to Wendy and said, “I came in here and she was totally unresponsive. I went to check vitals and that’s when she had a seizure. Tonic-clonic, the whole works. And then, uh . . .” She tried to get Jasper’s attention again. “And then he came in, and he—”

“I came in and I saw her holding that thing in her hand,” said Jasper, pointing to the detached device lying on the ground next to the bed.

“What is that?” asked Wendy.

“An insulin pump?” said Jasper, looking at Fiona as if for affirmation. “Right?”

“My God,” said Wendy. “She might have overdosed. The injector . . .”

Jasper nodded dumbly, his mouth open. He had moved out of the way of the hospital staff as they prepared to wheel Marva out of the room. “And then I just tried to help Fiona,” he said. “Doing whatever she told me to do.”