I wake up suffocating on something foul jammed down my throat. Ridged edges scrape at the raw corners of my lips and snake down my mouth. I gag, the tube jerks but won't come out. Two seconds awake and I'm already choking to death. Figures. I try to grab at whatever holds the tube in place, but my hands don't move. I can't move, can't breathe, can't think straight. What is this? What is this? What's happening?

"He's awake!"

Everything is dark, too heavy to be real. My eyes are stuck shut, and that's the part that terrifies me the most. I gag again, violently. Fighting to get my hand up, to get this thing out of me, to do anything.

"Yana!"

I recognize Delilah's voice, like a punch to the gut. She's not supposed to be here, we sent her home. We sent her to safety.

"What are you doing?"

"Sedating him."

My heartbeat thrums hummingbird-like against my ribcage, lungs convulsing. The edges of the tube cut grooves into the inside of my throat and the taste of iron floods my mouth.

"He just woke up."

"He need more time to heal before we can take tube out."

Warmth spreads up one of my arms, surprising me. It travels like wildfire, somewhere in the chaos I recognize the feeling of sedative coursing into my veins. Seconds later it hits my head, plunging me into an ocean of oblivious warmth. I feel no less suffocated, no less threatened, but a moment more and unconsciousness relieves me of thought.

Countless times I wake up the same way. Countless times they put me under again. Elle never returns, the grey never makes a re-appearance. There is only void black and bare snippets of the lullaby that ebbs and flows on no particular beat.

***

My throat burns, but this time the hard plastic edges don't scratch away my tongue. Air moves in and out of my lungs the way it should. And I can open my eyes.

The first thing I see is the blurry panels of a false ceiling. I stare at them for ages, until my eyes stop burning and the tiny holes look more like speckles than smears. I feel heavy, as if layers and layers of sand are piled on top of me. Everything hurts but in a dull, muted way, except for my right leg. That I can't feel much of at all. I tilt my head to get a better look at my surroundings and figure out where I am.

The room is small, glass sliding doors take up one wall and give a view into what looks like a miniature, empty lobby. A wooden door to the left of the glass wall is half-open, beyond it is a toilet and a sink, and further to the left, a stuffed red chair is crammed into the corner. I know by the glass wall that this isn't the Compound, the chair and bathroom confirm it.

"Morning, sunshine."

I turn my head towards the sound. Standing at the side of my bed is Delilah, a row of stitches curves down her left temple, scattered around the cut are burst blood vessels. She looks rested though, and clean.

"Here." She holds a cold spoon to my mouth. "Ice chips, Yana said to give you some if you woke up."

Never in my entire life has ice tasted so good. Cool trickles of water soothe the cotton balls that coat the inside of my throat. While I suck on the ice chips, Delilah perches on the edge of the bed. "You really had us going for a while there, the doctors didn't know if you'd make it past the first hour. But here you are."

"Don't sound so happy," I make a poor attempt at a joke, my voice is too hoarse to rise above a whisper. She smiles wanly and offers another spoonful of ice. My side aches something awful.

"You've woken up a couple times now, I'm waiting to see if it sticks."

"I think it will," I mumble around the ice chips.

"That's what you said last time, too," she says.

"Oh."

Minutes pass in silence, Delilah feeds a few more spoonfuls of ice into me and the burning in my throat settles down. I wince and scratch at the sore spot under my thin hospital gown. There's a stiff, swollen line zippering my abdomen. I run my fingers across it again, it feels like stitches, but I don't remember getting stabbed there.

"Your spleen burst, they had to take it out," Delilah says in response to my puzzled expression. My mind flickers back to the moment in the grey, with all the blood. I let my hand linger on the stitches.

It's dim in the room, the blinds are open but the soft glow of a streetlamp is the only light. There is one other chair in the room, tucked into the far corner beside the window. Sky is curled up on it, snoring. Unlike Delilah, he's a mess. His greasy hair sticks up all over his head. purple rings stain the skin around his eyes and his broken hand sticks out at an awkward angle over his knees.

"He looks bad," I say, I can't stop looking at the cage on his hand. Delilah shrugs, more to herself than me.

"He's been having nightmares. We die in them," she says, leaning her elbows on her knees. "Sleeping in here kind of helps though, so I try not to wake him up when he dozes."

"Only Sky would sleep better in the same room as the guy who broke his hand," I mutter. Delilah slides a critical gaze over me from the corner of her eye. I don't remember telling her that I was the one who crushed Sky's hand, but someone must have because she doesn't flinch or pull away. Maybe it's just not a surprise. We were built for violence, after all.

"I don't think he cares about that part," she says. I can't help the pang of guilt that goes through me. As if sensing it, Delilah pats my shoulder. "Just stay alive this time, would you?"

"I'll try."

"Good."

"And you?"

Delilah hesitates, and my heart stutters hard enough that the monitor beeping beside my bed stutters too. I can't hear it very well, it's on the same side as the ear that bullet grazed.

"Woah, hey, take it easy," she says, eyeing the jumping lines on the monitor. "I'm alright. A concussion, I think a bit of metal got me when the van crashed but I'm all patched up now."

"Good," I sigh. I try to prop myself up, only to discover that one of my arms is trapped. A thick cast envelopes my arm from my shoulder to my wrist.

"Shattered your humerus," she says.

"Is that all?" I ask, examining the rest of me. I should have checked myself over earlier, but nothing hurt enough to catch my attention. A broken arm and a missing spleen—whatever that is—doesn't seem too bad after everything that happened.

"Ha, you wish. You also have thirteen broken ribs, a bruised liver and kidney, a torn rotator cuff, and they say your spine is cracked but they don't know how bad it is yet."

"Wow, I don't feel any of that."

"With the painkillers you're on, it'd be more surprising if you did," she answers. "You tie for worst injuries from that fight."

"What poor kid tied with me?" I ask, my mind flashing to Dieter. Delilah snorts.

"He's a Whitecoat," she informs me, a sneer on her face. "An electrokinetic fried him in the middle of the riot and he got trampled."

Suddenly I have no sympathy for him.

"There was a riot?"

"There was a shockwave from the dome. It took down that building and popped a bunch of the cell doors. Most of us went after the Whitecoats, until the police got there. Amiah got arrested," she tacks the last part on casually, pausing to pop an ice chip in her mouth. "For something she did with her newstab? They let her go. They arrested a lot of us and let us go. You missed a lot of boring legal stuff."

"Oh damn," I feign disappointment.

Delilah rolls her eyes. Crunching down more ice she says, "you're lucky you got to sleep through most of it. You're lucky Sky found you, too, he kept you alive."

There's no tube in my throat but I feel choked anyways. Imagining Sky coming back for me, the idea that he might have had to hurt himself more, is too much.

"He shouldn't have done that," my voice is a bare whisper, struggling to get around the suffocating lump in my throat. Delilah slides that critical gaze over me again, expression unreadable. She opens her mouth to say something, but it's Sky's voice that fills the room next.

"Don't say that," We both jump, neither of us had noticed the lack of snoring from Sky's chair. He stands, watching me from behind red-rimmed eyes. In the next moment, he's throwing himself on me, hugging me as tightly as he can without disturbing all the medical junk attached to me. "I thought you were dead."

I lift my unbroken arm to hug him back. My movements are sluggish, too dulled for me to squeeze properly. I do my best, and he doesn't seem to mind when I thump him a little too hard.

When he finally settles, retreating to the end of the bed, there's a shakiness to him. "You can't say things like that anymore, Trick."

"Sorry," I say automatically.

"I can't keep watching my friends die," his voice cracks. Tears well in his eyes, dark spots bloom on his sleeve. Delilah does what I can't and smooths a comforting hand over his bent spine.

"I'm sorry," I say again, knowing the blood of those friends is on my hands. Even before the escape I might have killed them in the Dome. Hundreds of evils sit on me, I will never be clean of them. I can never live in this world. I press my thumb into the stitches at my side.

"I can't fight anymore." And the admission feels like death. Violence is all I am. Fighting is what the Whitecoats made me for, the only thing they made me for. Everything beneath my breastbone crushes into a tight ball, distantly I hear the monitor stuttering.

Delilah's calloused hand finds mine.

"You don't have to fight, " she says, "it's over, we're free."

It doesn't feel real. But Delilah is there, hand on mine, and Sky is there, at the end of the bed.

"We are proper free," he says.

And a teeny tiny fractured part of me begins tobelieve, for a split second, that we are free.