There's a nagging hum vibrating endlessly at the backing of my head like a pulse that grows with each passing year as my fantasies, hopes and dreams grow further and further away from reach.

My father once told me that the simplest way to live life is to expect nothing from no one, and I had for the longest time did just that, until Imogen stumbled into my life nearly a decade ago.

I hadn't asked of anything from her, my whole life but she had given freely, her love, her time and her happiness so much so that as I stand watching through the viewing glass of the quarantined emergency room, I realise that the only thing I'd ever expected in life is how much longer  our friendship would last. 

Lying lifelessly on the sterile white room, surrounded by an interconnected system of tubes and wires, is the girl I thought I had known my whole life. A girl with many names and many pasts. Imogen, being her very last.

"How long have you known her?" an officer dressed in black overalls asks, scribbling my hoarsely whispered answers down as I fight to hold back a wave of tears. I'm not going to cry, I tell myself. I still have hope. I still have hope...

"Ten years..."

"We've got records of her different false aliases that she took within an eight-year period having been registered from all the major and minor towns in Salvos so...how is that possible?" he goes on.

"Nomads," I whisper, as her father's autopsied body comes to mind. The last time we'd spoken he tossed me an orange, telling me to watch my vitamin intake before he walked off to tend to his rooftop garden.

Now he lay in a fridge, his youthful vigor having long left his lean, masculine body. I wonder why he hadn't stopped to greet me in the woods. Why he'd taken off without as much as a word, to warn me of the doom that would befall me had I chosen to follow blindly.

"...they travelled a lot. "

"What was her parent's occupation?" 

''They made medicine. Herbal medicine," I say, reaching out for the vanishing scar tissue leftover from the burn I'd suffered a few months before, whilst baking cookies with her mother, Emily on a school night for a school baking fundraiser.

 My mother had been held up on a night shift so Emily offered to gift me her family's secret recipe, which I couldn't refuse. My mother and I seldom ever bonded over  household duties, especially secret family recipes.

To her everything was manually attended to with the skill of an industry worker on a tight schedule. 

I remember watching Imogen's mother grind a few herbs into a paste and slather it on the burn, promising it'd be gone in a fortnight and sending me off with a kiss on the burn as a mother does with her child.

She wasn't wrong. Much of it was gone, save a small indent no bigger than a mustard seed, that hadn't smoothed over. 

My own mother had been furious when she saw the injury and even after I explained myself she still saw it as a hindrance to the incoming autumn pageant that I  without a doubt, would be participating in.

It was only later on that she would sympathise with me, having seen the discomfort it caused when I tended to my chores and dismissed me from working till it healed.

But even then there was a mechanical-ness to her tenderness that made me wish more than ever that I could switch places with Imogen even for a night's chance to pretend that I was Emily's daughter instead.

Within this suspended moment, I wasn't too sure I was ready to wield such a terrible fate. I had positively ID-d her father's body as being that of Kurt Altan while her mother, Emily; judging from the narrative that had weaved through her painful sobs, had more than likely fallen into the same fate.

"Would you happen to know why they had so many fake ID's?"  

I shake my head staring at the file that lies on my lap, opened on a page displaying the dozens of aliases they had taken in the decade that I'd known them. Why so many? I ask myself, as I stare at the fake family portraits. What were you hiding? Who were you?

She had mentioned the soldier's treason charge on the way to the mountains, but I don't mention it out of fear for her life. I know what happens to people who are accused of it.

I've seen them get stonned, hanged and electrocuted for even the slightest on accusations. And while my father had been lucky enough to escape the clutches of death, I fear for the fleeting chance at life that hangs over Imogen's dying body.

"She said that they were headed here," I say instead, turning to Iris who stands in a distance, balancing her chin on her long, slender fingers. Lost in her thoughts. "This building's on a mountain, right?"

She whips her head, turning to face me with a quizzical gaze. "Sorry, what?"

"Yes, it's on a mountain," the officer answers.

"Well, she said her dad was bringing her here then," I say, turning my attention back to Imogen unsightly form.

"To this place?" Iris says, clearing her throat to adjust the timbre of her voice. "That's impossible. He wasn't on our radar. We didn't even flag his car in any of our route checkpoints and neither we we notified of his request to come seek medical services from us."

"What exactly, did she say about this place?" the officer intrudes, exchanging a quick, secretive glance with Iris. I catch it before they conceal their exchange, rage building up in my veins. What are they hiding? What do they know that I don't? Why are they being so weird around me?

"Nothing to me. Just that there were people waiting to help that the father had been arranging for them to meet," I say as the questions don't stop building up at the back of my head. 

Why am I being held in this room for so long when Iris's condition could get worse any minute? Why are they taking so long to get clearance to see my best friend? Why am I not being given the right to see her up close?

"On the mountains or by the mountains?" Iris asks.

"Does it make a difference which preposition she used?" I ask, glaring.

"Yes."

"Then I don't remember which one it was. I do have a head injury so the grammatical details are all lost on me," I answer, ignoring the glare I get back from the officer. 

"Lara, it would be better if we knew exactly what you know seeing as to the fact that you're our only key witness-"

"Stop! Just stop it already!" Pushing myself up from my wheelchair, I turn and limp towards Imogen's recovery room. "I've cooperated long enough but I won't anymore until I see Imogen."

"That's not how it works, Lara," the officer starts.

"-shut up!" I hiss, turning to Iris. "We had a deal."

She looks up, staring at me pensively before she wakes up. "We did and I honoured my end of that deal. I brought her here, and despite whether or not we were her intended medical providers, we tried our best to cure her."

"Then let me see her. That's simply what I want," I say, my eyes brimming with tears. "I just want to see her one last time."

"The doctors said that it's not your call to make. Her immunity is so low right now that if she is exposed to any foreign germs from anyone, it could potentially cause permanent and irreversible damage to her system," she answers.

"There's also the possibility that she could be the carrier of a dangerous disease. The doctors still don't know what made her this sick or how her treatment was administered which is why we're asking you all these questions," the officer adds in a monotone voice.

"Why don't you just go check her house for clues? I don't know what you expect me to know, but I didn't even know how bad her illness was until we crashed. I thought she had ulcers. She'd said that much over the years and I had no reason to doubt her," I tell them, picking up the fallen pictures scattered on the floor beside me and sigh, blinking away the tears. 

"I didn't even know this side to her. All these aliases? Zoe? Emery? June? I don't know them. The only girl I know is my best friend; Imogen Altan, the girl lying on that bed on the brink of  death..."

"If that's even her real name..." the officer whispers but Iris elbows her ribs, cutting her rant short.

"You may leave, Dave," she adds, showing him the door. He opens his mouth to protest but she silences him with an icy glare that shuts him up. He wakes up, picking up his folders and leaves, a scowl permanently plastered on his face. 

I turn away from her just as she faces me, and focus on Imogen's body, noticing a red blinking light on the monitors.

"Lara..." Iris says in the softest whisper. "Look, I'm sorry I had to put you through all this. It's just standard procedure. I should've told you that..."

Her voice fades into an echoed mummer in the back of my head as my eyes grow wide with horror. In an instant, I feel as though I am in Imogen's recovery room.

The beeping siren of her monitor fills the room with dread and a second later, her body begins to convulse as the doors quickly open, letting in a team of nurses and doctors that surround her, pumping her body with all the remedies in the world from pulses of electrical currents to the strongest serums and gases.

Her mouth fills up with a frothing liquid and her eyes roll back, turning into the whitest shade. She doesn't fight to hold on to her dear life but as I watch, a dreadful calmness fills the air before the doctors give up on all their best attempts to revive her.

"Time of death? 11.59 pm," a doctor states right before the clock strikes midnight.

Outside a snowstorm rages on.

Winter is here.

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