Imani woke before the alarm. Sleep had been restless, haunted by images of the black-armored clones patrolling Edgeport's streets. Her heart ached with the memory of Noah leaving that morning—his kiss on her forehead, his promise that they'd celebrate her return to work tonight. Now, as she slipped on her scrubs, she forced herself to push the worry down. Today was her first shift back at Riverside General. She had worked too hard in therapy, too long in recovery, to falter before she even stepped inside.
The hospital's automatic doors opened with their familiar hiss, carrying with them the smell of disinfectant, steel, and tired humanity. A flood of voices filled the atrium—nurses rushing past with clipboards, families clustered in worried huddles, orderlies weaving stretchers through the chaos. It should have felt familiar, grounding. But the volume, the edge of desperation in the air, was new.
Within the first ten minutes of stepping onto the floor, Imani realized why.
Patients were arriving in waves.
A man with a shattered collarbone, handcuffed to a gurney, shouted about how he had been "jaywalking across Seventh." A woman sobbed as she clutched her arm in a sling, muttering that she had tossed a coffee cup into a trash can and missed. A teenager groaned in pain with a fractured leg, the officer clone that brought him declaring in flat, metallic tones that the boy had been "reckless in crossing on a yellow light."
The Black Signal clones weren't arresting people anymore. They were punishing them. For everything.
And the punishments were brutal.
Imani forced herself to breathe steady, to step into nurse-mode. She moved to her first patient—a middle-aged delivery driver whose ribs were crushed after a clone slammed him against his own van.
"Deep breaths," she said, guiding him through the pain as she adjusted his oxygen mask. "We'll get you stable. Just keep looking at me."
But every time she turned to check vitals or call for supplies, her eyes darted to the entrance, where more and more injured poured in.
Coworkers on the Front Lines
"First day back, huh?"
Imani turned to see Nurse Carla Nguyen, short, sharp-eyed, with her hair tied in a perfect bun that hadn't moved in years of trauma shifts. She was balancing two IV bags on one arm, her expression taut with exhaustion but softened by recognition.
"You picked a hell of a day to return," Carla said, slipping an IV line into a patient's arm like she was threading a needle in silk. "Thought I'd get you broken back in with something easy. Guess not."
Imani managed a faint smile. "Guess not."
At the next station, a tall, broad-shouldered nurse with a perpetual five o'clock shadow glanced up. Marcus Keene, charge nurse on the floor. Gruff, but dependable. "Don't let Carla scare you," he said as he checked a monitor. "It's been like this since the clones started patrolling. They call it law enforcement. I call it a damn triage machine."
Imani nodded, moving toward another patient with a sprained wrist. "Feels less like law enforcement and more like punishment."
Marcus didn't look up, but his voice carried. "That's because it is."
By mid-morning, the ER looked like a war zone.
A man whimpered through split lips, claiming he'd been fined by a clone for not picking up after his dog—and when he mouthed off, it shattered his jaw.
An elderly woman wept quietly on a stretcher, her wrist broken after she'd "failed to yield" while walking with a cane across the crosswalk.
Even the staff were rattled. Every new arrival made the air heavier, the question unspoken: how long until one of us ends up on those stretchers?
Imani kept moving, hands steady, voice calm, heart burning. This was what she had come back for—to help, to heal. She could not let the fear
At noon, she finally caught a breath in the staff lounge.
Dr. Evelyn Harper, an ER physician in her early forties with a wry sense of humor, sat at the table scrolling grimly through her tablet. "Seventeen admissions in four hours," she muttered. "And not one for natural causes. All clone-related."
Carla flopped into a chair, rubbing her temples. "If they keep this up, the hospital's gonna collapse before the city does."
Imani poured herself a cup of stale coffee and tried to steady her hands. "How do you even reason with something like that? They're machines. They don't care if it's littering or assault—they just… act."
Dr. Harper looked up, eyes tired but sharp. "Which makes them worse than men. At least a cop can use judgment. These things? They don't see people. Just errors."
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the overhead TV flickering to life.
"Breaking news out of downtown Edgeport," the anchor's voice cut through the room. On-screen, shaky phone footage showed a horrific sight: Black Signal soaring over the city skyline, a limp, battered figure clutched in its armored grip.
Skybolt.
The caption read: "BLACK SIGNAL CLAIMS SKYBOLT – HERO CAPTURED ALIVE."
Imani's breath caught. The coffee cup slipped from her hand, shattering on the tile.
Carla's head whipped toward her. "Imani—?"
But she was already fumbling for her phone, dialing Noah's number with trembling fingers. One ring. Two. Voicemail.
She hung up and called again. Nothing.
"No, no, no…" Her whisper cracked as her chest tightened.
Dr. Harper muted the TV, her voice low but firm. "Imani. Sit down."
Imani shook her head. "I can't—I have to—"
But the call still went unanswered, the screen mocking her with silence.
The rest of the shift was a blur.
She stitched wounds, set bones, adjusted meds, all while her mind screamed Noah's name. Every siren outside, every shadow crossing the window, made her heart pound.
But she forced herself to keep going.
A child with a broken arm needed her smile to stop crying. A young woman with a concussion needed her reassurance to stay awake. An old man with chest pains needed her steady hand.
And so, Imani did what she had always done—she pushed her fear down and let her training take over. Her world was chaos, her heart breaking, but she would not let her patients see it.
When the next stretcher came in—another victim of a "jaywalking infraction"—she took a breath, straightened her shoulders, and moved to help.
Because that's who she was. And no matter what had happened to Noah, her city still needed her.