Simon woke to the sound of breathing that wasn't his.
It took him a moment to realize it was a machine. The rhythm was wrong—too even, too patient. He opened his eyes and immediately closed them again as light pressed against the backs of his eyelids.
When he tried a second time, he did it slowly.
The ceiling above him was white, broken up by seams and fixtures that meant nothing to him yet. A thin tube ran across his field of vision, looping down toward his chest. His mouth felt dry, like he'd been breathing dust for hours.
He swallowed. It hurt.
Memory came back in fragments. Sirens. A blue sky. The inside of an ambulance. Then nothing that stayed put long enough to hold.
He shifted slightly and regretted it at once. Pain flared along his leg, sharp and immediate, then settled into a dull, constant presence. His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
"Okay," he murmured, mostly to see if he could.
His voice sounded wrong. Thinner. Used up.
Someone noticed.
A figure moved into view from his left, resolving into a nurse in scrubs the color of faded leaves. She glanced at a monitor, then at him, then smiled in a careful, professional way.
"Welcome back," she said. "Try not to move too much."
"How long?" Simon asked.
She tilted her head slightly. "A few hours. You took a bit of a hit."
That felt like an understatement, but he didn't have the energy to argue. He let his eyes drift around the room instead. Curtains half-drawn. Another bed on the far side, empty. A television mounted high on the wall, volume turned low.
It was on.
He hadn't noticed the sound before, but now it threaded through the room, quiet but persistent. A news anchor stood in front of a graphic showing a map of the city, sections highlighted in warning colors.
"…aftershocks are still being reported," the anchor was saying. "Emergency services are urging residents to remain indoors if possible—"
The nurse reached up and muted it.
"You need rest," she said, not unkindly.
Simon nodded. He wasn't sure he believed her, but he nodded anyway.
When she left, the room felt larger. Emptier.
He lay there and tried to take inventory of himself. One leg wrapped in bandages, elevated slightly. An IV in his arm. A dull ache everywhere else, like he'd been bruised in places he hadn't found yet.
He was alive.
The thought came back again, unchanged.
Alive—but not in a way that felt celebratory.
A doctor came by not long after. Older. Tired eyes. He explained things calmly, using words like fracture and concussion and lucky. Simon listened and nodded at the right moments.
"Do you remember what happened?" the doctor asked.
Simon hesitated.
"I was in a vehicle," he said. "Then… it wasn't on the road anymore."
"That's close enough," the doctor said, and wrote something down.
They asked him questions after that. Simple ones. Name. Date. Where he thought he was. Simon answered them all correctly, though each answer felt like it had to travel a longer distance than usual to reach his mouth.
Eventually, they left him alone again.
Time became unreliable after that. He drifted in and out of shallow sleep, waking to the same ceiling, the same quiet beeping, the same sense that something had shifted while he wasn't looking.
At one point, voices rose in the hallway. A stretcher rolled past. Someone cried. Someone else spoke too softly to hear.
The television came back on when no one was around to turn it off again.
Simon watched without much interest at first. A collapsed overpass. A residential block with its front peeled away. Interviews with people who looked stunned rather than sad, still too early in the process to know what they'd lost.
The numbers changed as the hours passed.
Confirmed casualties.
Missing persons.
Areas still unaccounted for.
He searched the screen for something specific and only realized after a while that he didn't know what it was. A street name, maybe. A familiar landmark. Proof that the city he knew still existed somewhere under the damage.
Instead, the footage shifted to a press conference.
An official stood behind a podium, flanked by emergency responders. He spoke carefully, emphasizing preparedness, response times, coordination. Simon listened until the words blurred together.
Then the anchor said something that made him look again.
"…authorities have confirmed that a police transport vehicle was caught near the epicenter at the time of the quake. All officers involved were killed. One civilian survived and is currently being treated at a nearby hospital."
Simon felt something cold settle in his chest.
The anchor continued, already moving on to the next topic.
No name. No face.
Just a line in the story.
He turned his head slightly, staring at the wall instead. The room felt quieter without the television, though he hadn't touched the remote.
He thought of the officers again. Their stillness. The way he'd waited for one of them to move.
He thought of his relative. The closed door. The unknocked knock.
A nurse came in later with a cup of water and helped him drink. She asked if he had anyone to call.
Simon opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"No," he said finally.
She nodded, accepting it without comment.
Night fell without ceremony. The windows darkened. The lights dimmed. Somewhere outside, sirens continued to move through the city, fewer now, but not gone.
Simon lay awake longer than he expected.
When sleep did come, it wasn't restful. Images surfaced and dissolved without sequence—cracked pavement, flashing lights, a line of text he couldn't quite read. He woke once with his heart racing, convinced for a moment that the room was shaking again.
It wasn't.
Morning arrived quietly.
Sunlight filtered in through the window, pale and uncertain. A different nurse came by. Breakfast followed, mostly untouched. The television played softly again, repeating the same footage with slight variations.
Simon watched until something else caught his attention.
A sentence scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
Authorities urge calm as further tremors are expected.
He stared at it longer than necessary.
Expected.
The word sat poorly with him.
He thought of the story he'd read. The way it hadn't explained itself. The way events had simply… happened, recorded without commentary.
He wondered if, somewhere, another chapter was already waiting.
The thought should have frightened him more than it did.
Instead, it felt familiar.