NEW EDEN SECTOR - ARCADIA GENERAL HOSPITAL
The nurses were preparing the body when it sat up.
Sarah Martinez had been a trauma nurse for twelve years. She'd seen unexpected recoveries before—people declared dead who came back, hearts that restarted after minutes of nothing. Medical science didn't know everything. Sometimes bodies surprised you.
But she'd never seen someone wake up after forty minutes of confirmed brain death from severe cranial trauma.
The young man—Orion Starr, twenty-one years old, construction accident victim, pronounced dead forty minutes ago—bolted upright on the gurney. His eyes snapped open, wide and disoriented.
"Where—" He grabbed his head, feeling for damage. Found nothing. No pain, no wounds, just intact skull where a steel beam had crushed it an hour ago.
Sarah approached cautiously. "Mr. Starr? Can you hear me?"
"I can hear you." His voice was steady despite the confusion in his eyes. "What happened?"
