His hand found the fabric.
Cold between his fingers. The thin, cheap hospital curtain material — the kind that existed as suggestion rather than barrier. His grip on it was the grip of a man who had decided something and the deciding had taken everything he had left.
He pulled it back.
One motion.
The curtain slid on its rail with the quiet, metallic whisper of rings on a rod, and the room beyond opened, and Vikram's eyes—
Stopped.
His brain—
Stopped.
The scene on the other bed did not process as a scene. It processed as individual images arriving faster than the order they came in. His eyes trying to build a sequence from fragments and the fragments not making sense the way nothing makes sense when it is genuinely too much.
Moonlight. The window on this side full of it, the silver-blue of it washing everything in the cold, honest quality of light that does not soften.
The bed.
Her.
