Page 26 of Legacy Ascended

“That’s so much worse.”

Jon glances at them in the mirror. “Neither of you is prescribing anything.”

“I’m protecting her,” Torres says.

“You’re trying to put her in bed for a week.”

“Exactly.”

I laugh, which pulls at my shoulder, which makes me swear, which makes all three of them ask if I’m all right at once.

“I’m fine. Stop it. Keep arguing.”

They do. I lie there listening to them negotiate my recovery like I’m not in the car, and the ordinary sound of their voices does more for me than anything Doc put in my arm.

The Luftis gate comes up out of the dark a little after one — the lamps along the drive, the black shape of the gate tower against the sky — and I sit up as far as the belt lets me.

"There it is," Jon says.

My room is here. My friends are waiting. Pickles is back at Jon's cottage, probably ignoring everyone who's been feeding him.

The infirmary entrance has its lights on and its door propped, and there are four people standing in the cold outside it, still awake and waiting for me.

Jon has barely stopped the car.

"She's still in the—" somebody starts.

Sophia comes through the middle of all of it.

She gets to my door as it opens and then stops dead, both hands out, and says the most useful thing anybody has said to me all day.

"Which side can I have?"

"Right. Left's the bad one."

Then she's very carefully on my right with both arms around me and her face in my neck, holding on as if she's been holding her breath since this morning. Behind her Renzo is saying something with his voice breaking in the middle of it, and Declan has a bag of food in one hand and my room key in the other, and Freya has hold of my sleeve and hasn't said a word.

Over Sophia's shoulder the medical team comes out with a chair.

"One minute," I tell them.

They give me one minute.

Chapter five

Jessica

Sophia is still talking into my collar when the clinician clears her throat.

"—and I want you to know that I said at breakfast, I said to Renzo, she's been weird about that appointment for a week, and he said that's because it's an archive and archives are weird, and I said—"

"Miss Dimitriou." The clinician has a voice you could iron a shirt with. "You can walk in beside her."

Sophia detaches herself one arm at a time and then takes up a position at my right elbow like she's been glued to me.

Torres holds the chair while I lower myself into it. I'm too tired to argue.

Renzo falls in on the other side.