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"That seems unfortunate."

The wallpaper disappeared. Then the icons. Then every screen in the room filled with dancing cartoon rodents wearing tiny sunglasses.

I stared. "What."

A nurse several desks away frowned at her monitor. "That's weird."

Another looked over. "My computer's doing it too."

Someone else shouted from down the hall. "I think the whole system's frozen!"

I quietly closed the browser. The hamsters continued dancing. Perhaps... the internet required a gentler touch. I drifted away from the nurses' station before anyone could blame invisible demons.

"Poppy?"

No answer. I looked around. Gone. A heartbeat later the bond yanked me upward so violently my boots left the floor. "Oh, for⁠—"

The ceiling swallowed me. Again. I reappeared on the second floor in the middle of a resident's room. "I despise this bond."

Apparently the spell considered approximately thirty-three yards to be a perfectly reasonable maximum distance. The moment Poppy wandered farther than that reality simply relocated me. Without warning. Without dignity.

She looked up from helping an elderly man into bed. "Oh, there you are."

"I was elsewhere."

"You sound grumpy."

"I was assaulted by architecture."

She blinked. "...What?"

"Nothing."

I brushed a box of Kleenex to the side. "This place is poorly designed."

She smiled. "I'll make sure the contractor knows."

She returned to fussing over her patient. Who asked, "What was that, dear?"

"No worries Mr. Henderson, I was just talking to myself."

I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. Watching. Again.

The old man reached for her hand. "Thank you, dear."

She squeezed it gently. "My pleasure, Mr. Henderson."

He smiled. So did she. Why? He would be dead in a few months, maybe if he was lucky a year or two. She knew that. He probably knew that. Yet somehow neither of them acted as though it mattered.

My gaze had lingered on the curve of her mouth a moment too long before I caught myself and looked away, unwilling to examine why.

Humans. I would never understand them. Still... when she smiled like that... the room somehow felt... less irritating. I frowned. I disliked that observation almost as much as I disliked the dancing hamsters.

By the time my shift finally ended, my brain felt like overcooked spaghetti. What. A. Day.

First, I found out I've apparently been sharing my life with an invisible demon for the past year. Then Mrs. Wilton casually announced she'd always been a fairy godmother. Then Azaren nearly blew up her living room trying to heal her. Oh, and somewhere in between, the hospital's entire computer system crashed because someone downloaded a virus.

I shook my head as I clocked out. "Some people really shouldn't be allowed near computers."