And pain. Mindless, staggering pain.
In my leg.
Lifting the sheet covering me, I looked at the leg in question and frowned. There was a transparent bandage covering half of my thigh. No stitches. No blood. Just a weirdly large, sticky bandage that I could see my skin through. It looked fine. Maybe I’d been dreaming.
I wiggled my toes. Flexed my foot. Bent my knee. Tried to lift my leg.
“Damn it!” That hurt.
“Don’t move yet. The bone isn’t completely healed and won’t be for several more hours.” A doctor or nurse or medic, I had no idea which, walked around the foot of my bed with a scanner of some kind, reading data I couldn’t see.
“Hours?”
She looked up, and I was struck by the brightness of her pale gray eyes. “Yes, the femur is a very large bone in human anatomy, and yours was snapped in three places.”
“Three places?” I felt like a fool repeating everything she said, but I was trying to figure out how a broken bone could heal in just a few hours.
“Yes. Are you in pain?”
I thought for a moment. “Only when I try to move it.”
“Excellent. That will improve as the bone continues to mend. By tomorrow morning you should be fully healed.”
“How is that possible?”
“We surgically implanted osteobots along the breaks. They will rebuild your bone.” She patted me on the ankle. “Don’t worry, the diaphysis will actually be stronger than it was before.”
“The what?”
“The long part of your bone. In the middle.”
Was she trying to make me feel stupid?
“Normally we would simply do an injection, but your bone fragments required realignment as well.”
Fragments? Gross. I suddenly could picture a surgeon with a knife and a pair of pliers trying to move pieces of my femur around. Not cool. This conversation was making me sick.
Don’t ask.
Don’t you bloody ask…
“Where’s Darius?”
Damn it. Idiot. He wasn’t here. That was where he was. Somewhere else. Maybe he was hurt.
“He was creating a disturbance after his treatment. I do not know where he is now.”
“A disturbance? What kind of treatment? Is he hurt?”
She sighed, but the sound was more tired than anything else, so I let it go.
“Let’s see. Elite Starfighter Darius. Ah yes, here he is.” She scrolled through the data as I would have scrolled through a social media feed on my phone, pausing to scan, then moving her fingers again. “Two broken ribs. Bruises. A few minor burns. He was treated and released. He’s going to be fine.”
Relief flooded me and I tried to hold on to my anger from before, during the mission, but it drained out of me like someone had pulled the plug on a tubful of bathwater. Gone.
“How do I find him?”
She grinned. “I’ll put out a shipwide call. In the meantime”—her smile was infectious—“you have other visitors. If you feel up to it?”