“Sorry.” Hwa looked at the pitcher at her bedside. “Give us a bit of that?”
“Aye.” Kripke poured some into a little tumbler and held it out. Hwa took it with her left hand. It tasted vaguely brackish. They hadn’t had rain in a long while, and the desalinators were working overtime.
“Brain scan?” Hwa asked.
He shook his head. “Not yet. You think you…?”
“Might have.”
Kripke ran a slow hand over his mouth and beard. He was pissed. She had missed that, his anger. His disappointment and frustration had a certain weight and thickness. When it settled over her, like a blanket, she knew she could be doing better. She knew there was room to improve. It was a comfort.
“Some stunt you pulled, back there.”
Hwa snorted. “Yes, b’y.”
Kripke laid one massive palm over her right hand. Dull pain throbbed up the arm. He must have sensed it, because his grip lightened. He took gentle hold of her fingers, instead. “Remember I said you’d have to learn to kick, because with hands like these you’d never punch?”
She nodded.
“Then you gets in the ring with little Ronnie Tolliver and you ups with that knife hand strike, right to his eyes, and I hauls you out because it was an illegal hit. You almost quit right then and there because you thought you should have won the match.”
“I should have. He was on his knees.”
Kripke blinked glassy, wet eyes. “How’re you getting on?”
Hwa reached over with her good hand and patted his. “Farbed up. But on the mend.” She cleared her throat. Her accent always got thicker when she was with Kripke. The gym was the one place she didn’t have to worry about her English or her Korean being wrong, and she could just talk like everyone else. “Quit the gig.”
Kripke folded his arms on his belly and leaned back in his chair. He needed to lose weight. He was going to be a statistic, soon. She had a sudden desire to be back in the gym with him, lifting or running or even just having fun on the trampoline. She missed the trampoline. But the gym was different without Tae-kyung. She had tried going back, after. But it stung. His ghost was strongest there.
“You what?”
“Quit.” She sipped more water. “They jerked me around. So I quit.”
Kripke’s furry eyebrows came together like two caterpillars checking each other out. “Jerked you around how?”
Hwa licked her lips. They were suddenly very dry. Christ, what if she’d imagined it? Imagined the weave peeling away from the skullcap’s head and the flashing lights underneath. Imagined the dead look in his eyes, like a doll’s. Imagined the shape in the water.
“Hey!” Kripke plucked the cup of water from her hands. “You’re gonna get it all over yourself, shaking like that. You cold?”
“Aye,” she heard herself say.
He was pulling the blanket up higher on her body and searching the room for something. “Goddamn hospitals. Always too hot or too cold. So. Youse quit?”
Hwa nodded emphatically. “Hell yeah, I’s quit. I’s done.”
Kripke jerked a thumb behind him. “You tell that to your detail?”
Shit. Of course she would have to tell Joel. How was she going to explain that? “Joel? Is he out there?”
Kripke shook his head. “He left before you woke. Big tall ginger fellow came for him.”
“Me boss. Ex-boss.”
“Some gear, that one. Cockier than two roosters in a henhouse.”
Hwa laughed. It hurt. “That’s him, sure.”
“Well, he raked me over the coals, asking me about you. I haven’t seen a man so down in the mouth since Bellucci took the fall in the quarter-final five years ago.” Kripke peered at her from under the bill of his hat. “You hearin’ me, ducky?”
Hwa looked away. She didn’t even have a chance to answer. A chime sounded in her room. “Jung-hwa Go? It’s time for your eye test.”
*
“Glaucoma’s pretty common in people with Sturge-Weber,” the doctor said. “And you’re overdue for your eye exam.”
Hwa was the first patient with Sturge-Weber that he’d ever met. He said he owed it to himself to learn as much about rare diseases as he could, when they presented themselves. Rotational residents got a special hazard bonus if they agreed to do work offshore. They would be among the last to leave, in an evacuation scenario.
“Like the spackle in your arm, for instance,” Dr. Hazard Pay was saying. “It’s really for burn victims. We can administer it in triage situations before an evacuation. It comes out of a big extruder gun, sort of like a pastry bag.”