“How did you know we’d survived?” I asked. “Maybe we’d just been eaten by the monsters.”
“Most of the team assumed as much,” said Mills. “I was the one who noticed that one of the human bodies had received a makeshift ‘embalming’ with eighty-seven-octane gasoline. That didn’t prove anything, but it sure suggested a lot of really wild possibilities.”
“The most lurid of which,” I said, extrapolating the likely story, “was that I had gone full psycho, betrayed my team, and left a gruesome calling card to announce the beginning of my serial-killer career.”
“Now it sounds like you’ve been reading my personnel reports.”
“How true do you think that version is?” I asked. “Measured in the number of armed marines waiting in the hall to ‘apprehend’ me?”
“Three,” said Mills simply. “Plus two more outside. Which is not nearly as many as there could have been.”
Brooke groaned, and we looked at her in unison. She moved her hand—more of a twitch than a conscious movement—and moments later the nurse bustled into the room.
“The MRI results are looking really clean,” he said, studying the monitors and tapping a pen against his cheek. “It’s practically a miracle. Now it looks like your girl is waking up.”
“Woman,” I said. Mostly just to bug him.
Brooke took her time regaining consciousness, and with the nurse in the room Mills and I couldn’t talk freely. Mills caught my eye at one point, nodding toward the door, but I ignored him and looked back at Brooke. If they were going to separate us, they were going to have to do it by force.
“Hey there,” said the nurse, shining a small penlight in Brooke’s eyes. “Are you waking up now? Can you hear me?”
“Where am I?” asked Brooke. Her voice was raw and ragged.
“You’re in a hospital,” said the nurse. “You hit your head pretty hard. Do you remember that?”
“My head,” said Brooke, and she tried to touch her bandage with her palm. A thick leather restraint stopped her hand just a few inches above the bed railing, and she rolled her head to the side to look at it, squinting her eyes in the bright light. She tugged on the restraint again, as if not comprehending its purpose, then tested her other arm and found it was restrained as well. She sighed and closed her eyes again. “Severe suicide risk,” she said. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I’m right here with you,” I said, raising my voice a bit to make sure she could hear me.
She smiled. “John.”
“His name is David,” said the nurse. “Do you remember Da—”
“She’s always called me John,” I said. “It’s okay.”
The nurse nodded, glancing at Agent Mills as if he was trying to put us all together, like a puzzle. He looked back at Brooke. “Okay, sweetie, we’re going to do a few more quick memory tests if that’s all right. You hit your head pretty hard and we want to make sure you didn’t scramble your noodles. You recognized John’s voice and that’s great—can you tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Your name is…” the nurse began, but he stopped talking as a wide, wicked grin spread across Brooke’s face. Her eyes were still closed. The nurse nodded. “I get it, sweetie, you’re just playing with me. Let me rephrase the question: do you know your name?”
“Some of them.”
“Start with the first one.”
“Uh uh uh,” said Brooke, her voice somewhere between playful and taunting. “That’s a secret.”
“You can tell me, honey, I’m a nurse.”
“You’re not going to get anywhere with this,” I said. I’d seen this side of Brooke before, and it wasn’t Brooke at all.
The nurse shot me a glance. “I have to test for brain damage.”
“Physical damage is not her problem,” said Mills. “Put in terms you’re familiar with, she has dissociative identity disorder. Ask her name, her age, where she’s from, any of the standard questions, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Sometimes more.” He pulled out his badge and held it up, establishing his absolute authority over the situation. “You’re going to go out in the hall and mark this test as done, and you’re going to mark the results as positive.”
“Negative,” I said.
Mills frowned. “Whichever one means she’s healthy and doesn’t have any memory loss.”
“So, negative,” said the nurse.
“This is why I didn’t go into medicine,” said Mills. “You make no sense at all.” He opened the door. “Thanks for your service to the United States government.” The nurse left, and Mills closed the door.
“Would my pay bump have included a badge?” I asked. “Because what you just did looks super fun.”
He slipped his badge back into his suit coat and walked to the side of Brooke’s bed. “So,” he said. “Are you going to tell us who you really are?”
“I’m an innocent little girl,” said Brooke.
“He knows everything,” I said softly. “You don’t have to hide.”