A.N.: I owe some of you replies to various things, and I'll get on that as soon as I can. Until then, enjoy.

. . . . .

I wake up to pain.

I guess it's about time.

I hear myself let out a moan, just a little one and kind of far away, then close, and I'm here and I open my eyes – and flinch and hide my head, because it's daytime, and it's too bright. Still, I force one eye open again and see that the blinds on the window are all the way up. I should have pulled them down last night. I wonder if that would have been allowed.

"I know it hurts."

I jerk my head around to squint at the cop. The woman cop. Her name, what's her name? She's sitting in a chair next to this bed . . . another strange bed, another strange day . . .

Here, now.

I work my way onto my back and sit up, press my left shoulder against the wall so I'm sort of facing her. Angled towards her, anyway.

"We took you off the IVs this morning," says the cop. There isn't any feeling in her voice, or in her expression. It's as blank as a walker's. No, blanker: She isn't even hungry. That's bad. "Dr. Edwards couldn't find any reason you shouldn't be able to eat solid food, so he and I decided pumping nutrients into your arms was a waste of resources. And since you were so eager to take yourself off the morphine as well . . ." She lowers her eyes to my bad hand. "I decided that was a waste of resources, too."

I flex my knuckles under all the bandages, a stupid thing to do – what was a deep, throbbing ache sets itself on fire, and I snap my teeth over my lip. And taste blood soon after.

"Do you remember me?" she asks.

"Not your name."

"Dawn Lerner. I'm a police officer."

Do we still have those? Rick's not really one. He's . . . Rick.

"And your name is Sydney."

I told her my name? Yes. Yesterday. Why did I think that was a good idea? Why do I think it was a bad one now?

She says, "Can you tell me the name of the woman we found you with?"

Can I think of a good reason not to?

"Carol," I say, maybe because there's still some sedative left in me, I don't know. "Is she alive?"

"Yes, she is."

"I want to see her."

"That's not how things work around here, Sydney."

I wiggle my toes, curl my legs underneath me. I could walk, if I wanted to. I could run. "How do they work?"

"You see your friend when I say it's okay. Which will be after you answer some questions for me."

I don't like her.

"Are you in charge here?" I ask, maybe just so I can get another question in no matter what she wants.

"Yes."

And there we have it – I don't like this place. I mean, I wouldn't like it even if Beth hadn't come to me last night. I figure. I figure I'm smart enough by now, that I've seen enough by now, to judge a place by its leader.

"Now all the questions will be from my end," Dawn says. "Okay?"

No, damn it. Go stick yourself with a sedative. It's fun. Bitch.

I nod.

She asks what I would ask first: How I lost my fingers.

I tell her what I told Beth I would tell her. I take the Governor, I take Atlanta, and I write a story with some of my uncle and some of Joe and some of lots of other things sprinkled in. My whole group's a part of the story. The beginning of it, really. I had a group, you see, Dawn, and then we all got separated . . . I ended up with Carol. The Governor, who broke up our group after he destroyed the farm we stayed on, tracked us down and cut off my fingers to torment Carol. But then I got away and shot him through with an arrow.

No walker bites, no walker bites – who survives a walker bite?

Who does, indeed? How long has it been now?

Dawn asks what the Governor looked like. It seems wrong not to tell her about the eyepatch – or, rather, the single eye. The one I still see some when I sleep.

But I leave it out, because if she sends someone over there to check the place out and there's no sign of an eyepatch or a body – walking or not – that has one, she might be suspicious. Rick would be, I think. I would be.

So I say he was a tall man with dark hair.

Anything else?

Not really.

She asks how I know Carol.

I say I met her after the turn. She was friends with my dad.

Is my dad alive?

I say he was the last time I saw him.

What happened to my side?

The Governor – only, I haven't been calling him the Governor, did I mention that? I've called him Blake, because that was his last name and in the movies they always called the bad guys by their last names – Blake shot me in the attack that broke up my group . . .

I'm doing good, we're going places. Except it's occurring to me that if –

– when, damn you –

– when Carol wakes up, she won't know these stories, and if Dawn asks her these questions and Carol gives different answers, it could be bad. No, it will definitely be bad. Dawn, she means business. That's clear.

Oh, oh. And then she blows any smudge of a chance she may have had left with me when she asks, "When did you stop cutting yourself?"

It's not because of the question, either, that she loses all of me. It really isn't. It's because her face didn't change. Her tone didn't, either. She looked at me, a kid who lives in a world that took her to a place where she – where I – wanted to slice into my own skin, my own flesh and veins and arteries, and asked when I stopped doing that to myself without the slightest trace of sadness. Without any sign of –

Of what? Pity? You're looking for pity now?

"Around two months ago," I say. My voice is rock. I'm rock. Or ice . . . that's better.

"How long had you been cutting yourself?"

"Seven months. Eight."

"Why?"

God, I'm starting to hate that question, that simple three-lettered question. It never seems to draw out an answer I like. "It was how I dealt with things."

"But then you just . . . stopped?"

I don't say anything.

"Want to tell me about that?"

"People found out. They made me stop."

"Made you?"

"Got me to."

"So you didn't want to?"

"Yes, I just –"

Dawn waits.

"I just didn't know I wanted to stop."

She narrows her eyes. "Do you ever want to cut yourself now?"

"No."

"You're lying."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are. I know liars, and I know addicts. Cutting is an addiction. I bet you still think about it every day. Probably several times."

I'm back to not saying anything. Good God, my hand hurts.

It's like cutting without the cutting, having two fresh holes where fingers should be.

Dawn leans forward. "Did you ever try to cut deep enough to kill yourself?"

"What?"

She blinks. "Have you ever cut that deep? Deep enough to die?"

I want out, out, out – of here! Just out of here, out of this room! But I'm so still . . .

"Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?" she says, shut up, Dawn, but she says it. So many answers, right and wrong, dangerous and safe, swirl and flash and dart and disappear from my head, but the one that finally sputters from my mouth is –

"Have you?"

And Dawn, she says, "No," and I don't know if I believe her. But then she says, "Know what? Let's just talk about now. Do you want to kill yourself now, Sydney?"

"Why do you care?"

Her eyebrows pop up. Then she stands. She walks to my bedside table, and I lean away from her, but she doesn't reach for me. She reaches for a cloth covering something on the table and pulls the cloth away, and then I'm looking at a plate of meat and carrots and some sort of green. "This is solid food, which Dr. Edwards says you can eat, remember? It's food that any other person here could eat, too. It's a meal. The bandages on your hand are bandages we could have saved for another person. We could save all the other bandages we would use on you in the coming weeks for another person. The same goes for these pain pills." She picks up a small plastic cup with two little capsules inside of them, and my hand throbs all the way up into my chest, where it makes a hole. "And that bed? It could belong to someone else. Someone who needs it. Someone who has a life they want to keep."

She's leaning over me now, even though I'm still leaning back.

"If you want to die," she says softly, "tell me now, so I can save all of these resources for someone who doesn't."

My head spins, all of me spins. I stare. I stare for too long, because she shifts her weight and asks, "Was something I said not clear?"

"No," I say. "It's just that's the first time a grown-up's talked to me like I'm a grown-up in a long time."

Something changes in her eyes. She's human for a moment, and I feel her like she's human, and she straightens and hooks her thumbs into her belt. "I understand that you're a child and that you can't be expected to understand every adult thing . . . but you need to understand this."

How gentle she sounds now.

She takes a breath. "Do you want to die?"

I watch as that human slice of her fades, slips away from her, leaving behind only the shell of a cop, the leader I can't trust. Another leader I can't trust.

I tell her no, I don't.

She nods. "Alright, then." She turns her back, moves to the door. "Eat, and take the pills. Then you can rest for the day. Tomorrow we'll talk about your job."

"I have a job?"

"Everyone here has a job. Everyone earns their keep."

My keep. As if there's anything for me to keep here. As if you have a shot in hell of keeping me.

I glance at the meal on the table. I almost tell her how I don't eat well, but then I realize that, hey, I'm starving. And I need to eat, on my own, even if I don't want to.

Because I'm not staying here.

"My friend," I say. "Carol. You told me I could see her. I want to eat in her room." I look over at Dawn to see the look she's giving me back, the kind of look that tells me to rethink fast, so I do, even though it twists all my insides and splits some of them. "Can I eat in her room?"

Dawn inclines her chin. Then ducks it down once. "Exam Room Two."

I pull myself out of the thin hospital blankets. I'm wearing the kind of suit a doctor might wear, or a nurse, all the same color and all the same scratchy substance, head to toe. And my arms are horribly bare, and I make sure to point my scars away from Dawn as I put my feet on the warm floor. A pair of white shoes and socks wait inches away from my toes.

"You should know," Dawn says as I get up, steadying myself, "It doesn't look your friend – Carol – is going to make it."

She could have said that while I was still in bed. She should have. I stare at her for a second too long, and then I crouch down and pull a shoe towards me. "Alright."

"I'm sorry."

I don't have an answer, so I don't try to spit one out.

She leaves. It's a relief, because it means I don't have to deal with her, and it means I can cry just by myself as I tie a shoe with eight fingers for the first time.

. . . . .

Carol is hooked up to machines and wires and she looks dead. So much so that I don't believe the heartbeat green-line thing, which says she's alive, and I actually reach out and press a hand against her chest to make sure her skin is warm, to make sure I can feel the blood pumping like it should. And it isn't pumping like it should. It isn't strong enough. But it's pumping. And it'll keep doing that, it has to.

You know better than that. No one is safe.

I put my plate of food by Carol's feet and pull the single other chair over by it. I stab some vegetables with a fork, shove them into my mouth and crunch them all up. I swallow, I wait, and then I say, "I'm eating, Carol. I'm eating and I'm not throwing up. I won't throw up."

Mind over matter. Who used to say that? Someone used to say that a lot. Back before, before it all. Before the turn, and way before my stomach started doing the twirls and swirls it's doing now. But I wait and wait and wait until that's gone. I've never been able to really wait like this before. Maybe that's the key. The wait.

I take another bite, this time of the meat. I can't tell what it is, and that makes me think of Terminus, and this time I have to put the plate down and put my head between my knees for two, maybe three minutes. But then, when everything inside of me smooths over – sort of, not enough for me to lift my head just yet – I say, "And I told Dawn – the leader here – I told her that I don't want to kill myself. And I don't. You know that, right? You know that?" I pull my head up. Carol is just lying there. "I need to that you know that. So I need you to wake up. You said you loved me, so you need to wake up."

She doesn't.

"Carol," I whisper. "Carol, please don't leave me and Beth alone . . . Please don't leave me."

She just lies there. Her heart monitor goes beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . but I can't get that to mean anything to me.

I press my half-hand against the bars on her bed until that pain drowns out the other, the inside pain. And then I take the two pills Dawn gave me. And hope they don't kill me. I sit there with my half-dead friend and my mutilated, burning hand, trapped in a hospital with people I don't know or love or would kill and die for, and now – now – I hope. Hope for life. Mine.

And in that moment I finally accept that I'm at least partly insane. And doing that sends such a wonderful wave of peace across me that I'm able to eat the rest of my meal without a single problem.