Ash and Cinder

25| Lullaby

I wake up to the soft refrains of the lullaby being chased out of my head by a high-pitched keening noise. Sludge sticks to the inside of my skull. From the exhaustion, from adjusting back onto the meds. I wobble when I jump to my feet, too flustered to tell where the sound is coming from.

One of the machines.

One of Elle's machines.

A stampede bursts through the door, an old man leading the way at a run. The lights spring to life, searing my eyes with fluorescent laser rays. Whitecoats. My heart seizes.

But no, the old man in lead is dressed in toothpaste green scrubs, like Yana. Nurses bundle in with a cart. One of them presses me away from Elle's bedside. I fling her back. She hits the wall with a thud and a shriek and immediately the old man hits a button on the wall.

"What's happening?" I demand.

The last remaining nurse is climbing onto the bed, straddling Elle's listless form, and pressing her hands to Elle's chest.

All the blood drains out of the bottoms of my feet.

Two barrel-chested men appear in the doorway. The one in front points a finger at me and says something I wouldn't be able to understand even if I did know Russian. Elle's heart monitor displays a thin flat line. One of the barrel-chests grabs me and pulls me toward the door. My body moves out of sync with the rest of the world. Stuck in place. All I can do is watch.

The woman jumps off Elle while a younger man pulls the sheets out of the way. There's too much happening at once to keep track of it all. The heart monitor is screaming, one of the scrubs is wrestling with the oxygen mask, another is yanking a red carrier from the cart and throwing it open.

The mustached scrub grabs a pair of floppy white squares, shouts an order, and presses them to Elle's chest. Elle arches hard, then falls limp. Dull ringing fills my ears.

"Come on, Elle, come one," I say, but I can't hear myself so maybe I only say it in my head. This could be all in my head, I could be asleep. I pinch myself. The pain is sharp and brief but it does nothing.

Again, she jerks and falls limp.

Again.

Again. I pinch myself a second time, a third time. I want to wake up, I want to open my eyes and find that none of this is real. But no matter how many bruises I leave on my arm, the scene stays the same.

After the fifth try, the mustached scrub jabs at the red carrier and the woman climbs up to restart chest compressions. The green line on the monitor carries on, and I stare at it, willing it to spike. But it doesn't.

And it doesn't.

And it doesn't.

The woman stops her chest compressions, and I lunge forward, begging them to keep going. She flinches away, afraid that I'll fling her into a wall too. Both barrel-chests wrench me back.

Don't let my sister die. Don't let Elle die. I'll do anything, I'll take her place, please, don't let her die. Please, please, please no.

The mustached man grips me by both arms, looks me in the eyes, says, "Her time of death, three forty-nine a.m. I am sorry."

If I stay upright, it is only by some miracle of physics. The world switches off. It is pitch black and dead silent for an endless, dragged-out moment. I blink, and it all returns with a force. The scrubs are gone and with them the machines. The sheet is smoothed out and pulled up over Elle's face.

I drag myself to the edge of her bed. I pinch the edge of the sheet with trembling hands and tug it down. She looks tiny without the machines. Blocked-up sobs squeeze my throat shut, unshed tears blind me, the shakes wrack my entire being.

She can't be gone. She isn't. It's not possible. She was awake earlier, she woke up, she was doing better. I run my thumb across her forehead and nothing happens. There's no shift, there's no color to her skin at all, only a bloodless kind of pale.

"No." I back away, terror crawling under every inch of skin.

I hit the other bed, the force knocks me to my knees. A scream rips out of my chest as I slam both fists into the concrete floor. Dust explodes around us, the building shakes and the floor crumbles into a valley of bent rebar and broken concrete.

Shattered bits of floor stick to the side of my hands like splinters, a broken chunk of rebar tears a ragged hole in my pants. No, no, not Elle. Please not Elle, please. Bring her back, let me take her place. Let me die instead, not Elle. Not now.

Stinging dust fills the air. I cough hard, standing and picking my way through the dust and the rubble to stand by Elle's bed. Wrapping my arms under her frail shoulders and knees, I lift her as gently as I can. She is impossibly light, limp. Cold. Dry. There's no pulse in her chest. I sit in the crater in the floor with her in my lap, and cry.

I shouldn't have fallen asleep, I should have been awake and ready to keep this from happening. But I wasn't and now she's dead. Elle is dead. My sister is dead.

I press my lips to her forehead and rock back and forth. Her horns scrape my arm. Tears smear on my glasses, pouring down my face.

Her horns. Her wings.

She will never get her wings.