Too Late For Regret, Mr. Booth

The gurney bucked beneath her, wheels squealing against linoleum, and Elise surfaced through layers of fog to find herself staring at a ceiling that moved. Fluorescent lights strobed past, each one a needle of pain behind her eyes.

"Fetal distress. All three. Prep the OR."

The voice belonged to a woman. Cold. Efficient. Elise tried to turn her head, but something held her-straps, hands, the weight of her own failing body.

"Please." The word came out wrong, slurred, her tongue too thick for her mouth. "My babies-"

"Save your strength, Mrs. Preston. You'll need it."

The ceiling stopped moving. Shadows gathered, shapes in surgical masks and blue scrubs, and then the lights changed. Not fluorescent anymore. Something harsher. Brighter. A surgical lamp that burned through her closed eyelids and turned the world red.

Dr. Eleanor Vance leaned into her field of vision. The mask covered her nose and mouth, but her eyes were visible-gray, flat, utterly without warmth.

"Administering anesthesia now."

"No-" Elise reached out, her fingers catching the fabric of Vance's gown, clinging with desperate strength. "Don't put me under. I need to hear them. I need to know they're-"

Vance peeled her hand away with mechanical precision. "Nurse. Restraints."

Something cold entered Elise's arm. She felt it traveling up her vein, chemical ice that numbed her fingers, her wrists, her shoulders. But her mind-her mind stayed awake. She screamed silently, trapped inside her own skull, as the scalpel descended.

She didn't feel the cut. She felt pressure. Tugging. The obscene sensation of hands inside her body, pulling, separating, extracting.

First: silence.

Second: silence.

Third: a sound. Thin. Weak. Like a kitten mewling in a distant room.

"Female. Apgar three. Get her to the warming unit."

Elise's eyes rolled wildly, trying to see, but a nurse's shoulder blocked her view. She strained against the restraints, her muscles screaming against the paralysis, and through the gap between bodies she saw-shadows. Movement. Two small bundles being carried away, no sound, no motion, nothing to suggest life had ever existed inside them.

"Time of death," Vance said, her voice carrying the casual weight of routine, "twenty-three-forty. Male twin A. Male twin B. Cause: intrauterine asphyxia secondary to placental abruption."

The words hit Elise like physical blows. Twin A. Twin B. Her sons. Her boys. The names she'd whispered to her belly for months-Jacob, she'd thought, for the strong one who kicked hardest. Iaan, for the quiet one who hid against her spine.

Gone.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, tracking sideways into her hair, because she couldn't move her hands to wipe them. The warming unit beeped somewhere to her left, a steady rhythm that meant one child still lived, but the sound brought no comfort. It brought only the crushing weight of what she'd lost.

The OR door swung open.

Jaida Powers entered in full surgical scrubs, her hair tucked beneath a cap, her eyes scanning the room with predatory assessment. She walked to the warming unit and looked down at the squalling infant within.

"Just the one?" she asked.

"Just the one," Vance confirmed. "The boys didn't make it."

"Shame." Jaida's finger traced the glass above the baby's face. "She would have been easier to explain away if they'd all died."

Elise's heart monitor spiked. The beeping accelerated, frantic, and Vance glanced at the screen with professional annoyance.

"She's conscious. The anesthesia didn't take fully."

"Doesn't matter." Jaida turned away from the warming unit, her hand going to the pocket of her scrubs. "She won't remember. They never do. Now, about disposal of the-"

The fire alarm screamed.

Not a drill. A full building alarm, piercing and insistent, accompanied by flashing red lights that replaced the surgical white with strobing emergency color. The intercom crackled to life: "Code Red. Basement level. All personnel evacuate immediately. This is not a drill."

Jaida's face twisted. "What-"

"Sprinkler system in the morgue," a nurse shouted, already moving toward the door. "Electrical fire. We have to go. Now."

The mention of the morgue sent a visible tremor through Jaida, a flicker of something that wasn't part of her plan. Her eyes darted toward Vance, a silent question passing between them before her composure cracked. "Damn it. Irma? Yes, there's a fire. I don't know. No, I can't-" She shoved past Vance, her heels slipping on the wet floor. "Handle the rest. Make sure she doesn't survive the evacuation."

She disappeared through the doorway. Vance hesitated, looking from Elise to the warming unit to the spreading water from the overhead sprinklers, and then she too ran, leaving behind her instruments, her patient, and the single living child in the plastic box.

Silence returned, broken only by the alarm and the hiss of water.

Elise bit her tongue.

The pain was sharp, immediate, copper flooding her mouth. It cut through the chemical fog, gave her something to focus on, something to climb toward. She bit again, harder, feeling the tissue tear, and the shock of it-pain she controlled, pain she chose-shook her awake.

Her fingers twitched. In the chaos of the evacuation, a panicked orderly had slammed a supply cart into the side of her gurney, and the impact had jarred the buckle on one of her wrist restraints, leaving it loose. Elise wrenched one hand free, then the other. Her body screamed in protest. She didn't roll; she slid, a dead weight tumbling off the gurney with a sickening thud. The impact sent a fresh wave of agony through her, tearing at her half-closed incision, and warm blood began to stream down her hips again. She didn't feel it as pain, only as a wetness that signaled her life draining away. She couldn't afford to feel it.

She dragged herself across the floor. The floor was cold and wet, her hospital gown tangling around her knees, her body leaving a trail of red that the sprinklers began to dilute to pink. Three feet. Six feet. Her hand found the leg of the warming unit and she pulled herself up, gasping, her vision black at the edges, and looked inside.

A girl. Tiny, purple-faced, fighting for breath through lungs that weren't quite ready. Her daughter.

Elise's hands shook as she unlatched the unit's side panel. The baby was lighter than she expected, lighter than air, lighter than hope, and she tucked her against her chest with one arm while her other hand searched for balance, for leverage, for escape.

The door burst open.

A young woman in nurse's scrubs stood silhouetted against the emergency lighting, her face pale with shock. "Oh my God. Oh my God, ma'am, you can't-"

"Help me." Elise's voice was barely human, a rasp of blood and desperation. She reached out, her blood-slick fingers closing around the nurse's ankle. "Please. They're coming back to kill us. Help me hide her. Help me save her."

The nurse-Brenda, her badge read, Brenda Kowalski, RN in training-looked from Elise to the baby to the spreading fire alarm, and something in her face shifted. A memory surfaced-another night, another powerful family, another girl who had been silenced. Her own sister. The look in Elise's eyes was the same. Her breath caught, and resolve hardened her features. She dropped to her knees, stripping off her own scrub top to wrap around the infant.

"I know Dr. Vance," she whispered, her voice shaking but certain. "She's not a doctor, she's a monster." She pointed down the hall. "Medical waste chute. It leads to the loading dock. I can get you to the service elevator, but you have to move. Now."

They moved.

The corridor was chaos, evacuating staff and patients streaming toward the main exits, but Brenda pulled Elise against the current, through a supply closet, down a maintenance stairwell that smelled of bleach and decay. Elise's body was failing, her steps staggering, her grip on her daughter the only thing keeping her upright.

The service elevator opened to the alley behind the hospital. Cold air hit her face, November in Manhattan, and Elise stumbled into the darkness with her daughter pressed to her heart.

Behind them, the basement level exploded.

The shock wave knocked her forward, and she fell to her knees on wet pavement, her body finally surrendering. She curled around the baby-her only baby now, her only everything-and watched flames consume the building where her sons had been declared dead, where her medical records burned, where Elise Preston ceased to exist in any database that mattered.

Brenda's hand touched her shoulder. "You need a hospital. Real help."

"No." Elise's voice was stone. "They'll find us. They'll finish what they started." She looked up at the young nurse, at the only person who'd shown her mercy in a night of monsters. "Tell them I died in the fire. Tell them there were no survivors."

"Ma'am-"

"Please." Elise pressed her daughter closer, feeling the faint flutter of that tiny heart. "Her name is Heaven. Help me give her a life. Please."

Brenda looked at the burning building. At the blood-soaked woman on the ground. At the infant breathing against her makeshift swaddle.

She took off her badge and pressed it into Elise's hand. "There's a clinic in Queens. St. Agnes. Ask for Sister Margaret. Tell her Brenda sent you."

Then she turned and ran back toward the fire, toward the lie that would save two lives, and Elise Preston disappeared into the November night with her daughter in her arms and her sons' names etched into the ash of her memory.