Strangelets Read Free Page A

nowhere she could feel. Even weirder, she still wore her own pajamas—anywhere buta hospice would have insisted on an official gown.
Why had they moved her?
    The window curtains were drawn; it must be nighttime, even though the overhead lights weren’t muted the way they usually were. Which also explained why her family was gone.
    Still, it was kind of strange for them to head home when she was at death’s door, after barely leaving her alone for weeks. Maybe something in her condition had changed. But she couldn’t have improved that much, right? Unless they’d suddenly developed a cure for her rare brand of terminal lymphoma that afternoon …
    She scoffed. The doctors had made it pretty clear that nothing short of a miracle would buy her even a few more months. And Sophie wasn’t a big believer in miracles.
    She felt alive enough, though: groggy and thirsty and irritated. Sophie sighed.
    She was ready to be gone. She’d felt
relief
as that void had swallowed her whole. But she must have been dreaming, right?
    Great. The last thing she wanted was to face more interminable weeks with her family hovering around maintaining a deathwatch.
    Well, since she was apparently stuck here, she might as well try to get some real sleep. And for that, she’d need painkillers; after months of morphine, it was tough to sleep without it. But the stand that usually held the drip with its “magic button” was gone; the machine let her dose herself as needed and turned off automatically when she tried to take too much. She knew that from experience, having tried a couple of times to mess with it. She’d always found that fail-safe measure annoying; why not just let her make the decision? That way she could have spared her family weeks of
their
lives.
    Well, a nurse should be able to get the drip set up in a couple of minutes, max. Sighing, Sophie fumbled around for the call button with her right hand. No sign of it. She tried with her left; sometimes the newer, more incompetent RNs moved it to the wrong side during sponge baths. Not there either. Crap. There was no way she was going to be able to sleep with fluorescent lights glaring down on her, it was like trying to nod off on the surface of the sun.
    “Damn it,” she muttered. “I can’t believe they forgot to turn off the lights—”
    Sophie yelped as the room abruptly plunged into darkness.
    In the wake of the glare, it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. Not pitch black, she realized; there was a faint glowing seam around the circumference of the room at ankle height and another at waist level, casting the space in a watery blue glow. Sophie experienced the disarming sensation of having been suddenly submerged.
    “Weird,” she said out loud. She’d spent a serious chunk of the years since her diagnosis in various hospital rooms. None had been this fancy. And as far as she’d seen, no one had entered the room to dim the lights. Something occurred to her. It was ridiculous, but maybe …
    “Lights!” Sophie called, feeling silly.
    She flinched as the lights flared back to life. “Dim lights?” she tried. Sure enough, they faded to a pleasant half-glow. She almost laughed.
    “Wow,” she muttered. Wherever she was, it was pretty over the top. Dad’s health insurance had balked at covering the hospice costs, so how could they afford this place? She’d really love to ask someone. She groped among the blankets for the call button again, then peered over both sides of the bed.
    A strange realization struck her. Slowly, Sophie drew back up to a seated position and held her hands in front of her face, examining them.
    It had been at least a week since she’d managed to move so much as a finger. She’d grown accustomed to the slightest motion sending waves of pain through her, tortuous jolts that were only diminished by the steady pump of morphine. But not only was the IV drip gone, there was no scar where it had been attached. And
nothing
hurt. She almost felt like