Madison shifted in her hospital bed, aching body both grateful for the rest and anxious at the too-familiar feeling of sheets and a mattress. She’d spent a lifetime’s worth of time in bed, and being trapped in one, again, made her restless, even if the circumstances this time around were less desperate.

  She had woken up here earlier in the afternoon, and had spent the day dealing with a constant cavalcade of prodding adults: a social worker, nurses, a pediatrician that was stunned to realize that she was, in fact, nearly an adult, and not the emaciated twelve-year-old she’d been assumed to be. Each of these people had barraged her with questions, had asked for information that she couldn’t or wouldn’t give. Her name (she’d told them her first but was reluctant to offer her last), her social security number (she didn’t know), what had happened to her (she didn’t want to share about her runaway attempt, and what had transpired afterward she wasn’t quite sure about herself), who the man had been that had dropped her off (she didn’t remember any man). The staff had met her stonewalling with a mix of pity and tight-lipped frustration, and the constant social contact was draining her.

  Now she was sitting quietly, rubbing at the bandages on her hands, while the hospital’s dietician prattled on about nutrition. She let the words wash over her, catching only the odd noun, “meals… emaciated … eat at home? … concerned … growing girl,” while her eyes were drawn magnetically to the door, where she tortured herself with mental images of Gramma wheeling around the corner and stomping into the room to claim her again.

  The dietician was repeating herself now, asking a question.

  “Maddy? Do you think we can go ahead and get you some dinner?” The woman’s eyes smiled, her face hidden behind a mask.

  “Uh, I don’t-” Madison’s pulse quickened a bit. She desperately wanted to avoid making the dietician angry, but didn’t know how. “I don’t have any money. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need money, sweetie,” the dietician moved to pat her arm, but the sight of her bandages stayed her hand.

  “I don’t want to make trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble. We’ve got a whole kitchen making meals constantly, for the whole hospital. That’s what they’re here for.”

  Madison picked at the edge of a bandage. “I’m okay.”

  “Well, sure, but you could be better. Your body’s doing its best to heal itself, but it needs energy to do that. We need to get some food in you.”

  “Okay! Okay,” Madison acquiesced instantly, buckling under the pressure. “Sure. I’ll eat. Or, I’ll try.”

  The dietician studied her for a moment. “Nobody’s mad at you, dear. And don’t worry if you can’t keep much down. We also have some other options for liquid meals, if you’d rather not-”

  “I’ll eat! I’ll eat. Don’t worry about it.” Madison tried to flash a reassuring smile, but she could tell the dietician didn’t buy it. The woman nodded, slow and gradual, like she was trying not to spook a cornered animal, and produced a little laminated rectangle.

  “Here’s a menu. Feel free to browse, pick whatever you’d like, as much as you’d like.”

  Madison squinted at the paper, eyes struggling to focus on the glossy font. She recognized some of the offerings: soup, turkey, fruit. She looked from the page to the dietician, wary of some sort of unspoken trap.

  “Everything okay?”

  Madison looked back down at her paper and reddened a little. “What’s this?” She pointed to an illustration of a colorful stack of ingredients, meat layered on top of some vegetables and bread.

  The dietician glanced from the page to the girl, an almost imperceptible double-take. “What’s what, dear?”

  “This. This… food item.”

  “A hamburger.”

  Madison realized a second too late that she probably should have feigned some sort of bashful recognition. The chance passed her by, and the dietician’s eyes crinkled in concern.

  “Have you never seen one of those before?”

  Madison, caught between an impulse to lie, an impulse to confess, and an impulse to beg this woman not to let anyone who said she was her grandmother into her room, froze. The dietician, realizing an answer wasn’t forthcoming, stood from her bedside and stepped to the door.

  “You take some time to look over the menu and I’ll be back in a bit. Do you remember Julia, the nice woman who talked to you this morning? She’s not in the building right now, but I think she’ll be back tomorrow with some more questions about what’s going on for you, at home.” The dietician smiled at her with her eyes again. “I know this is all probably very frightening, but please, try and be brave and tell her the truth. We all want to help you.”

  With that, the woman left her alone.

  Madison held the menu gingerly, like it might try to bite her, and struggled to make a choice. The idea of choosing what her dinner would be, demanding that a specific food be made and brought to her, filled her with pre-emptive shame. Wouldn’t the kitchen people be mad? That she made them go out of their way?

  She was so hungry, though. More so than usual, a stabbing sort of need that permeated the usual general fog of ambient hunger she’d learned to live with.

  She had been puzzling over the dilemma of how to select a meal without somehow incurring the wrath of the kitchen workers when she heard a knocking at her window and turned to see the man perched on the other side of it.

  Madison startled in her bed and let out a little yelp. She reflexively drew the covers up to her chin, before a wave of shame at the childish gesture made her freeze.

  The man on the other side of the window grinned sheepishly and waved, a curt, awkward gesture that she had no idea how to interpret. Madison was stuck somewhere between fear and total bewilderment.

  On the one hand, this was an almost perfectly unthreatening looking man. The kind of figure that would have been casted to play the dad in an old sitcom, the kind she’d been briefly allowed to watch years and years ago. He was dark-skinned, a little paunchy, with a thinning thatch of wild black hair flattened over his scalp. His smile was sheepish and crooked and, maybe deceptively, kind.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  On the other hand, he was somehow perched on the thin ledge outside her window, which stood maybe eighty feet above the ground. He was doing something with his hand now, pressing it flat against the glass, and suddenly the child-safe mechanism keeping the window locked in place was snapping open of its own accord, and he was sliding the glass pane to the side and clambering in.

  Madison’s arm darted for the “call nurse” button and the man made a pained noise.

  “Wait!” he whispered. “Wait, please, I swear I’m not here to hurt you.”

  Madison paused for a moment, then went to press the button. The man covered the distance between the two of them in a blink, so fast that she didn’t even really see him move. He restrained her hand, gently but firmly, and she started screaming.

  “Help! Help me!” Madison shrieked. “There’s a man in here! There’s- Someone!”

  “Hey, shh shh shh,” the man cooed. It wasn’t the urgent kind of shushing he’d used a second earlier, more the kind of noise you’d use to quiet an angry toddler.

  “Help! There’s a- There’s a hooligan! Heeeeeelp!”

  “A hooligan?” the man chuckled, bemused. “Hey, don’t hurt yourself. They can’t hear you.”

  Madison thrashed, screamed more. After one minute, two minutes passed without anyone ducking in to check on her, she considered what he’d actually said.

  “Why can’t they hear me?”

  The man did another one of those nauseatingly quick sprints, popping over to the door to lock it, before reappearing at her side. “I was muffling the sound of your voice. It’s hard to explain how. But I can sort of catch sounds, pluck them out of the air if they come from something close enough to me. So stop screaming, you’ll hurt your voice.”

  Madison acquiesced, snapping her mouth shut. She receded within herself, averted her eyes and froze again.

  “I get that me just appearing here was probably scary. Sorry. They wouldn’t let me come up the normal way.” The man smoothed his wispy hair and cleared his voice. “But I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Madison kept quiet. She figured that if the man wasn’t supposed to be here, she could get in trouble for talking to him.

  “Okay, okay, you’re the strong-but-silent type. I can respect that.” The man flashed another of his wonky grins. “But I’m going to need a few answers from you. For your own safety.”

  Madison stiffened, and the man flapped his hands, shook his head.

  “Not from me! Not from me. From-”

  An awful realization dawned on Madison, shook her from her silence. “You know Gramma? Is that who you’re talking about? Is she coming?”

  “Your grandma? No. Why, is she your guardian? Does she know where you are? I could get someone to call her, if-”

  The man read the naked terror on the girl’s face, digested it, and then nodded knowingly, his eyes flicking to her sunken cheeks, her impossibly small wrists. “Right. Never mind. No, I don’t know your grandma, and I won’t go asking around for her. Promise.”

  A sliver of Madison’s panic subsided, and she sunk back into her bed.

  “What’s your name? I’m Victor.”

  “Madison,” she responded, before she remembered her plan to keep quiet. She felt a flare of anger at the man, as if he’d tricked her.

  “Hey, that’s a nice name. That’s my sister’s name.”

  The man paused, waited for some response from her, and when none was forthcoming he cleared his throat and plowed on. “My kids and I found you passed out in the woods. And from what we could tell, you’d been there for a long time. And what’s stranger, is it looked like… Like you’d fallen from quite a height. What happened?”

  Madison hardly knew herself. She had a clear enough memory of that night, of the unbearable tension of her long, slow trip down the highway, the terror of Gramma’s car appearing, the pain of falling down the hill. Everything after that was a blur. She had snatches of images and sensations: dirt in her mouth, the smell of blood, the prickles of leaves and branches snapping against her skin at speed, the sight of city lights and treetops inexplicably beneath her, the chill of a swift wind. Then nothing.

  “Madison, I think I have reason to believe that you might be special. And by that, I mean really special. Capable of doing some very amazing things.” The man glanced back at the window. “Like me. I’m sure it’s not every day you meet a guy who can hop across a room in the blink of an eye.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Explaining it all would take me a lot longer than would probably be smart. I’m not supposed to be here, after all.” He winked at her like they were sharing some harmless secret. “Listen, obviously stay here as long as you can, as long as you need, to rest up. You look like you need it.”

  He’d been maybe the tenth adult that day to comment on her body like that. At this point, the remarks bounced off of Madison, and she kept her eyes lowered, kept picking her bandages.

  “You should be safe here,” the man said, more like he was trying to convince himself than her. He studied the room. “Yeah, it’s a kid’s hospital. They’d have to be- They’re not that desperate. But, once you get out, Madison, hey, can you look at me please? I need to know that you’re hearing what I’m saying.

  Hesitantly, she lifted her eyes to meet his. Victor’s brows were furrowed with concern.

  “Once you’re out of here, you’ll be in danger.”

  Madison nodded knowingly. “Gramma’s going to-”

  “Not from Gramma. Other people. People who are much scarier.”

  Madison, dubious, crossed her arms. “I don’t know any other people.”

  “And they don’t know you, not really, but they know about you.” Victor twiddled his fingers, like he was wrestling with his words. “The thing, the very complicated thing that makes you and I special, it… It draws certain people to you. And these people are not like me, they’re not gentle. They want to take something from you, and use it for their own ends, and they want it very badly.”

  “Then they can just have it. I don’t care.”

  “You should,” Victor said. “The only way they can take it from you is by killing you.”

  Madison felt a chill. She was used to being the target of ire, and cruelty, and punishment, but she’d never had to worry about someone wanting to kill her. “They want to- Why? What did I do wrong?”

  “Oh, kiddo, nothing. It’s very unfair.” Victor seemed torn between an urge to pat her arm and leave her alone. He, mercifully, picked the latter, and drew a slip of paper from his pocket, which he left on her bedside table. “That’s my phone number. Once you’re out of here, if you don’t want to go back to your Gramma, give me a call. I’ve got a couple other kids your age, in a very similar situation, and they’d love to meet you. I can explain everything then, and I can keep you tucked away somewhere safe for a while if need be.”

  Madison picked up the slip, studied it, still skeptical. “You want me to live with you? I just met you.”

  Victor held his hands up, palms out, placating. “Of course, no pressure. If there’s someone you think you’d be safest with, stay with them. Still, though, you should at least call. There’s a lot you’ll need explained, and not a lot of people are as qualified as I am to teach you. Until then, hang tight here, try and rest, eat up. And if you see anything, or anyone here that seems suspicious, make sure you call a nurse as fast as you can.”

  “Right,” she deadpanned. “Like I tried to when you showed up, five minutes ago.”

  Victor laughed nervously at that, eyes flicking from the “call nurse” button to the door. “Good point. Well. If anyone’s crazy enough to show up here, they’re probably not going to be as fast as me.”

  The man seemed to be stressing himself out as he talked. He heard something inaudible, out in the hallway, and he popped back over to the window, sliding it open in one quick motion. He hesitated, scanning her room again, as if checking for hidden intruders, before flashing her one more smile. “Remember. You can call me any time. Hang in there, kiddo.”

  And then the balding, portly man launched himself from the eight story window and zipped away, leaving her alone. Something new was gnawing at Madison’s gut now, competing with her ravenous hunger.

  The feeling was fresh, urgent fear, laced with something like hope.