prologue
Nico Minoru is walking on ice.
She treads precariously down the hall across a frozen stream, the tiles beneath her just as smooth and white and biting. The nerve endings in her extremities feel raw and exposed. Every step she takes shoots a chill more painful than the last through the arches of her feet and up the back of her legs. Even the soft fabric of her white cotton sleepwear seems to have transformed to steel wool overnight; it now scrapes relentlessly against her sensitive skin.
She lifts her sleeve to check for blood but, unsurprisingly, finds nothing. She never does. In front of her, a boy struggles to move upward in line, hindered by his own violent shivering.
“Next.”
The voice is distant and soft-spoken, yet it cuts through Nico’s skull like an icepick. The fluorescent lights reflect off the floor’s glossy finish, seeping right through her eyelids, and provide no relief from her pounding headache. Her stomach rolls. Five more people, she counts. Then it’s her turn to make the pain stop.
“Next.”
Nico inhales deeply through her nose and tries to distract herself, to focus on anything other than how awful she feels.
This is how it looks in the old movies, she thinks. The protagonist walks down a white hall in a white gown, dark hair flowing over her shoulders. She meets the white-clad woman sitting behind the frosted partition, who hands her a little plastic cup containing little blue capsules. She knocks back the pills, opens her mouth, and the woman dismisses her. Then she walks away only to spit the medication back out from under her tongue.
If only it were that easy. Nico shakes her head. The movies always get it so horribly, unforgivably wrong. Of course the little film hero can refuse the pills when she can walk through the line with grace, when she feels steady on her feet and free from symptoms so frighteningly close to the flu. What the movies fail to show are the tremors, the sunken cheeks, the white-knuckled grip on one’s own wrists as they stumble down the line pale-faced and red-eyed, all sharp angles and knobby knees and greasy hair. And misery.
Nico can’t remember how long she’s been here, or how many times she’s walked herself through this routine. But she thinks about those vintage movie scenes every damn time.
Maybe the film heroes are smart not to trust the wardens. Maybe Nico isn’t crazy, and the pills merely want her to think she can’t live without them. Maybe what she feels at this moment isn’t the result of her condition, but withdrawal symptoms engineered to make her desperate for the next fix instead. Maybe she should refuse the medication and suffer through the detox until she’s clean and clear of mind.
But then what?
If there’s one thing Nico knows for certain, it’s this: it doesn’t matter.
The what-if’s carry no agency. Questioning her circumstances won’t change the fact that she’s stuck here, that once someone is admitted to The Gibborim Asylum for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, they don’t leave.
The boy in front of her mumbles a quivering thanks to the woman behind the partition and steps away toward the nearest warden. The man stands like a sentry, his white clothes nearly camouflaged against the wall, ready to beckon inpatients back to their rooms. Nico thinks maybe he’s just met her gaze, but her vision began spinning an hour ago and she can’t be fully certain she isn’t just imagining his stare.
“Next,” the woman calls, and Nico steps up to the tiny counter, bony elbows cupped in her palms. It’s Frances today.
“Hello, Ms. Minoru,” she says. Her voice is warm but mechanical, and the smile she offers matches perfectly. “How are you this morning?”
Nico doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to, not if she looks even half as horrible as she feels. Instead, she eyes the tiny plastic cup Frances holds in her hand and takes it graciously when the woman hands it to her.
Who cares if the wardens make Nico dependent on the pills? Thirty minutes from now her hands will stop shaking, her heart rate will settle, and the tingling numbness plaguing her lips and fingertips will finally subside. Who cares, when the pills make it all go away?
So she takes them.