A fat drop of poison hung suspended over the last glass of water in the world. It took forever to fall, but fall it did, rippling jewel-green death into the liquid below. When the water stilled, it looked untouched. Clear and sweet and cold. The girl who had watched its descent stepped deeper into the endless room, her throat aching with thirst. Just a little sip. Just one little sip and she'd never be thirsty again. Both her hands ringed around the icy glass and she opened her eyes to the real world. The dream rolled off her, leaving a bitter taste on her tongue. Her throat still ached for water, an ache that told her the truth:

She was alive, and living things had no luxury of sitting still.

The moonbeams filtering through the window curtains illuminated the dim, vast space around her. Had she really woken, or was this still a dream? She squinted into the distance where shadows deepened and pooled as they always did in the corners of things. Corners meant walls. This wasn't the endless room of her dream. It was somewhere else, somewhere real. But it was no place that she knew. And more than just her throat ached. Her back, her chest, her stomach, all of her felt bruised and battered.

God, what had happened to her, and where was she?

No answer for the first question came to her, but the second might if she tried to find it. Another look at the giant room and she saw the things that she had missed before. A white screen to the left of her bed and the bottom of it, presumably for privacy. Whitewashed stone walls that rose to a ceiling that seemed as far away as clouds. White marble floors that glinted with the moon's light. White pillars that stretched up, up, up from that marble like ancient trees bleached by centuries of daylight. Row after row of beds, all of them done up in neat white linens, with neat white bars at the top and bottom of every single one of them. The beds that she could actually see looked empty. She stayed still and listened. No sounds of breathing or the moaning of dream-filled sleep. The swell of silence sang in her ears. She inhaled deeply. There, that scent. Astringent and sharp and too clean, the smell of a hospital or a doctor's office. But where were all the doctors, the nurses, the patients? How could she be the only person in an entire ward of what seemed to be a very large hospital?

Something was wrong here, deeply wrong, and she was caught in the middle of it. How she knew that she couldn't say. The knowledge simply fell over her like a shadow that she couldn't step out of.

Nothing good would happen if she stayed here. Nothing.

Her skin prickled at the truth of that. Panic twisted in her guts and punched the air from her lungs. Heartbeats flooded out the silence. No, nothing good would happen if she stayed. Something terrible had happened to her and she had been left in some strange place. Or perhaps that terrible thing had happened to her here. Either way, she needed to leave. She shifted up, sheets puddling at her waist and the air kissing coldly through her nightgown. Every part of her throbbed in one spot or another. It took a few painful breaths between her teeth before she forced herself up the rest of the way. Now her legs. She needed to get out of bed, needed to go.

She swept her right leg to the edge of the mattress, every muscle in it screaming a protest. Her left leg didn't move as easily. She took hold of her thigh, ignored the thrumming pain when she pressed her fingers into her flesh through her nightgown, and forced her leg to move. A mistake. Pain roared from her hip to her toes. White stars sparked in her eyes. She cried out, unable to stop herself. This new, fierce, fiery pain outshone the other injuries like a sun swallowing the light of distant galaxies. She stayed locked in place by that overwhelming light until it faded to the edges of her vision. Her knee throbbed, a feeling that spread like ice over a pond through the rest of her leg.

One of her hands shot up from her thigh, reaching for her throat on reflex. Her fingers closed around something that hung on her chest. Whatever it was bit into her palm, a cold, hard thing with an odd shape. She lifted it out, feeling for the first time the chain that hung around her neck. At the end of that chain rested a cylindrical gold pendant inlaid with dark material that she somehow knew was onyx and jet, the jewels of mourning. Now her other hand rose to hold the pendant at its base. Her fingers moved on instinct, at the same time pressing and twisting the black cap at the top of the pendant. The cap came away easily.

Moonlight filled the little cylinder. She stared at it for what seemed ages, then shook out the contents onto her palm, a short, slender vial of silvery liquid that glowed so brightly she clapped her hands around in fear that someone might see. She looked from one end of the ward to the other before she dared peek through her fingers.

Her mouth welled with thirst at the sight of the liquid rolling against the glass. A ghostly taste rose on her tongue, one bittersweet and laced with mint. She uncorked the vial and smelled that very taste. A memory rushed into her

three drops of silver into her mouth filled her with beautiful heat

and she made her choice. She dipped one of her smallest fingers into the liquid, jolting at the unexpected warmth of it. The stuff tasted as expected, and it ran down into her like liquid sunlight. Her pain receded under its brilliance. Before she knew it, her fingers had taken up the cork again. She turned it around on her palm, and stopped when she saw what protruded from the underside of the cork, a tiny length of gold with a hollow at the end that would rest in the liquid when the vial was closed. She hadn't noticed it in her hurry to open the thing.

Could it really help her, this odd medicine? The first taste had. A little more couldn't hurt, and she knew the flavor of it. Had to have taken it before. She used the tiny dipper to place two more drops of silver on her tongue. Summer blossomed inside her, chasing away the cold of the ward and her pain and her fear. She could move now, she just knew it.

Too many seconds seemed to pass as she corked the vial and returned it to the pendant. She took several breaths before she grabbed her left leg again. This time there wasn't the faintest flicker of pain. Her leg moved slowly, stiffly, but move it did. She pressed her feet to a floor so cold that it burned even through the protective blanket of the silvery medicine. Her aching arms pushed her to a stand. She almost smiled in triumph, until her legs buckled. The floor was as hard as it looked, sending shocks through her hands and knees. But she had caught herself from falling flat on her face, and that counted for something.

She bit back a frustrated sob. Her legs couldn't take her weight, slight as it seemed to be. But if she couldn't walk, she could still crawl. She slid along the floor like some huge, grotesque infant, her nightclothes trailing on the floor like a shroud. Her hands and wobbly knees soon numbed from the cold marble beneath her. She rounded the end of her bed and lifted her eyes to the ward, searching for a possible exit. Where could it be? Her gaze caught on a large, dark rectangle cut into the long wall opposite the windows behind her, the long wall that she had been facing when she had awoken. Leaving her bed had allowed her to see the rectangle on the other side of the screen.

Doors, those had to be doors. She aimed her body towards them and set off.