PULSE

Song: “overwhelmed” by Royal & the Serpent

“Vera, we need you to cover in the ED tonight.”

I audibly groaned. “It’s not my turn to float tonight.”

Sara, the nursing supervisor tonight, pursed her lips. “Well, the person whose turn it was called in. Along with half the staff, apparently. You’re next on the list so, hurry up. They’re expecting you in Pod D.”

I rolled my eyes the second she turned her back.

Pod D. The trauma pod.

Tonight would either drag by at an unbearable pace or descend into an absolute nightmare, and I already knew which option my luck would choose.

“Oof. Sorry, bestie.” Kailani winced in exaggerated sympathy. “Hopefully it stays quiet for you.”

My grip tightened around my Stanley. I turned a murderous look on my best friend, the only person in this hospital who could say something so unforgivable and survive the consequences.

“Seriously, Kai? You said the Q-word.”

Every nurse alive knew the rule. You never, under any circumstances, said the word quiet inside a hospital. It’s taboo. Forbidden. An open invitation for the universe to tear your shift apart purely out of spite.

And my supposed best friend had spoken it directly into existence. To me.

At least she had the decency to look guilty. “Oops. Well, at least it’s not a full moon—”

“It is, actually.”

Her face fell. “Oh. Shit.”

I sighed and turned toward the elevators before she could inflict any further damage.

“I’ll see you for lunch!” she called after me.

I flipped her off over my shoulder without breaking stride.

Pod D sat quiet at the end of the hallway when I stepped off the elevator. The overhead lights were on, but every bay stood empty, curtains pull back and monitors dark. No alarms. No hurried voices. No cluster of staff surrounding a stretcher while someone fought to keep a patient alive.

I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. No active traumas. For the moment, at least, the pod had granted me one small mercy.

The sharp smell of disinfectant hung in the still air as I crossed to the nurses’ station. I dropped my bag beneath the desk, pulled out my clipboard, and leaned over the counter to receive report from the nurse finishing his shift.

“Hey, Paul.”

Paul glanced up from his monitor. “Hey, Vera. They have you taking over for me tonight?”

“Yep.” I popped the p with all the enthusiasm the assignment deserved.

“Try to contain your excitement.”

“I’m an ICU nurse. My type A personality doesn’t survive down here. Everything is too chaotic and unorganized.”

He leaned back in his chair and thumbed through the papers on his clipboard. “And the ICU’s a snooze fest. Lucky for you though, nothing’s pending. Everything we got today has already been transferred upstairs.”

I scanned the empty tracking board behind him and nodded. “Excellent. Will you be back in the morning?”

“Yeah. I’ll be here.” He stood, already slipped his phone into his pocket as he headed toward the exit. “You never know. Maybe tonight’ll be qu—”

“Don’t you dare.” I pointed at him before he could hand me my second jinx of the night.

He laughed and lifted both hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You came close enough.”

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Night.”

Once he disappeared around the corner, I logged into the computer and signed into the unit phone. Paul had been right. No pending admissions. No incoming transfers. Nothing on the board demanding my immediate attention.

I should’ve felt relieved.

Instead, the moment I settled into my chair, something cold gathered behind my ribs. It began as a faint pressure beneath my sternum, shapeless and impossible to place, like a held breath my body had forgotten to release. I pressed my palm against the spot and waited for the sensation to pass.

It didn’t.

I forced myself back onto my feet and busied myself instead. I restocked the crash carts, inventoried the supply room, and checked every vitals machine to make sure it actually held a charge. Few things in life were more frustrating than dragging one to a patient’s bedside only to discover the battery had died something during the previous century.

I wiped down surfaces already clean, reorganized drawers nobody had asked me to touch, and replaced supplies before they were low enough to need replacing. Anything to stay moving. Anything to keep my attention away from the weight lodged inside my chest.

None of it helped. If anything, the pressure deepened, spreading beneath my ribs until my pulse seemed unnaturally loud, each slow beat pressing against the inside of my skull.

Maybe it’s cardiac, I thought.

I flagged down one of the techs passing through the hall and asked him to check my vitals. He gave me a curious look but complied, wrapping the cuff around my arm while I watched the monitor cycle through its readings.

Normal.

Well, normal for something that wasn’t human. My resting heart rate ran slower than any living person’s should, permanently bradycardia as a consequence of what I was. The numbers would’ve sent an ordinary nurse reaching for an EKG machine. For me, they hardly registered as abnormal.

I’d been born inside a body that refused to play by human rules. I knew its rhythms, its silences, and every peculiar way it warned me when something was wrong.

This wasn’t ordinary discomfort. This one had teeth. It sank into the back of my neck and stayed there, patient and certain. Less like fear and more like recognition, as though something somewhere had already found me and was simply waiting for the right moment to close the distance.

I pulled out my phone and opened my messages.

I wasn’t sure I believed her. Still, between the full moon and her careless jinx, I could almost convince myself the unease was nothing more than frayed nerves and an overactive imagination. For the moment, pretending her explanation satisfied me was easier than questioning why every instinct I possessed insisted she was wrong.

Why do hospitals insist on keeping the thermostat at sub-zero degrees?

I had my personal heater aimed at my feet, my heated blanket from home wrapped around my shoulders, a second blanket someone had left in the break room draped over my knees, and I was still freezing. It never mattered how many layers I piled on. The cold found its way through all of them eventually, as it always did, and settled itself deep in my bones.

It was currently two in the morning, seven hours into my shift with five still to go. The department had fallen quiet in a way that suggested the world was holding its breath rather than resting.

With no incoming traumas yet, I’d spent the last few hours floating between pods and starting IVs on the endless parade of patients getting pulled back from the waiting room. Half of them were drunk, one of whom had been convinced his ex poisoned him via text, apparently through technology unavailable to modern medicine.

Now I sat back at my desk in the empty trauma pod, waiting on Kai. She was due to come down any minute for our lunch date. We always synced our schedules to land the same shifts, and even when one of us got stuck floating, we still took our breaks together. On nights like this, the ritual was often the only thing holding our sanity together.

Familiar footsteps approached from behind me before Kai’s amused voice cut through the quiet. “I swear you’re cold-blooded, V.”

I swallowed a scoff. She had no idea how accurate that statement was.

“What I will never understand is why hospitals stay so goddamn cold,” I said. “Cold doesn’t even kill bacteria. It’s a myth. Someone decided decades ago misery equaled sterility, and we’ve all just agreed to suffer for it every since.”

She laughed and dropped into the chair beside mine. “Write your strongly word letter to the powers that be, then.”

“I have. Thirteen, to be exact.”

She pulled her lunch from her bag. “Maybe the fourteenth time’s the charm.”

I cut her a sideways glare, then caught a whiff of her latest concoction and wrinkled my nose.

“Spam. Again?” I teased. “It’s a miracle you don’t have high blood pressure.”

“And it’s a miracle you’re not hooked up to a feeding tube,” she shot back, pointing her fork at me. “In all the years we’ve been friends, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen you eat real food, and I’m pretty sure they were all under duress.”

“Too cold to eat,” I grumbled, which wasn’t exactly a lie, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.

What I couldn’t tell her was the real reason: I didn’t need to. Eating once a day sustained me, and even that slipped my mind more than than it should, buried beneath multiple twelve-hour shifts in a row and the particular exhaustion of pretending to be something I wasn’t for every single hour of it. My body simple endured it, the way it endured most things, quietly and without complaint until it couldn’t anymore.

“Uh-huh.” She shoveled in another bite without bothering to swallow first. “How’s your chest?”

“Still tight.” I rubbed the center of it again, as if pressure alone might convince whatever had lodged beneath my ribs to loosen its grip. “I don’t know what’s wrong. It just feels like something bad is about to happen.”

“That’s called anxiety, V.”

I gave her a pointed stare.

“It’s okay. You just need a vacation. And by you, I mean us.” She took another large bite. “Oh! I’ve got it. A cruise to the Bahamas. You can’t beat beach, sun, and alcohol.”

A humorless laugh escaped me. “Hard pass. You’re not trapping me on a floating petri dish of buffet food and Norovirus, then sending me out into the middle of the ocean. Besides, I already took time off last month.”

“You stayed home and reorganized your bookshelves,” she said, thoroughly unimpressed with how I chose to spend my free time. “That’s not a vacation, V. That’s an extra long Tuesday.”

I searched for a defense and came up embarrassingly empty. “Anyway, how are things going with the new guy?” I asked instead, desperate to change the subject. “What’s his name again? Brad? Brett?”

“Chad.”

“Whatever. Same difference. They’re all frat-boy names. I bet he owns a koozie with a joke about tequila on it.”

She rolled her eyes so hard I half expected to hear something strain. “Oh my god, don’t be so judgy. At least I’m putting myself out there. When’s the last time you went out on a date?”

Nine months, and it’d been a complete and utter disaster. When I mentioned being a nurse, the guy had asked whether nursing was the career I settled for after failing to make the cut for medical school, all with the particular condescension of a man who earned a lesser salary than me.

I answered by tossing my drink in his face and storming out of the restaurant.

“Dating sucks,” I said. “It’s easy for you. Men line up and trip over their own feet just to earn a second of your attention. Your dating pool’s an ocean. Mine’s a puddle.”

I wasn’t exaggerating either. Kai turned heads without trying or seeming to notice. Not that it was hard to see why. She was stunningly beautiful. Her skin held a warm brown glow, and she had thick, dark brown hair that cascaded in waves down to her waist. Compassion lived permanently in her chestnut eyes and in the effortless ease of her smile. She had the kind of open, unguarded beauty capable of making strangers want to know her.

She was, in nearly every visible way, my opposite.

“Come out with me this weekend,” she offered, the way she always did, the way I always deflected. “Chad has some cute friends I can hook you up with. Doesn’t have to be anything serious. One of them can sweep the cobwebs out of the basement and be on his way.”

My mouth fell open. “Rude!”

We both laughed, and for a second, the tightness in my chest actually eased. All it took was something as small and stupid as talking about my fossilized sex life at two in the morning while we sat in a cold, empty pod.

I wanted to hold onto the feeling. The relief. I wanted it to mean the night was actually fine and the pressure sitting behind my sternum was nothing more than anxiety and sleep deprivation.

Kai opened her mouth to respond when both our phones buzzed at once, the particular double vibration every nurse learned to recognize as bad news before the screens even lit.

“Shit,” we said in unison.

I threw off the blankets and snatched up my stethoscope, the cold in the room suddenly the least of my problems.

“This is all your fault!” I shouted at her over my shoulder, already sprinting for Bay 2, the pressure in my chest tightening another painful notch with every step.

Damn her and her jinx.