Moonbound

Chapter Four

Celeste

There was a ceiling I didn't recognize.

White acoustic tiles, pocked with tiny holes, one corner stained a faint tea-brown where some long-ago leak had dried. A fluorescent panel hummed above it, too bright, buzzing at a pitch that pressed against the inside of my skull. Somewhere off to my left, a low, steady beeping marked time like a patient metronome, and the air tasted of antiseptic and warm plastic and something faintly sweet underneath, like old flowers left too long in a vase.

And behind my left eye, a headache had taken up permanent residence. Not a throb, exactly. More like someone had driven a hot nail in just behind the socket and then walked away to let it settle.

I lay there for a long moment, blinking at the tiles, before it occurred to me that I should probably know where I was.

Or who I was.

Both facts sat just out of reach, like words on the tip of my tongue that refused to surface no matter how hard I strained for them. I reached, and reached, and my mind closed around nothing, a smooth, white, silent wall where the rest of me should have been. The thin blanket was scratchy under my fingers. A plastic band circled my wrist. An IV line trailed from the back of my hand, taped down in clean white strips, and my right ankle felt strange and heavy, wrapped tight and propped on something soft.

"Hey." A voice, male, low and rough at the edges, close by. "Hey, she's awake. Can you hear me?"

I turned my head, slowly, because moving fast sent a bright white spike of pain lancing through my skull, and the room swam, tilted, and righted itself.

Two men stood at the foot of the bed.

Twins, unmistakably. The same sharp jaw, the same strong, straight nose, the same dark, watchful eyes, the color of the oceans depth. They were both tall, both broad through the shoulders, and both of them looked like they'd slept in their clothes. One wore a rumpled gray jacket with the collar turned up. The other had his sleeves shoved to the elbows, revealing forearms corded with muscle and a smear of something dark, dried blood, I realized slowly, across one wrist.

My blood, some distant part of me whispered, and it should have terrified me.

But something about the way they held themselves was different, the longer I looked. One stood a little looser, arms crossed, weight shifted onto one hip, a restless energy rolling off him like heat from summer asphalt, a held breath he couldn't quite let go. The other had a steadiness to him, a quiet gravity, hands loose at his sides and feet planted wide, like he'd already decided he wasn't leaving this room until someone gave him a good reason.

They were staring at me as though I might vanish if they blinked.

"Where..." My voice came out cracked and unfamiliar, a dry rasp like paper tearing, as if I hadn't used it in days. I swallowed. My throat burned. "Where am I?"

The two men exchanged a look. It was quick and loaded with something I didn't understand yet, an entire conversation compressed into half a second.

"You're safe," the restless one said. His voice was warm and a little hoarse, as if he'd been talking in the dark for hours. "You had a fall. Hit your head pretty bad."

"A fall." I turned the word over, searching for the shape of a memory to hang it on. I looked for stairs, a slick floor, a skinned knee. There was nothing. A blank, smooth wall where a memory should have been, as seamless as the day it was poured. "I don't... I don't remember a fall."

"Do you remember your name?" the steadier one asked, gently, in a rich, even voice like a hand laid flat against my back. He asked it like a man who already suspected the answer and was bracing for it anyway.

I opened my mouth to answer immediately, certain, the way you're certain of your own left hand.

And found nothing.

A void where my own name should have lived, rent-free, my whole life. I reached for it again, and again, scrabbling at the edges of the blankness, and each time my mind came back empty-handed. The beeping beside me quickened, one sharp tick after another, climbing like a frightened heartbeat. Panic rose up fast and cold in my chest, flooding up through my ribs and squeezing my lungs flat.

"I don't know." My voice cracked properly this time, splintering down the middle. My fingers clenched in the thin blanket. "I don't — why don't I know my own name?"

"Hey. Hey, it's okay."

The restless one moved closer, and the bed dipped slightly where he set a hand on the rail. He smelled like cedar and rain and something warm and wild underneath, a scent I should have found alarming and instead found oddly, impossibly calming. Something about his presence settled a fraction of the panic in me, even though I had no earthly reason to trust a stranger standing over a hospital bed.

"The doctors said this might happen," he said, low and steady. "Memory takes time to come back after a hit like that. Swelling, shock, the whole thing. It doesn't mean it's gone for good."

I focused on his face, because it was something to hold. A small scar nicked the edge of his left eyebrow. A day's worth of stubble shadowed his jaw. His eyes were dark and fierce and, beneath the fierceness, impossibly gentle.

"Who are you?" I asked. My breathing slowly eased. The beeping slowed with it. "How do you know what the doctors said?"

Another look passed between them, longer this time, weighing something.

"I'm Axel," the restless one said. "This is my brother, Lowen. We were there when you fell." He hesitated, and some emotion I couldn't read moved across his face, too quick to catch. "We pulled you off the tracks."

Tracks.

The word dropped into my mind like a stone into black water, and for a moment I felt the faintest ripple, a rush of cold air, a grinding roar, a sensation of falling. Then it was gone, smooth and silent as before.

"You saved me," I said slowly. Something in my chest loosened at that, some instinct deeper than memory telling me these two men, whoever they were, had done something that mattered. "Thank you. Truly. I just... I wish I could remember anything else. My name. My family. Anything."

"Your name's Celeste," Lowen said quietly. "Celeste Marchetti. We got that much off your ID."

"Celeste."

I said it out loud, testing the weight of it in my mouth, waiting for some spark of recognition to catch like a match against flint. I rolled it on my tongue, soft and sibilant, a name like starlight. And I waited, I waited so hard my whole body went rigid.

Nothing came.

It was just a word, borrowed and unfamiliar, a coat that belonged to someone else, sitting where my own name should have fit like a key in a lock. I felt tears sting my eyes. I blinked them back furiously.

"It'll come back," Axel said.

There was something fierce underneath the gentleness of it, like a promise he intended to enforce personally if my memory didn't fall in line fast enough. His hand tightened briefly on the bed rail, knuckles whitening, and I had the odd, fleeting sense that he was holding himself back from something, from touching me, maybe, or from tearing the wall down with his bare hands.

"In the meantime," he continued, "you're not alone in this. We'll make sure you're taken care of."

"You don't even know me," I whispered.

"No," Lowen said, and something in his dark eyes burned, steady as a candle flame. "But we'd like to."

I looked between the two of them. Two strangers, technically, with blood on their sleeves and exhaustion in their shoulders, standing vigil in a harsh white room at what I guessed was the dead of night. A thin gray strip of window showed beyond the blinds, the sky just beginning to lighten at its edge. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattled past, and a voice paged a doctor in a flat, tired monotone. The world went on, ordinary and indifferent, outside our little pool of light.

And yet something about the way they were looking at me felt like the opposite of a stranger.

Like recognition, running in the wrong direction. Like they knew something about me that I didn't know myself, something large and quiet and important, and were waiting, with patience that frightened me a little, for me to catch up.

My chest ached with it. A bone-deep hum, faint and golden, like a note struck far away that my body heard before my mind did. I pressed a hand to my breastbone without meaning to, and both of them tracked the movement, their eyes sharpening in perfect unison.

"Are you in pain?" Lowen asked, stepping closer. "Should I get the nurse?"

"No." I shook my head and winced as the nail behind my eye gave a vicious twist. "No. It's not that. It's—" I broke off, searching for words. "Why do I feel like I should know you?"

Neither of them answered right away.

The silence stretched, thick and strange, humming with the faint electric beep of the monitor and the buzz of the lights. I watched Axel's throat move as he swallowed. I watched Lowen's hands curl slowly into fists at his sides and then, deliberately, relax. They didn't look at each other this time. They looked at me, and neither of them said a word.

And the silence that followed felt like it was carrying a great deal more weight than either of them was ready to hand me yet.