Mara woke on the clinic cot, and the world had gone flat.
She did not know at first what had changed. The room was the same: white walls, the curtain drawn back, the window high up with grey morning in it. The stool by the door, empty. The cart, with its tray covered by a cloth. Her boots on the floor beside the cot, where someone had taken them off her.
Everything was there. Everything was where it had been.
And all of it was thinner.
As if a layer had been peeled off the room. A layer she had not known was there until it was gone: a faint hum under everything, a resonance in the walls and the cart and the iron frame of the cot, that she had heard so long she had taken it for the sound of the world itself.
It was gone.
The clinic clock ticked on the wall above the door.
She listened to it. It was a clock. A small round clock with a brass case, ticking. She waited for the other thing, the thing under the tick, the ring of its spring and its gears and the brass case answering them. It did not come.
