I felt really warm. I stretched my muscles and opened my eyes. I couldn't see properly. Everything was blurry.

"David?" I asked, making out the contour of his perfect body.

"Yeah, it's me. See? I told you she wouldn't forget about the great stuff." he said, and winked at me.

"Shut up, you stuck-up twat."

Africa's voice. David laughed and smiled at me. I couldn't help to melt, even if I couldn't distinguish his teeth from his lips.

"Let me talk to her." Africa insisted.

David stood up and Africa threw herself on the bed.

"Why aren't you wearing your hair loose?" I asked her.

"What?"

"It would make it easier to recognize you."

"Oh. They gave you phenylephrine." Lindsay informed me. "It'll go away in an hour or so."

"Hypotensive shock?" I asked.

I could see her - and Alex? – nodding.

"What happened, exactly?" I asked. I was really confused.

"You went to the stage and-." Africa started.

"And I saw Luke!"

I suddenly remembered. He had been the one making Camille laugh. I sat up on the bed, but I felt so dizzy that I had to lie down again.

Africa looked at the others in despair. I couldn't make out her facial expression, but I could sense the tension. Lindsay moved closer to me and touched my paradoxically cold hand. I had thought I was sizzling until I felt real warmness. It shocked me.

"Tess... you've been blacked out for about two hours..."

I sat up again. Little black dots appeared in front of me and moved all around the room again. I wanted to give a strong response, to let them know I was sure of what I had seen, but I couldn't.

"Oh." That was all I was able to mumble.

"You should rest." David suggested, and caressed my messed-up hair.

I shook my head in a ridiculously slow way. It was immensely frustrating, intending to be vigorous and just managing to be delicate.

"I have already rested enough. How did everything end?"

They all stayed silent.

"I see. It didn't even start."

Africa nodded.

"I couldn't have summed it up better."

"Where's Professor Abbey? Why didn't he fight harder?" I implored. "He let me down."

I replayed in my head the moment when he had walked down the stairs. David shrugged and kissed me on the cheek. It was strange. I didn't find it comforting or arousing. I just found it... out of place.

"I reckon he was let down himself. By life. By not being able to help you. Us."

"But he is. In fact, I have a plan."

Africa cracked up. The rest of them went cold. I couldn't tell if I was smiling myself.

"Tessa, are you serious?" David said after a few seconds. "You've been fainted the whole morning."

"She gets inspired when she's on the edge, you know." Africa added, and she laughed some more.

"How can you find this even a tad funny?" Alex asked.

"We are going to carry on. We don't need anyone's permission. I know how to carry the treatment out, remember? I created it." I blurted.

The dots disturbed me. I couldn't see the blurs of their faces.

"You want to go illegal? I don't think it's such a good idea, Tess. It's serious." David said.

"Remember when you sneaked into the cinema? It turned out right. I bet you can't argue that back, lawyer." I said, and I winked my right eye at him, crushing a couple of dots in doing so.

"She looks fine to me!" Africa said, and, this time, they all laughed.

Africa stayed with me while the others went out to get me some food. My stomach couldn't stand a hospital meal. I had already had too many of them during the clinical hours along the year.

It was weird to be the one lying on the bed. I should be following a doctor around, trying to figure out how to use my stethoscope for more than looking like I knew what I was doing.

"I want to start now. We can't wait any longer. Do you know how many people in this building will die tonight, Africa?"

"At least you won't. Not after you've eaten some Vapiano pasta to go."

Vapiano was our perfect shopping day stop for lunch. I remembered having read in one of its walls: "Si va piano, va sano e va lontano". But, this time, I had to come up with an opposite motto. Because going slow didn't mean going long-lasting, but just the contrary.

"Mm. Does that even exist?" I asked. I couldn't remember having seen people take the food away.

"It does, if you bring a Tupperware."

I laughed, and I realized that my laughter was the only sound that I could hear. The hospital didn't seem that silent when I was on the other side, wearing a white coat.

"I was serious about many people dying tonight, Africa. What if it was someone we knew? Would you care more?"

Africa stood up abruptly.

"Stop it, Tessa!"

"How can you get angry at me just for pointing out reality? It's cruel, I know, but that's the way it is."

"Damn, I meant stop it for you, Tessa!" she yelled, moving her arms frantically. "Don't you see what you're doing to yourself?"

I shrugged.

"You're lying on a fucking hospital bed, Tess. You had a vasovagal syncope, and I don't even know what that is, but I know why it happened. You have a crazy hurricane inside; you can't care about everything and everyone!"

"I must. It's my responsibility, Africa. That's the thing with Medicine and the great discoveries. They're not an achievement, but a duty you must carry out."

"It's too much weight on your back, Tessa. You should be lying on your bed, wondering how David would do it, and reading Cosmopolitan. You live everything too fully."

"I'll take that as a compliment." I said, knowing it would extremely annoy her.

She sighed deeply and let out a groan. Her hair looked more like lit-up flames than ever before.

"I am not going to argue with you anymore, because it's helpless." She blurted, without even looking at me.

She left the room. I looked at the monitor I was connected to. My blood pressure was rising slowly. It read 85/50. What the hell. I removed the electrodes from my wrists and chest and got up. Supporting my weight on the bed with one arm, I managed to pack my things and leave the room.

I texted Africa and the rest to tell them I was leaving, and then turned off my phone. I didn't need their pitiful, cautious advice. I walked slowly through the hospital corridors, because I couldn't run. I would make a terrible fugitive. I took the lift down to the first floor. The doors opened and I walked through the oncology department. The silence I had perceived in my room was gone. Oncology was always busy and loud. As if the energy and movement that was running out of the patients' bodies drenched into the energetic atmosphere. That macabre thought seamed to lower my blood pressure some more.

There were posters all over the aisles that informed about the plans of building a new wing at St Thomas. Medicine of Eternal Replication and Immortality. Wow. It did sound poetical. I wasn't wearing my contacts, so I had to get very close to the wall to read the details and see the computerized pictures of how the new wing would look. The rooms were far too luxurious for a hospital. They looked the way I imagined the rooms at the Ritz, ridiculously big and overwhelmingly ornamented.

Most of the posters were there, at Oncology, because many of the facilities in the department were going to be used for the poetic medicine until the new Hilton-wing was ready. As I moved away from the poster, I thought about the many areas of medicine that would no longer exist in a couple of years. Oncology itself, Geriatrics...

Then I walked past the laboratory where I should be working and sighed nostalgically.

And then I stopped. It was half past three in the afternoon. There was no one in the lab at that moment. I cursed not having my white coat with me.

Half past three in the afternoon. I could be back for the night.

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