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Boring was safe. Boring was the goal, he told me.

And boring… well, boring I’d become a pro at.

“You’ll like Dr. Halloran,” he added, in the tone of a man who did not like Dr. Halloran. As in, not one single bit.

“Real relaxed. Real hands-off.”

Ah. Hence the ‘stress leave’, I thought with a frown.

“Hands-off is fine by me.” And it was. Some people didn’t much care for lots of work and preferred to pass it along, but I’d always been more the roll-my-sleeves-up type. There wasn’t much that fazed me these days, and besides, work made the days go quicker.

“Oh, you’ll get plenty of hands-on here then.” He laughed at his own joke. I didn’t, and he cleared his throat.

“I mean, well…he lets the nurses run the floor. You’ll be doing more than they pay you for, is all I’m saying.”

Story of my life… literally.

But I didn’t say that. Instead I filed it away with a nod and kept my veil in place, pleasant and blank. Then I let him lead me deeper into a building designed from the ground up to make sure that whoever went in, didn’t come out again. Not until someone with a key decided otherwise.

There was a comfort in that, in a horrible way. Three years of sleeping in places that locked but never once believing in the lock. And here I was, walking willingly into a building where the locks were the entire point. Concrete and steel and rules and cameras.

I know how that sounds. The safest I’d felt in months was inside a maximum-security prison.

Pretty much tells you everything about the life I was running from, really.

The infirmary was smaller and cleaner than I’d expected. A handful of beds behind a heavy door, a locked cage of a supply room, and, off to one side, a walk-in supply closet. One that contained shelves of folded scrubs and spare linen. There were also rolls of blue table paper, boxes of gloves, and a jug of disinfectant strong enough to sting from the doorway. As for the rest of the treatment room, a desk was situated near a barred window, one with a panic button screwed to the underside. I knew this thanks to Jones, who made a big point of showing it to me before anything else.

“Right here.” He guided my fingers to it like I was a child.

“You hit this, and you don’t take your hand off it until we come through that door. Doesn’t matter what you think you saw. Doesn’t matter if you feel silly. You hit it, you hold it, you wait.” I swallowed hard and nodded, really hoping I wouldn’t need the red button any time soon.

“Got it,” I told him with a firm nod that he obviously didn’t take seriously.

“I mean it, Vale.” He said it using a fake name I still wasn’t used to. The name that didn’t fit and yet, I answered to it anyway.

“I’ve got it. Panic button, hold, wait. I promise you, at five foot four, I’m not going to be a hero.” Something crossed his face then, not quite a smile, but close enough.

“Good. Because we’ve got somebody coming through here this week that you’re going to want to be very, very boring around.”

And there it was. The thing the other officer hadn’t finished. The thing behind Jones’s sideways looks, as if assessing whether or not I would cope not only with the job but with the monsters that I might have to nurse back to health.

I should have let it go. Boring was the goal, remember. Furniture didn’t ask questions. But the girl under the veil had learned the hard way that the thing you don’t ask about is the thing that ends up standing behind you. And well… I never could break the habit of wanting to see it coming.

“Somebody like what?” I asked.

Jones leaned against the desk. Lowered his voice, though there was no one to hear us but the empty beds.

“We get bad men in here. That’s the job. Killers, most of them, one way or another and you’ll patch up plenty of them, and they’ll even thank you and mean it.” He turned a pen over in his fingers.

“But this new one… shit… He’s different. They’re transferring him in, high-security handling, the whole circus. And nobody can tell me his name.” I frowned at that, and naturally asked,

“You mean they don’t know it?”

“No. I mean he doesn’t have one. Not on paper, anyway. A killer like that, and not one print in any system… it’s not normal. But then, from what I hear, there’s not one God-damn thing about this guy that is.” I couldn’t help the shiver, just from the way he said it, like he was already afraid of the man before ever meeting him.

“So they checked, and nothing.”

“Hell, everybody’s checked. Even the Feds but nothing… The guy’s a ghost. No record before the thing that put him here, and the thing that put him here…” He stopped and shook his head like he’d thought better of finishing.