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stick a needle in her arm and tie her down to a gurney if she started babbling about it. And who could blame them.
    She stabbed at the button for two floors below, and caught sight of herself in the shiny panel. She looked crazy. Sweaty, white-faced. Staring, shadowed eyes; wild, touseled hair. Rasping pants, gulping for air. Hell, she was crazy. Zombies? What the hell was that about?
    Didn’t matter. She could lecture herself all she wanted. She had no control over the urge to flee. She’d keep going until whatever drove her allowed her to stop. She sidled out of the elevator, and bolted down the hospital corridor. Heads turned, eyes on her. . . . You OK? . . . need help? She activated her trick. The one she’d used back in the bad old days, when Stan was in one of his moods. When not being noticed meant not getting screamed at, or hit, or kicked. Or worse.
    She’d learned to disappear. She’d learned it so damn well, in fact, that she’d been chipping doggedly away at unlearning it ever since. For her entire adult life. For all the good it had done her. And check her out. After years of therapy, her disappearing trick was still in perfect working order. All that careful, system-atic dismantling of “outdated survival mechanisms.” Hah. She slipped so smoothly into the familiar pattern. Nobody here. Nobody here. She locked on to the frequency, made it strong and steady. It throbbed off her while she gathered herself inside, tucking in everything that stuck out, everything that fluttered or glinted.
    She tucked it up tight, hiding it behind a thick, soft, gray fuzz of no thoughts, blank mind. Nothing at all. Nobody here.
    She forced herself to walk normally. Inquiries just stopped.
    Heads stopped turning. No eyes snagged on her. People walked on by, intent upon their own business. Nothing to see. Nobody here.
    Nothing to see.
    She zigzagged to the stairwell on the opposite end of the building. Three floors up. Then the elevator again. Four floors down. Hoping the random pattern would be in her favor. She found a stairwell, reached the ground floor. Nobody here. Nobody here. Slunk out the entrance onto Ocean Parkway, feeling horribly exposed. Nobody here. Nobody here. The sidewalk was hot. Her knees wobbled. Car horns blared, but the sound was muffled by the fuzzy blur of nobody here . She had to dodge people. They did not see her. She ran across Ocean Parkway, dodging cars. A couple of heart-stopping near misses got her across the road. She ducked up the first residential street she found, squeezing her brains to orient herself. This was a part of Brooklyn she didn’t know well, but she thought there was an F-train stop on Avenue X. Fifteen minutes, ten if she sprinted. Nobody here, nobody here.
    She didn’t want to wait in line for a MetroCard with her heart thudding like that, so she used a trick she’d learned as a teenager when she was short on cash. A guy with two huge suitcases was being buzzed through the service gate, so she just followed him through, using her invisible trick. Nobody here. Nobody here. No one saw. Not the subway attendant, or even the suitcase guy himself, though he walked backward facing her, red-faced and cursing as he dragged his bags up the staircase onto the elevated platform. Once there, one of his suitcases spun and fell on its top-loaded front, plop.
    . . . sweating like a pig, gonna smell like a dead dog on the plane . . .
    should’ve taken a goddamn cab . . . transfer at Atlantic Avenue going to kill me . . . just to save fifty measly bucks . . . old man could just open his damn wallet, help me out for once in his life, but no way, not him . . .
    Nina reeled back, disoriented, at the voice blaring in her head.
    But the man was not speaking. His mouth was a hyphen, sealed and tense. He dragged his suitcases toward the edge of the platform. The nattering hum of old, toxic anger subsided as the distance widened.
    What the hell? She stared at the guy’s hunched back, gulping, but