“She meant it,” said Alban, and he duplicated her action of a moment before, taking her hand to his lips and lightly kissing her fingers. “She was a child herself, just fifteen, but she loved me enough to sacrifice herself to save me. That is why I brought her here, because though there has been a lot of darkness in her life, there has also been love of the purest kind, and that deserves a second chance. I stand as witness.”

“I say yea,” said a blond woman, tall and willowy. “There was love, she wears it still. I stand as witness.”

“And I,” said a man. His layers said that he’d endured a lot, that his previous body had been bent with a painful deformity that had confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life, but here he was tall and strong and straight. “I stand as witness.”

Of the eleven people surrounding her, three thought there was no point in giving her a second chance, but even those three were free of any sense of malice. They simply thought she didn’t belong there. She didn’t resent them, because there was no room for resentment here even though there was evidently room for disagreement.

The woman stood there for a moment, her face lifted slightly to the sky, her eyes half closed as if she were listening to some song only she could hear. Then she smiled and turned to Drea. “Your mother-love, the purest form of love, has saved you,” she said. She touched Drea’s hand, the hand that still clung to Alban’s hand. “You’ve earned a second chance,” she said. “Now return, and don’t waste it.”

THE MEDIC WAS packing up his bag because there was nothing he could do, nothing that could have been done even if he’d been there when the accident happened. Blue and red and yellow lights strobed the highway above, while blindingly bright emergency lights had been rigged to shine down on the car. People were talking, radios were crackling, and the rumble of the wrecker’s engine gave a bass underlay to all the other sounds. Still, he heard something strange, something that made him stop and cock his head, listening.

“What?” asked his partner, pausing too, and looking around.

“I thought I heard something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like…sort of like this.” He demonstrated, taking a quick, shallow breath of air through his mouth.

“With all this noise, you heard something like that?”

“Yeah. Wait, there it was again. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Nope, not a thing.”

Frustrated, the medic looked around. He knew he’d heard something, twice, but what. It was coming from his left, from the direction of the wrecked car. Maybe a branch had finally snapped under the strain, or something.

They had covered the woman’s body with a blanket, draping it over her as best they could, given the fact that she was pinned to the seat with a damn tree through her chest. God, this one was bad. He tried not to let it get to him, but he knew this was one he wouldn’t forget. He didn’t want to look at the pitiful sight again, but, damn it, there was that sound for a third time and it was coming from that direction, for sure.

He stood, leaning closer to the wreckage, straining to hear. Yes, there it was. He heard it-and he saw the blanket move, as if the fabric was being sucked in a little, then blown out.

He froze, so astonished he literally couldn’t move for two long, very long seconds. “Shit!” he said explosively, when he could move again, when he could speak, and he whipped the blanket back from her face.

“What?” asked his partner again, leaping to his feet in alarm.

It was impossible. It was fucking impossible. Still, he pressed his fingers to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. And it was there, though he’d have sworn on his life that there hadn’t been one just minutes ago, but now he could feel the beat of life under his fingers, faint and rapid, but there.

“She’s alive!” he yelled. “God! Get a chopper in here! We got a live one!”

SHE SWAM IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SHE PREFERRED “out,” because then she wasn’t aware of the pain. The pain was a bitch. It was the biggest bitch she’d ever tackled, and most of the time it kicked her ass. There were times, when the drugs were either wearing off enough to let her think but still keep the pain somewhat at bay, or when the drugs were taking hold with exactly the same result, when she knew that this was the price she had to pay for that second chance. There was no magic healing, no easy trip back to the land of the living. She had to grin and bear it, though there was no grinning and an awful lot of bearing.

Every decision she’d made in her life, every step she’d taken, had led her straight to that deserted road and the accident. That was the point at which she’d exited, and the point at which she’d been tossed back. No detours allowed, no shortcuts from dead to perfectly healed.

She remembered, with a clarity even the drugs couldn’t affect, every moment of what had happened after she died. Real time, though, was more hazy. Sometimes she would hear the nurses talking when they were in her ICU cubicle, the words drifting in and out of her brain and sometimes making sense, but just as often not. When she did understand the words, she felt a detached wonder: a tree stuck in her chest? That was ridiculous. But hadn’t she looked down and seen something like that? Her memory of that time before, or between, was fuzzy. Though if she’d had a tree stuck through her, it would certainly explain how she felt physically, and why the agony in her chest seemed to expand to every cell of her body. She had no sense of time, of what day it was, or anything beyond the bed she was on and the unceasing battle she fought with the Great Bitch of Pain.

The nurses talked to her, too, explaining over and over what had happened to her, what they were doing, why they were doing it. She didn’t care, so long as they delivered the drugs that kept the Great Bitch at bay. Of course, there came a time-way too soon, by her way of thinking-when her surgeon ordered a decrease in the drugs. He wasn’t the one in agony, with his sternum cut in two, so what did he care? He was the one wielding the saw and scalpel, not the one on the receiving end. She had only a vague idea which of her visitors was the surgeon, but as her mind began clearing she memorized some particularly salty things she wanted to say to him. Okay, so he’d had to cut her sternum in half, but cutting her drugs in half? Bastard.

If everything she’d seen and experienced was supposed to make her sweet and forbearing now that she had a second chance, she’d already failed that test. She didn’t feel at all sweet or forbearing. She felt like someone who’d had her sternum sawed in two and her heart hauled out and used as a soccer ball.

As she gradually left the drug-induced fog, for a while she couldn’t think of anything except the Great Bitch and how she could get through the next hour, because without the full power of drugs she and the Bitch were constant companions. By then the nurses were getting her out of bed a couple of times a day, moving her to a chair so she could sit up-yeah, as if the hospital bed wouldn’t crank to a sitting position and she wouldn’t have to choke back the screams of agony every move brought. All they had to do was press a button and the head of the bed would rise and, hello, she could just lie there and ride it like a wave.

But no, she had to get up. She had to walk, if what she did could be called walking. She called it the hunched-over-in-agony shuffle, accomplished by sliding her feet instead of actually lifting them, and dealing with all the tubes and lines and needles and drains in her body, and trying to keep her ass covered at the same time because all she could wear-sort of wear-was one of those miserable cotton hospital gowns and it wasn’t even tied, just kind of draped over her with just one of her arms actually through a sleeve. What modesty she’d had was quickly abused; a hospital wasn’t the place for privacy, of any kind.