Dark, and then light.

  In the bed again. Always a bed.

  On the ceiling, a cartoon lion smiled down at Madison. She stared back up at it, as tired as she'd ever been in her life. She wanted to go back.

  Back to what? She was quickly forgetting. Sleep? Had she been asleep?

  Someone was yelling. Two men were loudly arguing. She crooked her head up, and the hair on the back of her head made a sucking noise as it decoupled stickily from her sheets.

  A nurse was trying to push into her room. He was a larger man, much larger than the dark-clad figure holding him back with one arm, but he was making no progress.

  "-give me shit about visitor hours. You're no visitor. The fuck did you do to that girl?"

  "Sir, I need you to calm down. I'm as confused as you."

  "Like fuck you are. Coming in here dressed like a fucking hitman, dead girl on the bed. The cops are coming, buddy. You better believe the cops-"

  There was a dull crack, and the nurse stopped talking. He stumbled backward, hand going to his throat, as if he'd been struck, but Madison hadn't seen the man in black move.

  The nurse stumbled back and coughed up a mouthful of blood. He turned his head, looking toward someone at the end of the hall, and moved to yell, to get their attention. Before he could make a noise, his head popped like a balloon.

  That time Madison had barely been able to notice it: the man in black's right hand had blurred through the air just before. He'd punched him. A single, blisteringly fast punch that had, in the space of a thought, reduced the nurse's skull to mush.

  Madison felt a strange sort of force pulling her backward, a lateral gravity. She dug her fingers into the bed and tried her best to be quiet, to keep from sobbing. The man in black was looking away from her, still. He peered down the hallway, cursed, and then stepped out of view

  Somewhere, unseen, somebody cried out and was silenced with another one of those awful, dull thwacks.

  The man would be back soon. Madison had to do something.

  She leaned forward to grope at her bedside table, fumbled around until she had the card of the man who had visited earlier. The motion was oddly taxing; it was like something was pulling on her, like her body was being magnetically repelled by that side of the room. It was all she could do not to collapse back into bed once she had the - huh, blood-stained - card in her hand.

  The blood was coming from her, she realized now. She could see spatters of it on her sheets, a thin layer caked on her right hand. A crusty, dry feeling on her scalp indicated that most of the mass of blood was coming from there. She reached up, ready to wince at a fresh wound, but the skin beneath was perfectly unharmed.

  She moved to slink out of the bed, to make for the closet, maybe, or sprint out into the hall, but the pulling feeling was getting worse. She clawed at her blankets, struggled to get upright, failed. She was on her back on the bed now, sliding, somehow, laterally off of it.

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  When her weak grip finally failed her, she went flying across the room and slammed into the window. She felt a groaning, vibrating tension behind her as whatever force was yanking her tried to pull her through the glass.

  The man was back, standing in the doorway, his gloves caked in fresh blood. He cocked his head at the sight of her, stumbled back a step. Madison couldn't see his face behind the mask and glasses, but she could tell he was nearly as surprised as she was.

  Then, almost with a shrug, the man fished a ball bearing out of his pocket and raised it up to her, and Madison remembered where all the blood had come from.

  "Please," she croaked, lungs struggling against the mammoth force crushing her against the window. She could feel tears being sucked out of her eyes as fast as she could produce them.

  The man paused, hesitated for just a moment, and then the window behind Madison exploded.

  A wall of wind battered her, obliterating all sight and sound for a moment, and it took Madison a few seconds to realize that she was hurtling, free, through the sky. The lights of the city were dropping precipitously away from her, getting smaller and smaller, as she ripped through the air like a comet.

  She was moving so fast. So much faster than she'd ever imagined something could move. If it hadn't been completely insane, she'd have been exhilarated.

  Whatever force had been pulling her out of the hospital room was now flinging her headlong through the night, taking her up and away. Madison didn't have the air in her lungs to scream, and so she tumbled wordlessly, head over heels, in the dark and the wind. Soon, her fear of the man had been replaced by a new, vivid terror: that she'd drop out of the sky again and surely die. At this speed she couldn't imagine a plane surviving a crash, let alone a person.

  As her fear of the man ebbed from her thoughts, her lateral speed began to diminish, being replaced instead by a nauseating vertical climb, accelerating faster the more she worried about hitting the ground.

  Then, as that worry began to be superseded by the idea of being flung into the cold of space, she was flying downward, a meteor now instead of a rising firework, and the dark farms and woodland beneath climbed up to meet her.

  Madison held her arms out, a connection forming in her mind. She spread her body, as if she was bracing herself, trying to slow her rotation, to control her descent.

  She thought as hard as she could about her fear of her speed, about going too fast, and almost immediately she was shedding velocity. Within a minute, she was hanging close to motionless in the air, hundreds of feet above the earth.

  The rising sun winked in the distance as it peeked over the hills. It was a cool, wet morning, and a carpet of fog was making the ground glitter. All around her the world was wide and yawning, impossibly huge, so big and clear that she could see the curve of it, could see, for the first time in her life, the actual enormity of the planet she'd spent so much time cooped away from.

  Madison twirled in the air, rotating in a lazy front-flip, and watched the wide sky and the rolling earth take turns trading places. She felt a pang of immense relief, and an insane giggle burbled to her lips.

  The giggle soon tumbled into a full-bellied laugh. Madison laughed until she cried, dangling there in the silver dawn, her hair splaying out in a thatch around her, tears squeezing out in floating droplets.

  She was free. The man was far away. She'd escaped. She'd been too fast for him, too fast for Gramma, too fast for anyone. She was flying.

  Her laughter rolled to a stop, and she spent a few moments watching the sun rise. Soon her smile faded, wilted into a hesitant frown.

  She was flying, but she wasn't quite sure how to stop.