The ambulance smelled like antiseptic and old fear, which was the smell of every ambulance Zara Abdullahi Cole had ever worked in, and she had stopped noticing it approximately three weeks into her first posting. What she noticed now, four years later, was the silence between calls the specific quality of Lagos at 2am when even the city's extraordinary appetite for noise had temporarily exhausted itself, leaving behind something that was almost peace if you didn't look too closely at the reasons for it.
She was parked on Bode Thomas Street in Surulere, engine running because the air conditioning only worked when the engine was running and the night was the particular thick heat of Lagos in March that pressed against every surface like a hand. Her partner for the night, Emeka Obi, was asleep in the passenger seat with the specific shamelessness of a man who had long ago made his peace with sleeping in any position anywhere. He snored lightly. Zara had learned to find it companionable.
She was eating a meat pie that had been purchased two hours ago and had not improved with time, reading a pharmacology textbook balanced on the steering wheel, when her phone buzzed.
Not the dispatch radio. Her personal phone. Musa.
You still alive out there?
She typed back with one hand: Barely. Emeka is asleep again.
That man could sleep through the second coming.
He probably would and then complain that nobody woke him up. She put the phone down and looked back at her textbook and found she had lost the page.
The thing about night shifts was that they gave you too much time to think. Zara had developed, over four years, an extensive set of techniques for preventing this the textbook, the podcasts she played through a single earbud, the running calculations she kept in the back of her mind about money. Nursing school fees due in six weeks, forty three thousand naira she did not currently have. Mama Folake's blood pressure medication, which the pharmacy near her house in Surulere had been out of for two weeks and which the next nearest pharmacy charged twelve percent more for. Rent, which was always rent, immovable and quarterly and somehow always arriving before she was ready.
The calculations were not comforting. They were not meant to be. They were meant to occupy the part of her brain that would otherwise do something less productive, like wonder why she was still here when half her nursing cohort had relocated to Canada in the past eighteen months, or think about the patient she had lost two weeks ago on the Apapa expressway, a young man of maybe twenty who had been hit by a truck and who she had worked on for eleven minutes in the back of the ambulance before the numbers stopped being improvable.
She did not think about that. She ate her meat pie and read about drug interactions and listened to Emeka snore.
The call came at 2:47am.
Victoria Island. Assault victim. Severe trauma, multiple injuries, caller had already disconnected. Address on Adeola Odeku Street.
Zara had the engine in gear before the dispatch had finished. Emeka was awake and reaching for his seatbelt with the automatic efficiency of someone who had trained themselves to go from sleep to functional in the span of a radio transmission.
"VI?" he said.
"Adeola Odeku."
He made a sound that meant at least the roads will be clear and settled into his seat.
They drove in the comfortable shorthand of people who had worked enough emergencies together that communication had simplified itself to essentials. Zara navigated the empty expressway with the particular focused calm that descended on her during calls everything narrowing to the task, the route, the variables she could control. The variables she couldn't control she filed away for after.
She was good at this. She had always been good at this the crisis calm, the narrowing focus. Her first supervisor had told her she had the temperament for emergency medicine, which was the highest compliment he gave anyone and which he delivered with the slight suspicion of a man who found it unnatural in someone so young.
She had not told him that she had been managing emergencies her entire life. That growing up with intermittent money and a grandmother raising a child alone on a teacher's pension had required its own version of crisis management, its own daily triage of what could be handled now and what had to wait. The ambulance work had felt, from the first shift, like a formalisation of something she already knew.
The man was in the service alley behind a restaurant on Adeola Odeku Street, which was dark at this hour but not deserted a security guard had found him and called it in and was now standing fifteen feet away with the expression of someone who wanted very much to be somewhere else.
Zara was out of the ambulance before it fully stopped.
He was in his mid forties, she estimated. Well dressed in the way that meant money the suit was European cut, the shoes were leather and real. He had been beaten with a precision that she recognised immediately as different from the chaotic damage of random violence. This was deliberate. Someone had known exactly where to apply force and how much.
"Sir," she said, dropping to her knees beside him. "Can you hear me?"
No response. She ran through the primary survey with the automatic efficiency of long practice airway clear, breathing present but laboured, pulse rapid and thready. His left side was the worst of it ribs, she thought, at least two cracked, possibly more. She called it back to Emeka who was already pulling the stretcher.
They worked quietly and quickly. She had an IV line in his arm before Emeka had the stretcher fully down, the fluid running before they moved him. His suit jacket, which she cut away with practiced efficiency, had something in the inside pocket that she moved aside without looking at not her business, not her call.
She was securing the cervical collar when his hand moved.
It was not the random movement of unconscious muscle. It was deliberate fingers closing around her wrist with a grip that was entirely wrong for a man in his condition. Not tight enough to hurt but firm enough that she could not have pulled away without effort, and something about the quality of the grip made her not try.
His eyes opened.
The light in the alley was bad and she was focused on his pupils equal and reactive, which was something and it was only in the second glance that she registered what she was seeing. His eyes were amber. Not brown catching the light wrong. Not any shade of colour that she had vocabulary for. Amber like a lit coal, gold at the centre and darkening outward, and they were entirely, uniformly that colour with no white visible.
She had time to think: that's not right and then he spoke.
"They know about you." His voice was wrecked, barely above a rasp, the words costing him visibly. "The Court knows. Run."
"Sir, don't try to speak"
"Listen." The grip on her wrist tightened fractionally. The amber eyes were fully focused on her face with an intensity that was not delirium. Whatever was happening in his body, his mind was entirely present. "You don't know what you are. They do. And they're"
He lost consciousness between one word and the next. The grip on her wrist went slack.
Zara held her position for exactly two seconds the two seconds she permitted herself when something genuinely strange happened before the professional override kicked back in. Then she was moving, calling to Emeka, getting the man loaded and secure.
She drove to the hospital with her eyes on the road and her hands steady on the wheel and the feeling of his grip still present on her wrist like a word she couldn't stop hearing.
The hospital receiving bay was its usual controlled chaos three other emergencies in progress, a doctor who looked like he had been awake for twenty hours because he had been awake for twenty hours, the particular soundtrack of a Nigerian public hospital at 3am which was its own form of music if you had enough context to follow it.
She gave her handover report with precision and brevity and stepped back and watched them take him through the bay doors.
She filled out her paperwork in the relatives' waiting area because every other surface was occupied. A woman across from her was praying quietly in Yoruba, the words running together into something that sounded like water. A child was asleep across three plastic chairs with a coat over him. The fluorescent light above Zara's head flickered at irregular intervals that she had stopped noticing by the third form.
Emeka brought her a cup of tea from somewhere that she accepted without asking where he'd found it at 3am in this hospital because some questions were better left alone.
"Strange one tonight," he said.
"They're all strange."
"The eyes on that man." He shook his head. "Jaundice, maybe."
"Maybe," Zara said.
She drank her tea. The fluorescent light flickered. Somewhere in the hospital a monitor alarmed briefly and then stopped.
At 4:23am, a junior nurse she had never met came to find her with an expression that sat between confused and disturbed and told her that the patient from Adeola Odeku Street was no longer in his bay.
Not discharged. Not transferred.
Gone.
Zara looked at the nurse for a long moment. Then she looked down at her wrist, where she could still feel the ghost of a grip that had been too strong for a dying man.
"Okay," she said.
She finished her tea. She went back to the ambulance. She drove the rest of the shift without incident and told herself, with the discipline of long practice, that she would think about it later.
She did not think about it later.
She thought about it the entire time