The hospital's CCTV footage from Bay 7 showed nothing useful.
Zara knew this not because anyone told her nobody told her anything, she was a paramedic who had delivered a patient and had no further official standing in the matter but because she asked Emeka to ask his cousin who worked hospital security to ask someone who had access to the system, which was how information moved in Nigerian institutions when you needed it to move at all.
The footage showed the patient in the bay at 3:54am. At 3:55am the camera developed a static interference that lasted four minutes and thirty seven seconds. At 4:00am the bay was empty. The bed was made. Not dishevelled and abandoned made, with the sheets pulled to hospital corners that the overworked night staff never had time to produce.
Someone had made the bed.
Emeka's cousin's contact found this detail funny in the nervous way people found things funny when they didn't want to think about them too hard. Zara did not find it funny. She wrote it in the small notebook she kept in her left uniform pocket, under patient: no ID recovered, eyes: amber, words: they know about you, the Court knows, run, and then she closed the notebook and put it away and went home to sleep.
She slept four hours. This was normal for her she had never been someone who slept long, her body apparently having decided somewhere in her early twenties that four or five hours was sufficient and that the remaining time could be more productively spent. She woke at 9am to three messages from Musa, one from her nursing school group chat about an assignment deadline she had forgotten, and the sound of her neighbour's generator which ran from 8am daily with the reliability of a muezzin call.
She lay on her back on her bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about amber eyes.
The thing was, she had a framework for strange. Lagos provided it a city of twenty million people generated a statistical inevitability of strangeness, and four years of emergency medicine had expanded her definition of normal to accommodate things that would have disturbed an earlier version of herself. She had seen a man walk into a hospital with a machete wound to the shoulder and ask calmly for a specific doctor by name. She had treated a woman who had been in a car accident and whose primary concern throughout the entire procedure was a phone call she needed to make. She had worked on a child who had survived something that the physics of the situation said the child should not have survived, and she had learned to file that under I don't have enough information rather than impossible because impossible was a word that emergency medicine wore down quickly.
Amber eyes. A grip too strong for a dying man. A bed made to hospital corners at 4am.
They know about you. The Court knows. Run.
She did not know what the Court was. She did not know what there was to know about her. She was Zara Abdullahi Cole, twenty four years old, paramedic, part time nursing student, daughter of a woman who had died before she could walk and a father she had never been told anything useful about, granddaughter of Mama Folake who made the best egusi soup in Surulere and watched the evening news with the focused outrage of someone who took governance personally.
There was nothing to know about her. She was nobody's secret.
She got up and made herself tea and ate the remaining meat pie from last night cold, standing over the kitchen sink, and opened her pharmacology textbook to the page she had lost and read for forty minutes with reasonable concentration, and then she picked up her phone and called Musa.
He answered on the second ring, which meant he was not sleeping, which meant his night rotation had either ended early or he was running on the specific second wind energy that junior doctors developed as a survival adaptation.
"You sound like you didn't sleep," he said, before she had said anything beyond his name.
"Four hours."
"Zara."
"It's enough."
"It is not enough. It has never been enough. Normal humans require"
"Musa." She sat down on her kitchen floor, which was a thing she did when she was thinking seriously, the cool tile grounding in a way the chair never was. "Did you hear anything strange last night? From VI?"
A pause. "Strange how?"
"Patient brought in around 3am. Assault victim. Disappeared from the bay before 4am. No record of discharge or transfer."
Another pause, longer. She could hear him thinking. "I wasn't in that end of the building. But" He stopped.
"But what?"
"One of the night nurses mentioned something this morning. I thought she was overtired. She said the bay smelled wrong after. Like she said it smelled like an animal had been there. Which obviously"
"Which obviously what?"
"Which is obviously not possible in a hospital bay," he said, with the slight firmness of someone reassuring himself as much as her.
"Obviously," Zara said.
She looked at the tile between her feet. There was a small crack running from the base of the cabinet toward the centre of the room that she had been meaning to report to her landlord for eight months. She traced it with her eyes.
"The patient said something to me," she said. "Before he lost consciousness."
"Patients say things."
"I know that."
"Trauma, hypoxia, blood loss the brain does strange things when it's under that kind of"
"Musa." She said his name in the specific register that meant I know all of this, I am not asking you to explain it to me, I am asking you to listen. He had learned this register over two years of friendship and he respected it.
"Okay," he said. "What did he say?"
She told him. Verbatim, because she had a paramedic's trained recall for patient statements and because she had been repeating the words internally since 3am with the compulsive attention she gave to things she didn't understand.
The silence after was longer than the previous ones.
"Run from what?" Musa said finally.
"I don't know."
"What Court?"
"I don't know."
"And his eyes were"
"Amber. The whole eye. No white."
She heard him exhale slowly. It was his I am a medical professional and I am going to respond to this as a medical professional exhale, which she recognised and found, in this particular moment, both comforting and insufficient.
"Jaundice can present with"
"It wasn't jaundice."
"Zara"
"I know what jaundice looks like. I have been doing this for four years. His eyes were amber and they were focused and he knew exactly what he was saying." She paused. "And then someone made his bed to hospital corners and walked him out of a secured bay while the camera had a four minute interruption."
The silence this time had a different quality. Musa was not a man who dismissed things easily it was one of the things she valued most about him, his willingness to sit with information that didn't fit neatly. His faith, she had come to understand, gave him a framework for the inexplicable that was more expansive than pure clinical rationalism. He had told her once that Islam had never asked him to disbelieve in what he could see. Only to understand that what he could see was not all there was.
"Are you safe?" he said.
The question landed differently than she expected. Not that's strange or are you sure but immediately, practically: are you safe.
"Yes," she said. "I think so. For now."
"For now."
"It's the best I can give you."
"Okay." Another exhale. "Okay. I'll ask around quietly. The nurse who mentioned the smell I'll talk to her properly. And Zara"
"I know."
"Be careful on the roads."
"I'm always careful on the roads."
"You drive like someone who has made peace with death."
"I drive like someone who knows Lagos traffic," she said, and he laughed, and the laugh made the morning feel briefly more manageable. She stayed on the floor after she hung up, the tile cool under her palms, the generator next door maintaining its reliable roar.
She thought about amber eyes. She thought about a bed made to hospital corners. She thought about the grip on her wrist that had been too strong, and the specific quality of focus in a dying man's gaze not delirium, not pain. Recognition. He had looked at her the way people looked at something they already knew, finding it exactly where they had expected.
They know about you.
What was there to know?
She got up off the floor. She had a pharmacology class at 1pm and Mama Folake's medication to sort out before then and approximately forty three thousand naira worth of problems that needed solving before the end of the month. She was a practical person. She had always been a practical person. Practicality had never failed her the way that everything else had occasionally failed her.
She opened her textbook. She made a second cup of tea.
She did not think about the patient.
She thought about nothing else.