Chapter 8: The Dream's Edge
The medical suite’s silence was a living thing. It wasn’t peaceful; it was the heavy, expectant quiet of a machine holding its breath. The only sounds were the metronomic beep of the heart monitor and the low hum of the refrigeration unit for the blood bags. Fluorescent light bleached the color from everything, turning the world into shades of grey, green, and sickly white.
Jake sat in the same chair by the wall, a silhouette carved from shadow and worn leather. He was dissembling a Sig Sauer for the third time, the oily, metallic snick-snick of parts fitting together a meditation to keep the other thoughts at bay. His jaw still ached faintly where her fist had connected two days prior—a good ache, a reminder she had fight left. He’d take a hundred of those hits over the terrifying limpness of her unconscious body.
On the table, Sage slept. The drugs had been dialed back to a low, therapeutic trickle at her own hissed insistence. “I need to know if I’m screaming.” Her sleep now was fitful, a tense, surface-level thing. Her eyes moved rapidly behind closed lids. Every twenty minutes or so, a fine tremor would run through her, a full-body flinch that made the IV line sway.
He watched her, his hands moving on autopilot. The clinical part of his mind, the one that overlapped with Steven’s knowledge, catalogued the signs: elevated heart rate on the monitor, slight sweat on her temples. PTSD. Night terrors. He knew the shape of them. He lived in a house made of similar echoes.
He was just slotting the slide back onto the frame when she stiffened.
This was different. Not a tremor. A full-body lock, her back arching minimally against the restraints of her own pain. A thin sound escaped her, a whimper trapped behind clenched teeth.
Jake set the gun down on the table beside him, slowly, silently. He stood up, the chair grating softly on the concrete. He didn’t approach. Steven had said sudden touches could trigger a catastrophic response. He just watched, his own breath held.
Her lips moved. A mumble at first, then words, low and guttural, spoken into the sterile air with a desperate, pleading rhythm. It wasn’t English.
Russian.
Jake understood maybe three words of Russian. Nyet. Davai. Spasibo. This was a flood, a torrent. Her voice climbed from a whisper to a ragged, terrified stream. He caught “pozhalusta”—please. He heard “nye nado”—don’t. Over and over. “Nye nado. Nye nado.” Then a name, or maybe a word, hissed with such venom it froze his blood: “Krivets.”
Her thrashing started small, a twitch of the legs, a hand fisting the sheet. Then it escalated. Her head jerked side to side on the thin pillow. The heart monitor’s beep became a frantic, steady whine. Her injured side pulled taut, and she cried out—a sharp, Russian curse this time—as pain ripped through the fog of the nightmare.
“Sage,” Jake said, his voice low but firm. He took a step forward. “Hey. You’re dreaming.”
She didn’t hear him. She was somewhere else, in a different room, with different monsters. Her legs kicked, a weak, scrambling motion. “Ostav’ menya v pokoye!” Leave me alone!
The IV stand wobbled. The saline bag swung.
Jake closed the distance. He couldn’t let her tear the stitches open again. He reached out, aiming to grasp her shoulder, to ground her. “Sage. Wake up.”
The moment his fingers made contact with the thin cotton of the medical gown, her eyes flew open.
There was no recognition. No consciousness. Just a pure, feral survival instinct etched in panic. The eyes that met his were wide, black with dilated pupils, seeing someone else.
Her right hand shot up, faster than he’d thought possible in her state. It wasn’t a slap. It was a closed-fist, instinctive punch, driven by the leverage of her torso. It connected with the point of his jaw with a solid, wet crack.
Light exploded behind his eyes. He staggered back a step, more from surprise than force. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth where his teeth had cut the inside of his cheek.
She was already scrambling back on the table, a trapped animal, her IV line pulling taut. A guttural sound ripped from her throat, half-scream, half-snarl. She grabbed for the heart monitor clip on her finger, fumbling to rip it off.
“No, no, no—tranquila,” Jake growled, shaking his head to clear the stars. He lunged, not to strike back, but to contain. He caught her wrists, both of them, his grip an iron circle. She fought with a silent, terrifying strength, bucking under him, her bare heels scrambling against the vinyl padding of the table. Her breath came in ragged, panicked sobs. Spit flecked her lips.
“Look at me!” he commanded, his face close to hers, putting himself in her line of sight. “Sage! It’s Jake. You’re safe. It’s Jake.”
She struggled, her eyes darting past him, around the room, still searching for the shadows of the pump chamber, for Gable’s men, for Krivets.
He didn’t let go. He adjusted his grip, careful not to hurt, just to hold. He used his body weight to still her thrashing, one knee on the edge of the table to brace. “Nadie te va a tocar,” he murmured, the Spanish slipping out from a deeper, older place. Nobody will touch you. “Escúchame. You are here. With me. The bad place is gone. Gone.”
The word, or maybe the tone—the rough, unfamiliar language cutting through the Russian echoes—seemed to register. The violent thrashing subsided into tremors. The wild terror in her eyes fractured, and behind it, a slow, dawning horror seeped in. She was seeing him now. The cracked fluorescent light. The medical suite. The man holding her wrists.
Her gaze dropped to his hands, then flew to his face, to the red mark already blossoming on his jaw. She saw the blood on his lip.
The fight left her all at once, a collapse that was more devastating than the struggle. A choked sound escaped her, and she went limp, her head dropping forward. The sobs that followed were silent at first, just violent shakes of her shoulders. Then the sound broke—raw, ugly, wrenching gasps that seemed to tear themselves from a place deeper than her injured ribs.
Jake released her wrists. She didn’t pull away. She just crumpled.
He didn’t think. He just gathered her. He sat on the edge of the table and pulled her into him, her back against his chest, his arms coming around her, careful of her injuries. She was freezing, shivering as if plunged into ice water. She didn’t resist. She turned her face into the worn leather of his vest and wept.
He held her. One hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her short, sweat-damp hair. The other arm wrapped around her middle, a steady band of pressure. He rested his chin on the top of her head. He could feel each fractured sob as a physical vibration through her frame.
“Está bien,” he whispered into her hair, his voice a ragged scrape. “Let it out. You’re safe here. I’ve got you. Te tengo.”
He didn’t know how long they stayed like that. The heart monitor’s frantic beep gradually slowed, settling back into a steady rhythm. Her crying subsided from storm to aftermath, into hiccuping, exhausted breaths. She was utterly spent, a vessel emptied. Her weight was a complete surrender against him.
Slowly, her hand came up. Not to push him away. Her fingers, cold and trembling, found the blood on his lower lip. She wiped at it with her thumb, a faint, confused smear. “I hit you,” she mumbled, her voice hoarse and thick.
“Yeah,” he said, a low rumble in his chest. “You got a decent right hook. For a gimp.”
A shudder that might have been a laugh or another sob went through her. She didn’t move away. “The words… the Russian…”
“You don’t have to explain.” He said it flatly. No pressure. An offer of darkness accepted without condition.
She was quiet for a long time. The silence was different now. Shared. Burdened, but not alone.
“It’s not… it’s not just Gable,” she said finally, the words so quiet he felt them more than heard them. “It’s an old debt. From before. He works for… Krivets. I stole something. I thought it was just information. It was more.” She took a shaky breath. “They want it back. Or they want me erased. Gable was the middleman. The collector.”
Jake’s arms tightened around her almost imperceptibly. The puzzle piece clicked, and the picture it revealed was worse. This wasn’t over. This was a fork in a road that led deeper into hell. “What did you steal?”
She shook her head against his chest, a minute movement. “The less you know, the less they’ll want you dead for knowing.” She paused. “The children… they were collateral. My fault. A pressure play. I couldn’t…”
“You got them out,” he finished. He understood fault. He carried continents of it.
She finally pulled back, just enough to look up at him. Her eyes were swollen, red-rimmed, but dry now and painfully clear. The clinical calm was shattered, and what was underneath was vast, weary, and terrifyingly resilient. “You should have left me in that plant.”
“No,” he said, the word final as a slamming door. “We shouldn’t have.”
The suite’s main door hissed open. Marc stood in the threshold, having heard the commotion. He took in the scene: Jake on the table, Sage in his arms, the overturned chair, the beeping monitor, the blood on Jake’s mouth. His expression didn’t change. He just gave a slow, single nod.
“Gable’s scrambling,” Marc said, his voice cutting through the intimate silence. “Moving assets. He’s scared. Of us, or of failing his boss, I can’t tell yet.” His eyes locked on Sage. “You know who his boss is.”
It wasn’t a question.
Sage held his gaze, and the defiance was back, a feeble spark fanned into a low flame. “I know. And I know where he’ll be in seventy-two hours. A private auction. In Vienna.”
Jake felt the shift in her, the gathering of will. He let his arms fall, allowing her space. She didn’t move away, just straightened her spine, wincing at the pull of her ribs.
Marc’s smile was a thin, sharp thing. “Then we have a schedule.” He looked at Jake. “Get her stabilized. We’re not done.”
He turned and left, the door sealing behind him with a soft thump.
The silence returned, but it was charged now, humming with a new, dangerous purpose. Sage looked down at her own trembling hands, then balled them into fists. The nightmare was real, but it was outside these walls. And for the first time, she wasn’t facing it alone.
Jake stood, his joints protesting. He fetched a clean cloth from the supply cart, wet it with cool water from the sink, and handed it to her. For her face. For whatever she needed.
She took it, their fingers brushing. A silent thanks.
“Vienna,” Jake said, picking up his Sig Sauer from the side table and smoothly reassembling it with a few expert motions. The final click echoed in the quiet room.
“Yeah,” Sage said, pressing the cloth to her eyes. When she lowered it, the raw grief was tucked away, replaced by a grim, focused calculation. She looked at the heart monitor, then reached over and deliberately peeled the sensor from her finger. The steady beep flatlined into a monotonous, warning drone.
She ignored it. “We’re going to need better clothes.”
The flatline alarm shrieked its single, piercing note in the sterile room. It wasn't a medical emergency, but it felt like a verdict. Sage held up the disconnected sensor, a gesture of defiance that lasted exactly three seconds before a wave of dizziness washed the color from her face. She swayed, the cloth dropping from her other hand.
Jake caught her before she could tilt off the table. Her skin, where his hand gripped her arm, was clammy and too warm. “Hey, none of that,” he said, lowering her back against the raised bed. He reattached the sensor. The beeping resumed, faster now.
“I’m fine,” she muttered, but her eyes were glassy, unfocused.
“You’re not,” Steven said, appearing in the doorway with a digital thermometer. His usually impeccable hair was disheveled. He’d heard the alarm too. He placed the thermometer against her temple. It beeped. He read it, and his face tightened. “One hundred and two point eight. This isn’t postoperative stress. This is sepsis.”
The word landed in the room like a lead weight. Jake knew it. A battlefield killer. The body turning on itself.
“The antibiotics aren’t touching it,” Steven continued, his voice clinical but strained. He pulled back the sterile dressing over the incision on her side. The flesh around the neatly re-sutured wound was an angry, weeping crimson, hot streaks radiating outward under the skin. A faint, sweetly rotten odor underneath the antiseptic. “The infection is deeper than we thought. Possibly in the bloodstream. My resources here are containment, not a full-scale biochemical fight.”
“What are you saying?” Marc’s voice came from the doorway. He’d returned, drawn by the tension.
“I’m saying I can keep her hydrated and sedated while she dies,” Steven snapped, the polished facade cracking completely. “The pathogen is resistant. I don’t have the diagnostic suite to identify it, let alone the tailored pharmaceuticals to kill it. She needs a real hospital. Or…”
He trailed off, looking at Marc, a silent, terrible understanding passing between them. A hospital meant records, questions, and Gable or Krivets would find her before sunset.
“Or what?” Jake asked, his hand still on Sage’s too-hot arm.
“Or we call someone who has a full-spectrum molecular biology lab in his pocket,” Marc finished, his jaw working. The implication hung in the air, toxic and unavoidable.
“No.” Jake’s refusal was immediate, visceral. “Absolutely not. We bring someone else in, this whole thing unravels. It’s not just us. It’s her. They’ll want her. They’ll pick her apart.”
“She’ll be dead in thirty-six hours, Jake,” Steven said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He pointed at the spreading inflammation. “Look at it. This is systemic. I’ve tried everything on my formulary.”
Sage tried to push herself up on her elbows, failed. Her breath hitched. “Just… cut it out. Cut the whole damn thing out.”
“It’s in your blood,” Steven said, gently pushing her back down. “There’s nothing to cut.”
A thick silence fell, broken only by Sage’s ragged breathing and the relentless, accusatory beep of the monitor. The three of them, a fractured system, stared at each other over her burning body. The walls of their hidden world were closing in.
Marc turned and walked out of the medical suite without another word. They heard his footsteps retreat down the corridor, then the sound of a heavy door opening and closing.
“Where’s he going?” Sage whispered.
“To make a call,” Jake said, his voice hollow. He looked down at her, at the fever-bright defiance in her eyes slowly being drowned by physiological terror. He saw the fingerprint bruises on her thighs, now overlapped with the angry red streaks of infection. The people who had done this had left a final, invisible poison in the wound.
Ten minutes later, Marc returned. He held a sleek, non-descript black phone, a piece of technology far beyond their usual burners. “The line is secure. As secure as anything can be with him.” He didn’t look at any of them. “He’s coming.”
“Who?” Sage asked, though she’d already guessed.
“The only person arrogant enough to think he can fix this and discrete enough to maybe not blab to the whole goddamn world,” Marc said, placing the phone on a counter. “Tony Stark.”
Three hours later, the ambiance of the derelict waterfront district changed. The constant background hum of distant traffic was severed by a new, deeper sound—a low, sub-audible thrum that vibrated in the fillings of their teeth. Through a grime-caked window, Jake saw a sleek, matte black aircraft, no larger than a sedan, descend silently from the low cloud cover. It was all impossible angles and absorbed light, a ghost.
It settled on the abandoned pier outside without a sound. A hatch hissed open.
Tony Stark stepped out, not in Iron Man armor, but in dark jeans, a gray sweater, and leather jacket. He carried a brushed metal briefcase. He looked incongruously normal, like a billionaire slumming it. He took in the rusted skeletal frames of the warehouses, the oily water, the utter bleakness, and raised an eyebrow.
“Charming,” he said, his voice carrying easily to where Marc stood, arms crossed, in a shadowed doorway. “Really leans into the whole ‘psychopath chic’ aesthetic. Lead the way, Captain Cryptic.”
Marc said nothing, just turned and led him inside, through the labyrinth of corridors to the medical suite.
Stark paused at the threshold, his eyes flicking from Steven in his blood-smeared apron, to Jake standing guard like a stone idol, to Sage on the table. His casual demeanor evaporated. The engineer’s brain engaged, absorbing the scene in a millisecond: the inadequate equipment, the advanced infection, the history of trauma written on her skin.
“Okay,” he said, placing the briefcase on a side table. It clicked open, unfolding not into a container, but into a hovering array of holographic interfaces and miniature, whirring scanner pods. The sterile white light of the suite was washed out by the cool, blue glow. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with. Steven, was it? Talk to me. Timeline. Treatment attempted.”
Steven recited the medical details in rapid, precise terms. Stark listened, nodding, his fingers dancing in the air, manipulating holoscreens only he could see. A scanner pod detached and floated over Sage, emitting a thin, concentric ring of light that passed down her body.
“You hit her with a second-gen cephalosporin,” Stark muttered, reading data. “Smart guess. Wrong one. That’s not a street-grade infection. That’s engineered.” He zoomed in on a molecular model that spun in the air. “See that protein sheath? That’s custom. Nasty little piece of bio-hacking. Probably triggers on a specific antibiotic, makes it worse. Your basic hospital would’ve killed her faster.”
“Can you fix it?” Jake’s question was a raw scrape of sound.
Stark glanced at him, really looked at him, seeing the violence and fear held in check. “Yeah. I brought the broad-spectrum nano-disassemblers. They’ll chew through the engineered bits and the regular infection. Then we rebuild from there.” He tapped the air, and his briefcase produced a small, clear capsule filled with a silvery fluid. “This goes in her IV. It’ll work fast. She’s going to feel like hell for about twenty minutes as it scours her system. Then she’ll sleep for twelve hours.”
He handed the capsule to Steven, who, after a hesitant glance at Marc, administered it. The silvery fluid vanished into the clear IV line.
Almost immediately, Sage gasped. Her back arched off the table, a silent scream locked in her throat. Her hands gripped the edges of the table, knuckles white.
“What’s happening?” Jake took a step forward.
“The nano-tech is identifying and dismantling the pathogen. It’s a war at the cellular level. It’s supposed to hurt,” Stark said, his eyes on the vital signs flashing across his hologram. Her heart rate spiked. “But she’s strong. Look. The inflammatory markers are already dropping.”
The violent tremors subsided as quickly as they began, leaving Sage drenched in sweat, panting, but conscious. The awful, fevered glaze in her eyes was clearing. She focused on Stark, recognition dawning amidst the pain. “Stark.”
“The one and only.” He gave her a quick, professional smile. “Don’t thank me yet. The bill’s in the mail.” His smile faded as he looked at Marc. “Now. The ‘why’. You don’t call me for a simple sepsis case. Who did this? And what’s the ‘it’ they’re using to do it?”
Before Marc could formulate a lie of omission, Stark’s holographic display flickered. An incoming data-stream, prioritized. He glanced at it, and his expression turned grim. “Uh-huh. Right. So while my stuff was scanning her, it did a full tox and bio-screen. Found trace markers of some very specialized, very illegal hormonal conditioning agents. Long-term drip-feed stuff. This wasn’t just a beating.” He looked at Sage with a new, unsettling pity. “Someone was trying to chemically rewrite you. Break you down to compliant components. This is next-level nasty.”
The room went cold. The fingerprint bruises. The deliberate, grasping marks. It hadn’t just been cruelty. It had been a process.
Jake’s stillness became something lethal.
Stark closed the hologram with a sharp swipe of his hand. “Alright. You’ve got my attention. And not just mine. A flagged, engineered bioweapon signature just pinged my private servers. That tripped a dozen protocols. Natasha’s already asking questions. So is Rogers.” He snapped the briefcase shut. The blue light vanished, leaving the room feeling poor and dark again. “You’ve got your patient back. She’ll be mobile, if not combat-ready, in 48 hours. But you don’t just have a gangster problem anymore. You’ve got Avenger-level interest.”
He headed for the door, then paused, looking back at Marc. “Whatever vendetta this is, Spector, you’re on borrowed time. And clock’s ticking. Clean it up before we have to.” He gave Sage one last, appraising look. “Good luck.”
The hatch of his aircraft sealed. The thrumming silence returned, and then it was gone.
The medical suite felt smaller, exposed. The secret was out. Sage lay still, the color slowly returning to her face, the fire of the infection receding. But a new kind of terror had been introduced.
Marc finally spoke, his voice low and dangerous. “Vienna. In seventy-two hours. We go. We end Gable. We find Krivets.” He looked at Sage, at the dawning understanding in her eyes. “Before the ‘good guys’ decide we’re part of the problem that needs to be cleaned up.”
The race was no longer just against a collector. It was against the spreading light of a world that would expose all their secrets.