Free Under Dark Sky Law by Tamara Boyens

can play at this game,” she
said, the creepy smile slowly drooping towards her chin.
    Xero just kept smiling innocently. “Play
what?” she said, knowing messing with the nurse wouldn’t lead
anywhere good, but not really caring anymore. It had been a rough
week, and she was only hastening the inevitable anyway.
    The nurse finally couldn’t maintain the fake
grin any longer, and it died on her face like a fallen soufflé.
“Lights out for you,” she said and grabbed a capped syringe out of
her scrub pockets. As Xero suspected, the nurse must have been
contemplating it even before she messed with her, considering she
had a syringe ready to go.
    Thankfully there wasn’t much more Xero could
do before healing further from her injuries, so an early sedation
wasn’t much of a punishment. The nurse stuck the syringe into one
of Xero’s IV lines and gave a little miffed cackle before slamming
the empty syringe into the sharp’s container on the wall and
plodding out of the room. The door slammed and locked again behind
her.
    She began feeling woozy, but she smiled a
little bit more knowing that the nurse had just violated some of
her own sacred hospital policies. Unauthorized sedation of a
patient for one, and not monitoring a sedated patient for stable
vitals before leaving the room for another. If you pushed anyone
far enough, they would break, and Xero had a knack for figuring out
what would make someone violate their own code of ethics. It was
one of the things that had made her an excellent psychiatrist.
    The lights dimmed on her vision again, and
she silently hoped her intuition was right, and the nurse wouldn’t
take any further steps towards vengeance. Then again, waiting for
catastrophe was half the fun.

CHAPTER 8
     
    Fate smiled on her gamble, and she woke up
once again in the hospital, this time significantly more intact
than she had been before. Rapid healing protocols were one of the
few things they didn’t have out in the pits that they she really
wished they did. It didn’t work well for chronic or infectious shit
like cancer or lung zaps, but it was a goddamned miracle for
straight forward wound healing. Less than a day had passed, and she
felt nearly 90% improved. Medical personnel must have agreed
because within hours of waking up they began preparing to have her
transported to another facility.
    Very little in the way of communication or
answers was provided during the course of the transfer, but it was
all pretty standard bullshit. Once she was out of the locked down
hospital environment she’d have a lot more leeway to get access to
the kinds of equipment and information that she was accustomed to.
Everyone she’d dealt with during the discharge and transfer process
had been low level peons. Some of the higher level officials she
was used to doing business with were conspicuously absent, leading
her to think there was even more shit going down than she
originally thought.
    She was proud of herself for behaving for the
majority of the experience. The nurse she’d had so much fun with
never returned, likely having been fired or transferred to another
ward for her insubordination. When she was younger, she had trained
herself to be a professional and hide her true emotions from her
clients. She had a natural talent for being a chameleon—for
observing the behaviors of others and mimicking them. But when the
exiles happened, when everything changed, she had let go of those
inhibitions and those feelings of captivity. She wasn’t proud of
everything that she’d done in those days, but she had learned new
skills that she still used today. However, she still fought against
the urge to just let it all hang out and watch everything burn
around her. These days she had bigger responsibilities, which she
sometimes felt like living up to when the mood struck her. There
was a whole colony that relied on her to keep shit together, which
was probably a mistake on their part.
    At the end of the day she