I don’t release the knitting needle or my grip on Jade until I hear the alarm sound and the click that signifies the door to Ward D is now unlocked.

As soon as that happens, I stand up and throw the needle as far as I can.

I raise my hands over my head just to be safe. There are a lot of bad things happening right here, and I don’t want anyone to get any idea that I’m responsible for any of it.

Jade scrambles to her feet as well, doing her best to smooth out her blond hair so it doesn’t look quite as wild. I might have been well served to do the same. Only about five percent of my hair is still in my ponytail and the rest is hanging loose around my face or possibly sticking straight up in the air. But at least I don’t have smeared makeup like she does.

A man bursts into the unit. He’s a maintenance worker who I vaguely recognize from the last two years, with gray hair, a belly that hangs over his work belt, and an ID badge that says “Chuck” in big black letters. I wonder if he recognizes me. Probably not. There are so many of us students.

Chuck’s eyes widen as he stumbles inside the unit. He takes in Jade with her wild blond hair and streaked mascara, me with my hands up in the air, Damon on the floor with his face covered in dental floss, and then Spider-Dan, looking quite proud of himself.

“What the hell is going on here?” Chuck barks.

He doesn’t even know this is just the tip of the iceberg. He hasn’t seen what’s in the seclusion rooms.

“She attacked me!” Jade swipes at her eyes as she glares at me. “She’s a crazy person. Thank God you came to our rescue!”

“That’s not true,” I say in a calm, even voice that belies what I’m feeling inside.

Chuck looks between the two of us. He’s got to realize that she is the patient and I am the… well, I’m not a doctor yet, but I’m definitely not a patient—even though when I look down on my chest, I realize that my ID badge came off during the scuffle.

Chuck must see that I’m the sane one. Right?

Finally, his eyes rest on me. “I know you,” he says. “You’re the medical student who kept forgetting the combination to your locker in the anatomy lab.”

That is extremely accurate, although embarrassing. I had to ask Chuck to cut my lock off no less than three times during my first year. I never claimed to be good at remembering numbers.

“Yes,” I say.

“What’s your name, Medical Student?” “Amy. Amy Brenner.”

“Okay, Amy.” He nods firmly. “I want to hear from you and you alone.

What happened here tonight?”

AFTER HE HEARS an abridged version of my story and gets a glimpse of what’s inside Seclusion One, Chuck calls 911.

Several other hospital staff members join us in Ward D, to assess the damage, and take Jade and Damon into custody. Damon briefly lost consciousness, but he comes around when security gets onto the unit. However, being choked with dental floss has taken a lot of the fight out of him. A nurse whose ID badge identifies her as Hazel takes me aside. “Anyone else injured?” she asks.

Spider-Dan seems… well, as good as he ever was. Then I remember Seclusion Two. “There’s a patient in there too. His name is Miguel.”

Much like the door to the entrance, a code isn’t working on this one either. Chuck has to reset it manually, and we all step back to let him do his

job. As I watch him, my stomach churns. What are the chances that Miguel is perfectly fine in there?

As soon as the door swings open, I immediately see the rest of the blood that Nicole couldn’t clean up. Strawberry jelly—how could I have ever believed that? It’s streaked all over the floor in the room, although I can’t see much else because the emergency staff members have already run inside. It just showed how much Jade was messing with my head that I could have ever doubted myself.

“No pulse!” someone announces from inside the room.

Even though I knew it had to be true, I still feel a wave of sadness. One more casualty of the night. Hopefully the last one.

A few patients have wandered out of their rooms to see what the commotion is about. Even though the staff is desperately trying to keep them inside, there are too many patients and the staff is too busy with all the dead bodies. Clint wanders out, dodging a nurse who tries to step in his way. He is wily that one.

“Amy!” Clint calls out. He’s still holding that bag of saltines.

I didn’t even know he knew my name—it’s awkward since I still don’t know his. In my head, he is Clint Eastwood. I attempt to smile, but I can’t get my lips to cooperate. “You should go back to your room, sir.”

His overgrown white eyebrows scrunch together. “Is Mary okay?”

I don’t have the heart to tell him the truth. “Yes, she’ll be fine. Please, just go back to your room.”

He’ll never know the difference. He’ll just think she got discharged.

There’s no reason for him to know she’s dead.

“Okay.” He digs around in the bag of saltines and pulls out one of the little packages. “When you see her, will you give her one of these?”

I accept the package and drop it into my scrub pocket. “Of course.”

As Clint obediently shuffles back to his room, a terrible thought occurs to me. I look over at room 906—one of the few patients who has remained in his room. I grab Hazel, who is lingering in the doorway of Seclusion Two. “You need to check on the patient in room 906,” I tell her urgently. “They drugged him with something.”

Hazel nods and hurries into room 906, without bothering to knock on the closed door. I hear the creaking of bedsprings within the room, and a few seconds later, the intercom blasts above us:

Code blue room 906.

I don’t even need to check the handy guide on the back of my ID badge, which lists what the different code colors signify. Code blue is cardiopulmonary arrest.

Oh my God. Will is in cardiopulmonary arrest. No, not another one. I can’t take it anymore.

I step aside while the code team rushes into the room with a crash cart. I try to get a glimpse inside, but all I can see is somebody intubating him. That’s not a good sign. A moment later, they have got him on a stretcher and they dash past me, with Will intubated. A nurse is blowing air into his lungs manually with a bag while they roll him along.

“Hey.” Hazel grabs my arm. “Do you know what they gave him?”

My mouth almost feels too dry to speak. “I think it was Ativan,” I croak. “Is he… what’s going on?”

She flashes me a grim look. “He wasn’t breathing.”

A second later, they are out the door and gone. I’m assuming they’re taking him down to the ICU. But at least he’s alive. He’s got a chance of surviving.

Please let him survive this night.