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Jet blinked. Something beeped. Someone gasped.

‘She’s awake! Doctor, she’s awake!’

Who’s she ? Talking about her? The room was fuzzy, too white, too bright. It hurt Jet’s eyes and the hidden places beneath. She blinked again, smudges of flesh and hair and teeth looming above her.

‘Luke. Get the doctor, now. Go!’

Her mom’s voice, raw and unfamiliar.

‘Mom?’ Jet croaked, croakier than usual. She tried to sit up, her body sleep-locked, trapped by thin, rough sheets tucked over her elbows. A white gown, patterns of pale yellow and blue.

‘Let me help.’ Dad’s voice now. Must belong to that smudge there, beside her. Warm hands on her shoulders, she sat up, something stuck to her head, crinkling against the pillows behind her, and a shooting jolt of pain.

She rubbed her eyes, got tangled in the tube sticking out the back of her hand.

‘Water?’ Mom said, and it was already by her lips. Jet couldn’t get the angle. She slurped and she knew Mom hated that, but maybe Mom could forgive her this one time because Jet was in the hospital.

And she knew why. She remembered. The room was fuzzy but her mind was not.

Someone had tried to kill her. Smashed in her head.

The crunch of the pumpkin cookie and her skull, and the strange scream of the dog.

But Jet was still here, she was breathing – gulped one in just to check.

This was real – another blink to be sure, her body laid out before her, two hands, two legs that moved when she asked.

And she must have a head because she was seeing and hearing and breathing out of it.

She was alive.

She’d survived.

Fuck.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

‘Jet.’ Mom’s face was clearer now, inches from hers. ‘The doctor is coming now. She’s going to explain to you, and you need to listen, OK? It’s very important. They won’t do it unless it’s your choice. You’ll know the right choice, sweetie.’

Mom reached out to stroke Jet’s hair, but her fingers stalled. ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

‘Got her!’ Luke’s voice, charging into the room, breathless, like he’d run all the way. ‘Hey, Marge,’ he said softly, not like Luke at all. ‘You OK?’

‘Got a bit of a headache.’ Jet smiled. None of them would look at her. Come on, she was just trying to lighten the mood. She was alive.

The door swung open again, a small woman with dark skin and braided hair, a file clutched in her hand. She didn’t smile either.

She cleared her throat, eyes alighting on the bed. ‘Good to see you awake. Your family said you like to be called Jet,’ she said. ‘I’m Dr Lee.’

Jet didn’t know what to say. Nice to meet you? Why did everyone look so fucking miserable? She was alive, she was awake.

‘Can I just …’ Dr Lee said, coming close, drawing a penlight from the pocket of her white jacket. And, yes, she could just, because she was already doing it, shining the light in Jet’s eyes. One and the other. Light off. ‘How much have you told her?’ The doctor turned to Jet’s mom.

‘Nothing,’ Dianne said, backing off. ‘We were waiting for you.’

‘Guys, it’s OK,’ Jet sniffed. ‘I already know. I remember everything. Someone hit me in the back of the head. Tried to kill me.’

Silence.

‘Didn’t do a very good job of it,’ Jet said. Jazz hands, for effect.

Dad cupped his fingers to his mouth, holding back a sob. A silent tear rolling down his knuckles.

‘Mr Mason, please,’ Dr Lee said, pulling up a chair to sit beside the bed. ‘Jet. I’m a neurosurgeon. You’re in Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.’

‘How long have I been here?’ Jet asked. ‘What day is it today?’ What day, or what year? Fuck – had she been asleep a lot longer than she thought? Oh fuck, had she been in a coma for years – is that why everyone was being so weird? She hadn’t turned thirty already, had she? All that lost time.

‘It’s Sunday,’ Dr Lee said, voice calming, reacting to Jet’s panicked eyes, ‘at 2 p.m. You’ve been here about thirty-six hours.’

‘Fucking phew,’ she said. ‘That’s a relief. I thought I was old.’

Dad turned away, faced the wall.

‘Jet, you were in a bad way when you arrived at the ER,’ Dr Lee said, fiddling with the edges of the file.

‘You were an eight on the GCS on arrival, which means you were comatose, had to be intubated. Suffered cardiac arrest from blood loss shortly after. We were able to stabilize you, get you into surgery. You had a subdural hematoma, here on the left side of your head, under that bandage. That means a buildup of blood on the surface of the brain. We evacuated the blood and there didn’t appear to be any significant brain trauma.

But we believe you were hit three times.

Once on the left side of your head there, and twice on the back of your head, near the base of your skull. ’

Those were the ones Jet remembered.

Dr Lee swallowed.

‘Your skull was fractured. A longitudinal fracture across the occipital bone. The first blow would have caused the fracture, the second would have depressed the bone farther into your brain.’ She paused, looked down.

‘Considering the site of the injury, the violence of the attack, it’s a miracle there isn’t significant damage to the vital tissues and vascular structures of the brain, that you’re able to move and think and function as you are. I’ve never seen anything like it. But.’

Jet knew there had to be a but coming. Because if it was a miracle, her family wouldn’t be looking at her like this. Like she hadn’t woken up at all.

Her head was throbbing, the base and the left side; now she knew where to pinpoint the pain. Hot and sharp, an imitation, a ghost of how it had felt at the time. When her head had exploded open.

Dr Lee flipped the file in her lap.

‘The fracture was successfully mended during surgery. We’ve reconnected the skull pieces with screws and wire mesh. Stitched up your scalp.’

It flared and itched as she mentioned it.

‘And after surgery, you were sent for another CT scan.’

She pulled out a scan from the file, the plastic quivering with an almost comic wub-wub sound, not reading the room.

Dr Lee held the scan up, against the afternoon light streaming through the window.

A black background. White writing glowed at the very top: Margaret Mason, Age: 27, 11/01/2025, more numbers Jet didn’t understand.

Below was a grid of pictures. Different angles of her brain, dissected this way and that, rendered in a strange pale blue.

‘There is a bone at the base of the skull, at the deepest part, right in the middle of your brain, called the clivus. The trauma to the back of your head has resulted in a fracture to the clivus.’ The scan trembled in Dr Lee’s hand, threatening that noise again.

‘A clivus fracture is an incredibly rare event, seen in less than 0.5 percent of traumatic head injuries. And if you look here’ – she pointed to the scan, to an image taken through the top of Jet’s head – ‘you can see there is a small piece of bone fragment separated from the clivus.’

Dr Lee’s finger pressed against a tiny pale white orb, floating there in the middle of Jet’s brain. She pointed it out in the side view too, checking that Jet could see. Not even an orb, just a speck really.

‘OK,’ Jet said. ‘But it’s tiny, right? And I’m fine. Look, I’m fine.’

Luke pulled out the chair on the other side, made Mom sit down.

‘Jet,’ Dr Lee said, her teeth holding on to the t, chewing on it, so she didn’t have to continue. ‘That tiny bone fragment is leaning against the wall of your basilar artery.’

Jet breathed out. ‘That sounds important.’

‘One of the major arteries supplying blood to your brain.’

Yep. Important.

‘A surgery to remove the fragment would normally be considered impossible. It’s so deep, so hard to access without damaging other parts of the brain.

Too easy to accidentally nick the artery and cause a catastrophic bleed.

Chances of mortality far too high. Better to leave it and, in time, the fragment may migrate to the outer edges of the brain, where it could be more easily accessed and removed. But.’

Another but.

The throbbing was a drumbeat in Jet’s head now, mirroring her heart, answering fear with fear.

‘You have polycystic kidney disease, Jet.’

‘I’m well aware.’ Jet sniffed. Again, those weeks of pissing blood, pain so bad it doubled you over, the phantom bruises, quitting her job and moving home because it all got too much, the high-blood-pressure pills she took every day, never smoking, not too much salt, even though she’d once loved fries.

‘What does that have to do with my brain?’

Dad was standing behind Mom now, hands on her shoulders, lips in a tight white line to stop him from crying.

Dr Lee swallowed.

‘A complication of PKD is that patients have much weaker arterial walls, in the heart and … and in the brain.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m sorry, Jet, there’s no easy way to tell you this. With the fragment’s position, putting extra pressure on an already weak arterial wall, an aneurysm will form at the site. A large one. And when it ruptures, the resulting hemorrhage, the bleeding, it … it would be fatal.’

‘O-K,’ Jet said, nodding, stopping when she realized that hurt. ‘And how likely is it that an aneurysm would form?’

‘It’s a certainty, Jet. And it would be fast.’

‘How fast?’

‘It’s impossible to accurately predict, especially before the aneurysm has formed.’

‘Give it your best guess, doc.’

‘Jet,’ Mom sniffed.

Dr Lee straightened, looked at the floor instead of Jet. ‘Given the particular circumstances of your case, I would say we have just days. Maybe a week until it ruptures.’

Jet clicked her tongue, to hide the thrum of her heart, fight-or-flight fast. This couldn’t be happening. Was this really happening? ‘So … you’re saying that I’d be dead in about a week?’

No one answered.

Dad couldn’t hold it any longer, burying his face in the crook of his elbow as he sobbed.

‘Dad, it’s OK,’ Jet said, shifting in her bed. She’d only seen him cry once before like this. A guttural, primal sound. She hoped she’d never have to hear that sound again; seventeen years wasn’t long enough.

‘It’s my fault,’ he cried.

‘Dad, it’s not your fault. It’s hereditary.

There was a fifty percent chance that me or Luke or Emily could have inherited PKD.

’ That made Jet the unlucky one. She already knew that, because the other two had normal names and she was the one who got stuck with Margaret.

‘So, the surgery, then. Right?’ Jet looked from Dr Lee to her family.

Mom nodded, wiped her swollen eyes. None of them looked like they’d slept much, in the time Jet had slept too much. ‘It’s the only choice, Jet.’

‘Please, Mrs Mason,’ Dr Lee’s voice hardened.

‘I need to make something clear to you, Jet, before you make any decision. Like I said, under other circumstances, this surgery wouldn’t even be considered.

The risk of mortality is high. I have to be honest with you: it was my colleague, Dr Fuller, who performed the initial surgery on you.

After the second CT scan, once the situation became clear, Dr Fuller refused to even consider performing surgery to attempt to remove the bone fragment.

I said that I would only do it if you had all the information – if you chose this, understanding the risk. ’

The drumming in her head quickened, unnatural, like it was counting down to something, racing her heart.

‘What is the risk?’ Jet asked. ‘Can you give me a percentage or something?’

Dr Lee hesitated, her tongue moving around inside her mouth, bulging through her cheek. ‘Less than ten percent chance of survival.’

The drumming stopped.

‘So, more than a ninety percent chance that I’d die on the table?

’ Numb, detached, like she wasn’t here in this body, in this bed.

Sometimes minds did that, didn’t they, to save you from the pain?

Or was this a result of the brain trauma, the kind of broken that didn’t show up on CT scans?

‘I’m not a betting girl, but those don’t sound like good odds. ’

Jet wasn’t good with chance. She’d already lost that game with polycystic kidney disease. And that was with fifty percent. Not ten. Less than ten.

‘There’s nothing else you can do?’

‘I’m sorry, Jet,’ Dr Lee said, a tremble in her voice that she coughed to cover. How many times had she had to tell someone they were going to die? Could you get used to a thing like that?

Jet looked at her family. Luke, gray and silent, a muscle ticcing in his jaw. Dad crying, a quieter, more unsettling kind of cry. Mom leaning forward in her chair, taking Jet’s hand in her own, giving it a squeeze.

‘So.’ Jet hesitated, trying to stick her mind back together, to fix what the doctor couldn’t. ‘My choice is I can die now, or I can die in seven days?’