The Manor

He woke gasping for air.

The breath caught in his throat, sharp and painful. His lungs burned. For a moment he couldn't remember anything—not his name, not where he was, not how he'd gotten here.

Only darkness. Only fear.

*ABC, Thomas. Airway, breathing, circulation.* Training kicked in before conscious thought. Airways clear—no obstruction, no gurgling. Breathing rapid but steady—twenty-two, maybe twenty-four respirations per minute. Pulse thready but present. No obvious hemorrhaging. The protocol ran through his mind like muscle memory, grounding him even as panic threatened to take hold.

*Great. Patient assessment complete. Unfortunately, the patient is you, and you have no idea where the hell you are.*

Forcing his pulse to slow—*come on, aim for sixty, you've talked down worse*—he drew in another breath, fighting the terror that clawed at his chest. The air tasted stale, thick with dust and a second layer—the musty dampness of the Northeast, familiar from too many calls in old Catskill farmhouses. *Forty miles from the station. Maybe fifty. If you're even still in New York.* The smell hit him next: decomposition, early-stage. Maybe forty-eight hours post-mortem, based on the sweetness underneath the must. *Jesus Christ, what is this place?*

Fragmented images scratched at the back of his mind—jumbled memories that refused to form into anything coherent. Like trying to read an EKG with half the leads disconnected.

Moonlight filtered through cracks in the walls above him. Thin beams cutting through the darkness, revealing dust motes suspended in the air like tiny ghosts.

He was lying on a mattress. Old and lumpy, springs digging into his back. *Institutional grade. Hospital surplus, maybe. Or morgue overflow.* The thought came unbidden, the kind of dark joke that got EMTs through their shifts. *Gallows humor,* Sarah used to call it. She'd lean against the rig after a bad call, peeling off her nitrile gloves one finger at a time—always one finger at a time, like a ritual that kept the world from falling apart—and shake her head at him. *"You know what your problem is, Crane? You joke when you should cry. And you cry when you should be angry."*

Sarah.

The name stabbed through him. Sharp and immediate.

A memory surfaced through the fog—not fragmented this time, but whole. Their second anniversary. She'd cooked. Badly. Blackened chicken that she called "Cajun style" with that defiant grin she wore when she knew she'd lost but refused to admit it. Dollar-store candles, already half-melted from some previous life. Wine from a box because they'd spent their money on a weekend in the Catskills that got rained out. She'd sat across their tiny kitchen table in his old FDNY shirt, sleeves rolled past her elbows, tomato sauce on her collarbone, and said, *"Crane, this is the worst meal I've ever made and the best night I've ever had."* And she'd meant it. That was Sarah—she could make burnt food and cheap wine feel like the only thing in the world worth having. Could make a cramped apartment feel like a cathedral just by being in it.

Then the images splintered. Blood on asphalt. Red and blue lights strobing. Her voice cutting through static: *"Thomas, I need you to stay with me—"* The smell of gasoline and copper. The leather jacket he'd given her for their anniversary, twisted against the shattered windshield. Her hand in his, grip weakening. Her eyes losing focus. The last breath she took sounding like every last breath he'd ever heard on a call, and he'd heard enough to know exactly what it meant.

Then nothing. Just silence where her voice should have been.

The image dissolved. His partner. His wife. Three years gone, and the grief still sat in his chest like a stone. The accident haunted him—the call he'd missed, the shift he should have covered—and the weight of it pressed down even though the details wouldn't come clear.

His hands were shaking.

Sitting up slowly, his head pounded. *Concussion protocol: headache, confusion, memory loss. Check, check, and check. Congratulations, Thomas, you've got the trifecta.*