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The first one rushed her. Scarlet met him with a sharp elbow to the solar plexus, then spun into a kick that caught the second man in the knee. The movements were instinct, pulled from a life she had lived before debt and dead-end jobs. Before everything had fallen apart. The training was old, but her muscles remembered.

But there were three of them, and they were angry. Anger made people stupid and vicious and relentless.

The fight spilled across the empty street, a chaotic dance under the buzzing sodium lights. Scarlet tasted blood, felt one of her ribs crack under a heavy, well-aimed punch. She got in her own hits, leaving one of the men groaning on the ground, clutching his injured knee. But the numbers were wrong. They had always been wrong.

The drunk pulled something from his jacket. Metal glinted under the streetlight, a flash of silver against the dark fabric. A knife.

Scarlet saw it coming. She saw it, and she could not move fast enough. The blade punched through her side, white-hot and terrible. She gasped, a sound swallowed by the night. She stumbled, a sudden weakness flooding her limbs, and felt her legs give out from under her.

The pavement was cold and wet against her cheek. Footsteps pounded away into the distance, growing fainter and fainter until they were gone. Somewhere far above, a streetlight buzzed and flickered, casting a sickly yellow glow on the scene.

Her vision narrowed to a pinpoint. Darkness rushed in from the edges, thick and suffocating.

The last thing Scarlet Lewis thought before the world went black was that forty-three thousand dollars did not matter anymore.

Pain was a living thing. It crawled through her body with teeth and claws, shredding everything it touched. She tried to breathe and found only agony.

Voices shouted somewhere above her. Hands pressed against her side. Pressure. So much pressure. She wanted to tell them to stop, that they were making it worse, but her voice would not come.

Red and blue lights painted the wet street. The colors swirled and bled together, mixing with the darkness at the edges of her vision. She tried to hold on, tried to stay present, but the pain was too big. It filled the world.

“Stay with me.” A woman’s voice, urgent and professional. “Can you hear me? Stay with me.”

Scarlet’s lips moved, but no sound came out. The darkness pressed closer, patient and inevitable.

She remembered the fight in fragments. The drunk’s twisted face. The glint of metal in his hand. Her own blood spreading across the pavement in a dark, warm pool. Had she screamed? She could not remember screaming.

The paramedic’s hands moved quickly, efficiently. Words tumbled over each other, a stream of medical terms Scarlet did not understand. Hemorrhaging. BP dropping. Type and cross. It was the language of emergency, of life slipping away.

Something sharp jabbed into her arm. An IV. Fluids flooded her system, cold and strange. Her body felt distant now, like something she wore rather than something she was. The torment was still there, but it seemed to be happening to someone else.

“We are losing her.”

The words drifted through the fog in her mind. Losing her. As if she were a set of keys or a wallet, something that could be misplaced and found again.

But she was being lost. She could feel it. The connection between her body and her consciousness stretched thin, fraying at the edges. The darkness was not just at the periphery anymore. It was everywhere.

Her heartbeat slowed. She heard it through the roaring in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each beat was weaker than the last, each one a step further into the void.

Images flashed behind her eyes. Her parents in their hospital beds, surrounded by tubes and wires that kept them alive for one more day, one more week. The debt collectors’ letters piling up on her kitchen counter. Sarah’s face in that last moment before everything went wrong.

Was this what they had felt? This strange, floating sensation? This sense of being unmoored from the world?

The agony dimmed. It went silent. That should have been a relief, but terror flooded through her instead. The absence of feeling was not peace. It was ending.

“No pulse. Start compressions.”

Hands on her chest. Rhythmic pressure. One, two, three, four. Someone was counting aloud, their voice steady and mechanical. Her body jerked with each compression, but she felt it from far away.

They were trying to restart her. They were trying to pull her back. But the darkness was so heavy, and she was so tired of fighting.

Just let go. The thought whispered through her mind like a promise. No more debt. No more guilt. No more waking up to a life that felt like a punishment.

She started to drift. She started to let the darkness take her.

Then something changed. The world around her shifted, like a channel switching on a television. The sounds of the street faded. The pressure of hands on her chest disappeared. She was floating, untethered, and free.

Scar-let opened her eyes.

She saw the street below her. Saw her own body on the pavement, paramedics bent over her broken form. Saw the ambulance with its lights still spinning. She saw everything with perfect, terrible clarity.