The night shift started at midnight.

Imara had been doing it long enough that midnight felt like a natural beginning — the point where the day admitted defeat and handed things over to the people willing to stay awake through the part no one wanted to be awake through. She had stopped finding the drive in strange. Stopped finding the empty corridors strange. Stopped finding any of it strange except occasionally, at around three in the morning when the ward went quiet for twenty minutes and the specific quality of that quiet reminded her that most of the world was asleep and she was not.

She liked those twenty minutes....