The girl on the operating table had the most beautiful hair. Rivers of molten gold flowed over the sides of the table, shimmering in the harsh hospital light. You could lose yourself in their glow, startle back to yourself after what felt like moments later but might have been an eternity.

Mark’s fingers trembled as he fused veins and glued wounds. Deep gashes curved along the girl’s body, bleeding through the gauze the first responders had used to keep at least some of the blood inside. Bite marks from enormous teeth marked her skin. On the monitor next to the table, the white line overwrote her heartbeat in achingly slow beats.

A heart to pump blood was useless without blood to pump, and if you could tear your eyes from her hair long enough to see her skin, it would be a colourless white, like a death mask before it was painted. Mark stepped back just long enough to clench his fingers into fists. He did not normally shake. “Where’s the lab?”

“No results.” This from a technician on the other side of the glass.

“Tell them to hurry,” Mark said through gritted teeth. “I need her blood type stat.”

“There is no blood type,” the technician said. “The tests don’t recognise her. At all. The lab doesn’t even know if she’s human.”

The quiver in Mark’s hands began again, deeper than ever. When he made fists, the shaking burrowed deep inside, like the threads of his being were shaking apart.

He should have guessed, from the hair.

He bent over the girl again. “Hang the bags.”

“There’s no blood work.”

“Something is better than nothing,” Mark said. Not a familiar maxim for him, but when you were dealing with something not of this world, all the decades of research went down the rabbit hole.

The technicians hung bags. Mark joined another vein and glued another wound, and when his gaze slid back to her inexorable hair, he found her eyes were open. Impossible. But not where fairytales were concerned.

He said, “Go to sleep, Goldilocks.”

“In my world,” she said, and her voice was like her hair, a trigger for all the long-lost memories of childhood: “In my world, the bears are people too.”