“You’re sounding angry again,” Dr. Gloria said.
Todd said, “You mentioned her only once in our therapy sessions, but according to your file…”
If he flicked open that damn pen I was going to leap across the table at him.
“I don’t have a child,” I said.
Dr. Gloria looked over her glasses at me, the Medical Professional version of an eye roll.
“Anymore,” I said.
Todd pursed his lips, signaling disappointment. “I’m sorry, Lyda, I just can’t sign off on this. I think you’re trying to get out of here so you can score, and you still haven’t addressed some key issues in—”
“I’ll take the chip.”
He looked up at me, surprised.
“The terms of my sentence give me the option,” I said. “All you have to do is sign. You know I’ve been a model patient.”
“But you’re almost done here. Two more months and you’re out. If you go on the chip, that’s a mandatory year of tracking. You won’t be able to leave the province without permission.”
“I understand that.”
He gave me a long look. “You know they can’t be spoofed, yes? Not like the old chips. Your blood alcohol levels will be sent to us every ten seconds. Anything stronger than aspirin throws up a red flag. And any use of a controlled substance, other than those prescribed to you, gets immediately reported to the police.”
“Any drug can and will be used against me,” I said. “Got it.”
“Good. Because the last time I brought up the chip, you told me I could shove it up my ass.”
“Well, it is very small.”
He suppressed a smile. Todd enjoyed being joked with. Made him feel part of the troop. And as the least insane person on the floor (if I said so myself), I was the person he could most easily talk to. The only question was, would he be insecure enough to keep me here, just so we didn’t have to—sob—break up?
Time to seal the deal. I looked at my feet, feigning embarrassment. “I know this may not be technically allowed after I leave, but…”
“This room is a safe place to say anything,” Todd said.
I looked up. “I’d like to keep in touch with you. If that’s all right.”
“I’m sure that would be fine,” Todd said. “If I sign on for this.” But of course he had already made up his mind.
* * *
The NAT ward was small, a population of twenty-five to forty, depending on the season. News traveled the floor with telepathic speed. Two of the residents believed they were telepathic, so who knows.
I was packing when Ollie appeared in my room. Five foot two, hair falling across her face. Quiet as a closed door. And like everyone on the ward, Severely Fucked in the Head.
She stared into the room, eyes pointed in my direction. Trying to work out the puzzle. That stack of shapes probably belonged to one thing, those horizontal shapes to something else. Once sorted, labels could be applied: bed, wall, duffel bag, human being.
To help her out I said, “Hi, Ollie.”
Her face changed—that slight shift of recognition as she assigned the label “Lyda” to an arrangement of red hair and dark clothes—then went still again. She was angry. I’d made a mistake by not telling her I was leaving. Not as big a mistake as sleeping with her, but enough.
At last she said, “Can I see it?”
“Sure,” I said. Ollie concentrated on the changes in the scene: The object that swung toward her in her visual field must be, logically, my arm. From there she found my wrist, and slid a finger along my forearm. Tactile information integrated more easily than the visual. She peeled back the Band-Aid, pressed the tiny pink bump. She was as unself-conscious with my body as with her own.
“So small,” she said.
“My new portable conscience,” I said. “Like I needed another one.”
Her fingers lingered on my skin, then fell away. “You’re going to look for that dead girl’s dealer.”
I didn’t try to deny it. Even on meds Ollie was the smartest person I’d ever met, after Mikala.
She closed her eyes, cutting out the visual distraction. She looked like a little girl. Told me once that her Filipino mother was 4’10”, her white Minnesota father over six feet, and she was still waiting for those Norwegian genes to kick in.
“You can’t know that it’s the same drug that hit you,” she said without opening her eyes. “There are thousands of countertop tweakers out there. Somebody just happened to whip up something with the same symptoms.”
The glories of the DIY smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and an internet connection could download recipes and print small-batch drugs. The creative types liked to fuck with the recipes, try them out on their friends. People swallowed paper all the time without knowing what they were chewing. Half the residents of the NAT ward weren’t addicts; they were beta testers.
“You’re right,” I said flatly. “It’s probably not the same drug at all.”
She opened her eyes. Now seeing right through me. “I can help you,” she said.
There was a certainty in her voice. Ollie used to do things for the US government, and the US government used to do things to Ollie.
“I don’t think they’re going to let you walk out of here,” I said. Ollie was not one of the voluntary patients. Like me, she’d been convicted of a crime, then sent here because the docs thought she was an interesting case. “Just stay here,” I said. “And heal.”
Heal. That was a NAT joke.
She said, “I can be out of here in two—”
“Nurse,” I said in a low voice, warning her. We residents did this a lot on the ward, like kids playing in the street calling “car.”
“Seconds,” Ollie finished.
Dr. Gloria and one of the day-shift nurses walked toward the room. “Ready?” the nurse asked me.
Dr. G looked at Ollie, then back toward me, a knowing smile on her face. “If you’re all done here,” she said.
I picked up my bag. “I’ve got to go,” I said to Ollie. I touched her shoulder on the way out. This is me, the touch told her. This is me moving away from you.
* * *
“She’s in love with you, you know,” Dr. G said.
“Hospital infatuation,” I said.
We stood on the sidewalk outside the hospital, waiting for my ride under a gray sky leaking sunlight. Dirty snow banked the sidewalk, peppered with black deicer pellets. Behind us, staff and visitors passed in and out of the revolving doors like ions through a membrane.
I folded up the plastic bag that contained my prescription and jammed my hands into the pockets of my thin jacket. It had been early fall when I went in, and my street clothes had failed to evolve while in storage. But I was not about to go back inside that building, even to stay warm. I was a free woman—tethered only by the plastic snitch attached to my vein, broadcasting each taste of my bloodstream to the ether.
Dr. G had followed me out. “You’d be better off staying with her and finishing your sentence inside,” she said. “Less temptation. You were staying clean, Lyda.”
“Edo’s making NME One-Ten.”
“You don’t know that.”
“All Francine could talk about was ‘the Numinous.’ That is no fucking coincidence. Edo broke his promise.”
“He never made that promise,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I made a promise to him.”
“Listen to yourself,” Dr. Gloria said. “You’re pissed off. Have you considered that you’re overreacting to the girl’s death? You have a blind spot for little lost girls.”
“Fuck off.”
“Lyda—”
“I’m responsible for the drug that killed her.”
“Even if the substance is the One-Ten, which is doubtful, that doesn’t mean that it’s Edo Vik.”
“Then I guess I have to find out who is making it.”
A car pulled up to the curb, a decrepit Nissan hybrid. The cost of the gas had to be enormous. The driver jumped out of the car, ran to me with arms out. “Lyda!”