Giorgi started to cough but it caught in his throat. His whole body spasmed. After, his breaths came only in rasps. He tried to say something, but his voice was gone. Ignatius drew more of the liquid from the vial and injected it. Giorgi’s breathing slowed.
“We’re still here, Giorgi,” said Leonid. “The Leonid you knew before and the one you know now. The whole purpose of the new one is to make sure the old one doesn’t die.”
Giorgi murmured, but it was not a word. The sound seemed to have no human thought behind it.
The ambulance lurched to a stop, rattling the gurney and all the equipment stored on the walls and in the cupboards. Leonid and Ignatius slid forward along the bench. Ignatius banged her fist against the wall at the back of the cabin.
“Careful!” she shouted.
The muffled voice of the driver replied, “We’ve reached the hospital.”
Ignatius looked at Leonid as if she was just then noticing that he was there. She pulled a white coat off a hook by the back door.
“Here,” she said. “Put this on. I’d prefer that no one see your uniform. Then help me get this gurney unlatched.”
The doors swung open as Leonid slid one arm into a sleeve of the coat. With the coat half-hanging from him, he helped Ignatius lower the gurney to the ground. The doctor waiting there gaped when he saw Giorgi’s body.
“Bozhe moi,” he said. “What happened?”
Ignatius produced a small folio from her pocket and flipped it open, revealing some sort of identification card. The doctor’s eyes grew wider than when he had first seen Giorgi.
“Make him comfortable,” said Ignatius, and then she walked in a direction away from the hospital doors.
Nadya still sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching out the window as if at a passing landscape. The glass of the window made it hard to make out her face. Leonid finished donning the white coat and followed the gurney into the hospital. He waited there as doctors scuttled all around Giorgi, the room too dark, walls painted a green the color of sickness itself, until it became obvious that Giorgi’s last words had already been spoken.
NADYA HAD BEEN kicked out of the ambulance and now sat beside Leonid in the waiting room, humming a simple melody to herself. There was nothing left to wait for. The doctor had come out and said he was sorry and explained that the burns were just too much. Giorgi’s body had simply stopped working. Leonid was not sure if it was one of the doctors from Star City or one who belonged to the hospital. They all looked alike. Leonid cinched the open front of the white coat he wore to conceal the uniform underneath.
From the other side of a set of metal double doors came a squabble, and then they flew open and the Chief Designer hulked through. Sweat spangled the bald portion of his head. He wore no coat, and his shirt was unbuttoned one button farther than usual. He saw Nadya and Leonid and hurried to them. He creaked down to one knee and looked Leonid in the eye.
“Where is he?” asked the Chief Designer.
Leonid looked away.
“He’s gone,” said Nadya.
“Into surgery? To a burn specialist?” The Chief Designer offered this as a prayer more than a question.
“Just minutes ago. He succumbed. The doctors said the exact cause several times. What was it?”
Leonid spoke without looking at anyone. “Hypovolemic shock and loss of myocardial contractility. Whatever that means.”
Mishin and Bushuyev came through the metal doors, one of them walking backward, apologizing to a nurse who seemed to be making half an effort to prevent them from entering. They stopped behind the Chief Designer and looked first at Nadya and then at Leonid, back and forth. Finally, Leonid shook his head once.
“What happened?” asked the Chief Designer. His voice was higher than normal and pinched.
“There was the spark,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.
“I know that!” snapped the Chief Designer. “I need people to stop telling me things I already know.”
He punched his fist into the tiled floor. Leonid thought he heard a crack.
“Leonid and I don’t know,” said Nadya. “Tell us what happened.”
Mishin and Bushuyev looked at each other. The Chief Designer flopped back into a seated position on the floor. He lowered his head and lifted his hand in Mishin and Bushuyev’s direction. One of them began:
“Giorgi had about an hour left in the anechoic chamber. He’s usually so calm in there, busy maybe, but not nervous. Today he was getting antsy as the clock ticked down. He made himself a cup of tea, and then asked us to flip off the monitors so he could get all those damn sensors off him. That’s what he said. He said they started itching after the first day and he could not handle it any longer. We flipped off the monitors so he could have a little privacy. We left the speakers on, of course. He was singing, no surprise. And then there was a strange noise, and the technician asked if everything was all right, and then the first scream. The technician turned the monitor back on, but it took so long to warm up, and we could not go inside until we knew what was happening. Not that it would have mattered. When the technician played the recording, we saw that the flames consumed Giorgi immediately. He’d been removing the sensors with a cotton pad soaked in alcohol, to break up the adhesive. In the past, he usually just ripped them off, but maybe he was doing it to pass the time. We’d never seen him so antsy. He finished with the sensors on his chest and stomach and tossed the cotton pad onto the desk. But it skipped to the hotplate and made contact with the burner. Just a little spark, we’re sure, too small to be seen on the monitor, but right then the flames flared through the whole room, and when they settled, Giorgi was engulfed. We use a high-oxygen mix in the chamber, for pressurization. The oxygen is what flared. His uniform must have been saturated with it, which is why he kept burning. No one ever considered such a thing. No one even thought of it.”
“We don’t need excuses,” interrupted the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev hesitated for a moment, and then the other continued, “Once it was clear the flames were limited only to Giorgi, the technicians rushed in and threw a blanket over him. Until then, Giorgi had remained standing. He was almost calm, patting at his body as if searching for a pack of cigarettes in one of his pockets. He tried to make his way to the bed, but his eyes must have been ruined already, and he just kept bumping into the desk. He knocked that damn hotplate to the floor. Watching the video, we were terrified that would cause another spark and another explosion, but nothing happened. We knew that it had not happened, that there had only been one explosion, but we were still afraid. The technicians came and got us, and word got out, and everyone was there. Thank god for Ignatius, or we would never have gotten him out of the room.”
The Chief Designer raised his head. “You didn’t mention Ignatius before.”
Mishin and Bushuyev did not respond. One of them pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the corners of his eyes though it did not seem that he was crying. Minutes went by with no one speaking. A nurse passed from the ward through the waiting room out the double doors to the hospital entrance beyond. That might have been an hour ago or only seconds, thought Leonid. The Chief Designer lumbered up from the floor, a motion as if he were assembling his body from pieces into the shape of a standing man.
“Let’s see him,” he said.
He walked through the other set of steel doors into the ward without waiting for anyone to show him the way. No one thought to follow.