Toronto, Ontario
Leah sat cross-legged on her bed in the darkness, pinching the inside of her thigh in her boredom. She'd peeled off the blindfold that Colonel Valens and the other doctors had made her wear since her sight started to return. The bright lights from the corridor had already given her a headache, but it wasn't as bad as it had been, and there were limits to how much she could stand, and Leah was bored.
The waves of tiredness were starting to alternate with something else: a strangely vibrant energy filled her, prickling through her veins and making her fingertips tingle. The open-weave blanket bunched around her legs felt coarse and annoying, and her hospital pajamas chafed. Leah closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and watched a soccer game rebroadcast from Brazil on her contact.
In the bed beside hers, Patty whimpered and stirred. Leah opened her eyes and unfolded her legs, careful of the IV site in the back of her hand as she climbed out of bed and crouched down next to Patty. She held the other girl's wrist when Patty tried to tug away from her. “Hey, it's okay,” and reached up to make sure Patty's blindfold was in place when the corridor door opened, spilling light through the room.
Busted, Leah thought, and made sure Patty was tucked in before she turned around to face the music. She was surprised, though: it wasn't a nurse glowering her back into bed, but a boy her own age with dark hair falling like inky brushstrokes across his forehead. He slipped inside and pressed the door closed beside himself, careful not to let the latch click. “Are you Patty Valens?”
Leah tugged her hospital gown straight. “Leah Castaign.” She grabbed her IV stand, unwilling to wait for it to catch up with her on its own. “Who the hell are you?” She caught a little of her dad's tone in her words, and didn't mind at all.
“Bryan Sall. Isn't this Patty Valens's room?”
“She's sleeping.”
“I'm not sleeping.” Patty's voice was plaintive. Leah glanced over as she sat up, one arm holding her blankets against her chest, the other one going up to her eyes but not moving the black mask. “Bryan, I don't know you, do I?”
“No.” He came a few steps into the room, and Leah saw that he'd disconnected his IV, and a thin strand of red seeped from under the tape on his left hand. “I'm Carver Mallory's roommate. He was asking for you.”
“Asking?” Patty started to slide out of the bed and got her ankles tangled in the sheets. Leah went to help her. “I don't have my eyesight back yet—”
Leah heard Bryan swallow, realized a second later that she shouldn't have been able to. “I don't think he's going to get his back, Patty. His legs are numb, he says, and — look. I'll take you to him. L–Leah will help.” Won't you? his eyes asked, and Leah saw how pale Patty seemed in the darkness.
“What if we get in trouble?”
Oh, Patty. Leah could hear the longing in Patty's voice, and Leah's own restlessness made her bounce on her toes. “I'll tell them it was my idea,” Leah said, taking Patty's hand. “You're blind.”
“I'm not supposed to be out of bed.”
Leah grinned. “Do you always do what you're supposed to?”
The IV stands were going to be a problem. Leah solved it by unhooking her own, deciding she could always tell the nurse it tugged loose while she was sleeping, and making Patty hold onto hers. Bryan turned back from peeking out the cracked-open door to frown at that. “Shouldn't we unhook that, too?”
“I don't think she's ready yet,” Leah said, feeling Patty's tension through her clutching fingers, then the grateful squeeze. “She's still really tired. You go first and scout ahead; we'll follow.”
He stared at her for a second, and then nodded and slipped out the door. Shepherding Patty, Leah followed.
It was only a few doors, and the hospital corridor was quiet. Bryan must have been lying in wait until the appropriate moment. Smart boy, she grinned to herself, and then put a hand out as Patty stumbled. “Sorry.”
“It's okay. Where's Carver?”
“Here.”
The room wasn't lit either, but Bryan had an interface on his nightstand, hidden from the door by the privacy curtain. Its pause graphics twisted in midair, casting a bluish light over two rumpled beds and a scatter of flowers and cards and a giant teddy bear wildly too young for the boy standing beside her. He looked down when he saw her notice it and moved quickly to the occupied bed.
“Carver?”
Patty's voice, answered by a mumble. Leah led the older girl carefully to the window side of Carver's bed and placed her hand in his, not liking how limp and cool his fingers were. They didn't have him blindfolded, she realized, but even when his eyes opened, they didn't focus. She saw the thin wires leading from the interface plug at the back of his neck, and the white patches on the dark skin of his chest, and bit her lip.
“Carver?” Patty asked again. Leah backed away until her butt hit the window ledge, and leaned against it. She caught herself chewing her lip and forced herself to stop, hearing her father's voice in her head. You look like a cow chewing cud. But her lips and her fingers were numb as she watched Patty bend over in the flickering light and put her ear close to Carver's lips. Leah could see that he wasn't gripping Patty's hand back when she squeezed.
She almost jumped when Bryan slid up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned to him, as grateful for the dimness of the light hiding her blush as she was to take her eyes off Patty and Carver. A pulse fluttered in the notch of his collar, and Leah felt her eyes drawn to it. “You okay, Leah?”
She shook her head. “It wasn't supposed to be like this.”
He hugged her awkwardly and then stepped away. It didn't feel quite like when Dad hugged her, and she was both glad and sorry when Patty stepped back from Carver's bed, trailing her IV stand, and said in a strangely level voice, “I think I want to go back to our room now.”
0745 Hours
Monday 4 December, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Today's the day. Just a few hours off.
And I'm a fucking idiot. I'm crawling around under the eight barbershop chairs in the lab — mine, freshly installed, and seven others — stress making me itch to dirty my hands, staring at holographic circuit diagrams through my prosthetic eye just exactly as if I had any kind of sense at all. Or as if I could make head or tail of what half these things are supposed to do.
Valens lets me get away with it, probably realizing I have to blow off the tension somehow, and it beats showing up drunk to work. Which was the other option. But probably contraindicated in this case. Hah.
One of those chairs won't be used. One of the boys who went in for the nanite treatment didn't make it. Carver Mallory, the handsome cocoa-skinned sixteen-year-old I glimpsed on the Montreal, is never going to wake up. And I hate myself because with every breath I take, the only thought I can produce is thank God it wasn't Leah.
Gabe leans against the console, checking the VR module programming one last time. Elspeth is by the door, alternately keeping us company and getting in the way.
There's something coolly soothing about wiring charts. The doc's pantsuit rustles as she comes over to me, leaning down to see what I'm doing. I'm not changing anything, of course. Just making sure everything looks like it does in the charts.