I spoke over his shoulder to Orry’s plump, little face, “Guess what, bub? I’m getting healed today; you’ll get to see what happened to your father when he was fixed.”
Pietre shook his head. “Oh no. We’re not adding another child to the situation; find somewhere to drop it on the way to the labs.”
I snarled at him. “My child is not an ‘it’.”
“Whatever,” he said with an infuriating shrug.
After leaving Orry begrudgingly with Odval, I was escorted to the science labs like a criminal. Pietre and Careen walked next to me shoulder to shoulder. I wanted to clip them both. Well, actually I wanted to elbow him in the groin and throw a stick for Careen to fetch. She was so much like a bounding puppy. I swear I heard her panting with her tongue hanging out. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if she had barked. But I kept my cool. I needed their help. So I breathed deeply and imagined I did those things, which gave me some level of comfort. Eyes front, we traipsed towards the town, hopped on a spinner, and rode in silence until we reached the labs.
The science labs were connected to the hospital by a rickety, covered walkway, encapsulated with bent pieces of corrugated tin shaped into a crude arch. We had to walk through the hospital and up some stairs to get to it because the original entrance to the labs themselves was sealed from an old explosion. The door was folded in on itself and rubble reached the ceiling. It looked as if someone had thrown a bomb directly at the entrance.
Looking around anxiously, I worried I would bump in to Joseph, but thankfully he was not near the entrance at that time. As we walked through the doors to the hospital, I looked down the long corridor and wondered if Cal lay there still. I trembled and shut my mind to it, following my minders up the stairs.
As we climbed, Careen separated from me and jumped up the stairs, turning to look at us while she talked. Her excitement was not at all infectious—it was unfitting.
“Rosa, this is Pietre. I told you about him before,” she said, none too subtly. I was surprised she didn’t wink. He didn’t even flinch at the mention of is name.
“Uh huh,” I managed to mutter.
Pietre observed her bounding, his eyes stalking her breasts bouncing up and down, tracking her long legs with a sly gaze. I felt sick to my stomach.
When we got to the walkway, we took it one at a time. It couldn’t take much weight, though Pietre commented that I could probably jump up and down on it and it wouldn’t make any difference. I ignored him but he was trying my patience.
I stepped on; it creaked and swayed like a spring breeze would send it flying out into the atmosphere. The Survivors were a strange people. Why not fix it? They seemed to have the attitude of waste not, want not. If it was broken, they would fix it but they were unlikely to tear it down and build a new one. It brought my thoughts to my mother and her similar attitude, a shiver of nervousness shooting up my spine.
We descended a dark stairwell lined with small squares of light. Pushing open the doors at the bottom, we found ourselves in a shiny, silver room. There were bits of machinery laying on every available work surface. Robots whirred and lasers shone in blues and purples. Everything was new and foreign. Except for a dark face focused intently on a computer screen. Deshi.
I snuck up quietly behind him and shouted, “Hi Desh!” He jumped in his chair. When he recovered, he glared at me and chastised me like a child.
“You know, you really are so immature sometimes. I’m working on something very important,” he said.
“I bet you are,” I said sincerely. “What exactly?”
“I’m working on a computer bug that will open all the Ring gates simultaneously and then latch them again.”
“Ooh!” I said mockingly.
He looked at me with tired impatience. A look I was so familiar with, I barely noticed it anymore.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he asked, raising his dark brows.
“I’m getting fixed up,” I said, overly chirpy, swinging my elbows.
Deshi looked unimpressed. If he was interested or curious, he didn’t show it. He waved us around his table without looking up from his screen. “Healing room is in there,” he said, pointing to a worn, wooden door in the far corner of the room.
When I was nine, my mother broke her wrist. She said she tripped, braced herself awkwardly, and fell on it. I never believed her. She had a ringed bruise around it, which looked far too much like someone had grasped her strongly and wouldn’t let go. Someone like my stepfather Paulo. Mother had always been steady on her feet. She walked with purpose but never hurried. I’d always suspected there may have been a physical side to her abuse but if she didn’t report it herself, there wasn’t much I could do.
Luckily, because she was a seamstress, her hands were considered her livelihood and the Superiors granted her treatment. We were sent to the hospital for an x-ray. I sat on a chair inside the room but behind a low screen and glass window while they did it. The noises were loud and cracked like lightning. I pulled her handbag up to my chin and peeked over the edge, scared she was going to be electrocuted. It was one of the only times I ever heard her use an annoyed tone. The man stretched her arm out over a table and she snapped at him for being too rough.
This room was very similar.
There was a metal table in the center and plastic chairs lined one wall behind a glass screening window that rose to the ceiling. Hovering above the table was a glass cabinet with at least twenty pipes coming out of it in different positions. Surrounding the table were six long-armed metal contraptions connected to the pipes.
I was too scared to ask.
A woman with short, blonde hair came in behind us. Her glasses were attached to a chain around her neck. She held a clipboard and was studying it intently. Without looking up, she said, “Pietre, what are you doing here? You’ve used your quota for the month.”
For the first time, he seemed ruffled. He ran a hand through his light brown hair and spoke to his feet. “Er… umm, sorry, Doctor Yashin. It’s not for me, it’s for her.” He pointed in my direction with a surly look on his face. Suddenly he seemed younger, closer to our age than he pretended to be. The woman peered up from her clipboard and assessed me critically. She held up my arm in the cast and asked me to remove my hat, making ahs and hms as she wrote things down in a sharp, break-the-pencil kind of way.
“Very well,” she said curtly. “On whose directive?”
“Vereshchagin.”
Vereshi… what? I smothered a giggle at Gus’s mouthful of a last name, receiving a nasty look from Pietre.
“Right, I’ll confirm. Get her undressed and on the table for me for when I return.”
I gave them both an incredulous look. There was no way I was undressing in front of either of them. As if reading my mind, Pietre smiled darkly and said, “I have no interest in seeing you naked but if you want to train, we have to do this first.”
“No,” I said plainly.
“Well, you’ll need help getting into position on the table. You don’t know which hoses go where or which way to lie. And with the cast…”
I thought about it. Careen would stand there and point out all my imperfections. Pietre seeing me was a horror I couldn’t envisage.
“Get Deshi. Does he know what to do?”
They both paused and exchanged glances. Pietre nodded and left the room, returning with a disgruntled Deshi dangling off his flexed arm. And when it was explained what he needed to do, his dark face went a funny shade of green.
“No. No way. Get Careen to do it,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m not that disgusting. Please Desh. This is embarrassing enough as it is.”