As I brush past him, he leans over and presses his lips to my cheek, just once, a tenderness that makes no sense in that moment. His lips against my skin are soft and tentative.
“What are you doing?” I don’t want his touch, I don’t want any man’s touch on me ever again.
He stiffens, then backs away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t do it again!”
This time when he blushes, the moonlight is bright enough that I can see it.
The corridor floor has rows of phosphorescent lights that mark a trail to the service elevators in the dark corridor. Specific security codes haven’t been set in this unused part of the hospital, hence the general code that Julien’s written on my hand with his dermapen. I place my palm on the wall next to the elevator shaft. In a few seconds, the door slides open and I step inside, shivering. The elevator plunges down, down, down, and my stomach cramps while my ears fill with the pressure.
I’m in shadows as I step gingerly down the hallway, my eyes darting left and right. I’m looking for a small alcove where a few displays are recessed into the tables, just before the main hall of the hospital.
I quickly assemble a plan as I move: I’ll try to access the Deep Web to send Lin an SOS. I go over it in my mind as I follow the trail of blue lights, praying that there will be no guards along the way, that the communication channels are still open on the Deep Web since the last time I used them.
A luminous thermometer on one of the walls glows as I pass by. Somehow the cold muffles all sounds, as in an underground cave. I shiver, as much from fear as from the chill in the air.
To distract myself, I search for that strange symbol Julien mentioned—the monkey’s tail. Above ground there are so many things I know nothing about: gestures, ways of speaking, jokes, signs. I’d have to learn a whole new language if I ever reemerged into normal life.
I edge around a corner toward a warm light emanating from the end of the hallway. I slow down, my eyes sliding along the walls. Is this it? No, it’s a toilet. How about here? No, an office.
The locks on each door pulse soft green, inviting a handprint, but the wrong touch will alert Security in an instant. I round another corner and suddenly the main hall appears, an empty cavern. Where are the patients and doctors and nurses coming together and moving apart? Where is the dance of life in the hospital? This is more like an abandoned airplane hangar, desks empty, chairs pushed back and left. The main lights are switched off; the amber lights of the night cycle pulse overhead in a pattern that resembles blood rushing through the four chambers of the human heart.
But this means I’ve gone too far. Or that I’ve gone down the maze of corridors in the wrong direction.
I retrace my steps back to the beginning of the corridor. I still can’t find the strange little symbol or anything even close to it. Maybe it’s so small that it remains hidden in the gloom. I drop my line of sight, looking lower, and that’s when I see the sign embedded in the door handle. It looks nothing like a monkey’s tail, I think, in annoyance. Stupid doctors.
I reach out to grasp the handle, matching the dermacode to its imprint. It glows green, and smoothly the door unlocks and opens.
Just then, another door right next to the display room begins to open. I’ve only got a split second to react: terrified, I push myself into the alcove, where I cower, legs shaking, as the alcove door stays open for an eternity, like a yawn that won’t come out.
Someone’s emerged from the room into the hallway. I don’t recognize the shadowed face—he’s not tall enough to be Julien. My own door isn’t closing quickly enough. Whoever it is will peer inside the room, if he’s curious. He’ll see me, if I make any noise.
He stands in the hallway, a blue ghost. Then he goes back inside and the alcove door slowly shuts. I release my breath sharply, pressing my arms into my stomach.
The lights flick on as soon as the door closes. I’m in a simple storeroom, nearly empty except for a few bedding supplies. But wait: in the corner, a desk, with a single display on top. I don’t know if this is the place Julien meant.
I inch toward the desk, reach up to the display, and wait for the dermapen code to be accepted. I blink once or twice and see the message flashing across it:
Code invalid. Access Denied. Contact IT for more information.
“No!” I moan out loud.
There’s no time to think, to fantasize about my life outside, to wonder whether Lin’s upset, or Diyah’s lighting candles for me in the shrine in the Charbagh. I retrace my steps all the way down the corridors, back to the elevators. The corridors, empty as starving bellies, are haunted by guards and Agents only in my imagination.
Soon I’m back in front of my room door, shaking and sweating. I lean against it, too tired to lift my hand to the handle. The door swings open for me, sending me stumbling, off-balance, into the room.
“Julia?”
Julien’s been here all this time, waiting for me, good as his word. He sits on the edge of my bed, his hair pushed back from his smooth forehead. The darkness marks out the hollows beneath his eyes. What makes a young man look so old?
“I couldn’t do it. I... the code didn’t work,” I say.
My knees buckle. Julien reaches out soundlessly for me, and I fall towards him. He enfolds me in his thin, strong arms and helps me to the bed.
The moon observes us through the window; we’re both spirits in its brilliant wake. I won’t sleep for fear of what will happen to me tomorrow. At least for now, in these few bright hours, nothing can touch us while we shelter each other.
Julien
When had they lain down together? After Sabine had come back from her failed mission, and Julien put his arm around her to comfort her. He couldn’t remember how it happened, but suddenly he and Sabine were pressed together in the narrow hospital bed, two people holding on to a raft for fear of drowning. He shifted his body away an inch or two to put some distance between them, but they always seemed to come back to one another on invisible currents.
She’d finally told him that her name wasn’t really Julia, but Sabine; she had been in a place called “the Panah” since the age of seventeen, when she had run away from home. She’d contacted the Panah over illegal channels. She disappeared into an underground life: he couldn’t even imagine her daring, her foolishness. Her job: to spend nights with the rich and powerful men of Green City, nights that were not marked by sex, but rather to share sleep, a type of contact and comfort that had become impossible decades ago. She’d been in the Panah so long, she said, that she didn’t desire any other life.
“Where are your parents now?” Julien had asked her.
“My mother died when I was twelve. My father... I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”
“What happened? The Virus?”
Her fingers, resting lightly on top of his, had stiffened. He could feel her tense up; he loosened his arms around her until she settled down again, like a hawk rousing its feathers. “She killed herself.”
“Oh, god,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, god? I haven’t heard anyone say that in a while.”
“My grandparents used to say it a lot. I guess I picked it up from them. They were Religious. Old-fashioned.” He was glad the darkness hid his blush.
His mind always moved in a practical, scientific way. To put a man and a woman alone into a room together, and expect nothing to happen... What an impossible paradox. This was a game of the most dangerous kind. And how vulnerable those women were to those powerful men. No wonder Sabine had ended up here. He didn’t know what to be more amazed by: the women’s courage or Sabine’s naïveté.
He believed she was telling the truth. He had gained some understanding of human nature, listening to patients all day long. Their history, how much they exercised, how much they ate, smoked, drank—he could discern who was honest
and who was being evasive; he had developed an ear for the unsaid, the unexplained, the unarticulated. Sabine, he could tell, told the truth as if her life depended on it. He shook his head, bewildered at the scenario he’d gotten himself into. Holding this woman in his arms was like pulling a time bomb close.
“What?” she whispered.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?”
Her quiet laugh had so many colors that he couldn’t tell if he was being mocked or reassured. “You would never hurt me. Would you?”
Julien grew instantly alarmed. He meant her life in the Panah, but suddenly he felt like an assailant. “But... after what happened to you, and then I operated on you without your consent. How could you not hate me?”
“I can’t hate what I don’t remember.”
Julien had treated victims of male-on-male sexual attacks, reported immediately to the Agency, punishable by immediate execution. It was an inevitable part of life in Green City; the absence of women caused more harm than the authorities let on. Julien had been trained to handle them clinically and procedurally. He knew which reports to file and which Officers to alert. He followed the DNA protocols precisely, referred the men to the right department in the hospital for deprogramming to treat their trauma.
There was a parallel track at the hospital: a more compassionate philosophy, pioneered in part by Julien’s senior and informal mentor, Dr. Rami Bouthain. White-haired, wrinkled, and grand, Bouthain was still strong on his feet even at the age of sixty-eight. He worked six hours a day as Shifana’s senior consultant in the department of internal medicine.
As a young medic in the army, Bouthain treated many wounded men in the border skirmishes, where unspeakable things happened between men. Rape, torture, mutilation were all commonplace, haunting the men for years after their military service. Only talking of their experiences relieved their mental burdens. As a result, Bouthain developed a keen interest in psychiatry and psychology. Most psychiatric aid was now relegated to psychotropics that targeted gut bacteria and body inflammation rather than the brain. Talk therapy had gone out of vogue decades earlier. But when Bouthain came to Shifana Hospital after the fighting, he created a trauma program where military veterans underwent counseling and rehabilitation. Most important, they could talk about what had happened to them, a curious route to healing, but one which Julien found himself agreeing with as he witnessed its results with the patients.
Now Julien asked himself: what else could he have done? The procedure he’d performed on Sabine was a complete success, medically speaking. But as he listened to Sabine talk in the dark, he recalled Bouthain’s words and wondered what he could do about the trauma of her experiences. Her mother’s suicide, her father’s indifference, her life in the Panah, the assault at the hands of an unknown monster. All stacked one on top of the other; if one were touched, all would fall and shatter the woman who contained them.
During the night Sabine shifted and turned in the bed, away from him, toward him, pressing against him until he was squeezed to the edge, pulling away from him so that he felt cold when their bodies separated even by an inch. Julien told her a little bit about his childhood and family, his days in school. He couldn’t explain his intense loneliness, his furious drive to succeed. He couldn’t tell her that he was unable to trust the boys he’d grown up with. How there was always a wall between him and other people.
She said very little, but she put her arms around him and squeezed, and he lay there, breathless and stunned. The points of pleasure electrified by her proximity weren’t located in his body, but in his mind, and by morning, he’d come to believe, in his heart.
Alternating between waves of contentment and anxiety, Julien rifled through plans like a pack of cards, shuffling and turning up the same dog-eared ones in the same order and combination. He was risking his life, and others’ lives, in helping Sabine. Yet he couldn’t just abandon her the way the man who’d dumped her at the hospital had done. So now what: hide her here for another few days until she was strong enough to walk out on her own? Send a message for her to the Panah for them to come and collect her? Or wait for the Agency to find out about them and arrest all of them for their crimes? By saving her, had he sentenced himself and his colleagues to certain death?
Julien pressed his thumbs between his eyebrows to release the knot of tension in his forehead. Then he leaned back into her warmth again and tried to shut out all thought from his mind until the predawn light began to filter into the room. But his mind drifted back to earlier in the day, when Mañalac had caught him in the corridor as Julien was on his way to his rounds. “Wait, Doctor Julien, wait. That test you asked me for, I have the results.”
“From toxicology? And?”
“It came back positive. An experimental drug. Ebriatas. We don’t have it in the database. I had to check it with the Science Bureau. That’s why it took me so long to get the results.”
“What does it do?”
“Works like Midazolam used to, before they discontinued it,” whispered Mañalac. “Treats insomnia without as much disorientation or nausea. Anterograde amnesia is common. But one more thing: it causes all sorts of problems with pregnancies—miscarriages—especially in combination with all the fertility drugs the women are taking. That’s why they haven’t released it on the market as yet.”
After Mañalac delivered this information, Julien had tried to understand how Sabine had gotten her hands on an experimental drug that even he, a doctor, hadn’t heard of. Could it have have caused the ectopic pregnancy? It certainly explained her amnesia. He’d have to bring it up delicately with her; she would be reluctant to confess to using illegal drugs. She must have been truly desperate, going to such lengths to find the sleep that eluded her.
He’d tried giving Sabine a synthetic morphine to knock her out in the night, but it had no effect. That was when she told him how she’d lie quietly in her bed for hours, trying to fall asleep, her mind racing and becoming more and more anxious about the coming daylight. Only the anesthesia she’d had during the procedure had kept her under, and he couldn’t exactly dose her with it just to help her sleep. Julien wondered if Sabine might be suffering from a form of hypervigilance—a symptom Bouthain had said he’d seen in traumatized patients, especially the ones who had returned from war. Sabine hadn’t seen any heavy combat on the battlefield, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t fought her wars.
Julien decided to try a simple relaxation exercise on her: he told her to count her breaths. “It’s a natural tranquilizer. It relaxes the whole nervous system. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.”
At five in the morning, Sabine was finally lying silently beside him, breathing evenly. Julien’s device began to glow orange, rousing him in time for early morning rounds in the main ward. He raised his head from the bed, then levered his body into a sitting position, his long legs easily reaching the floor. He sat there for a few moments, blinking in the morning light. He was light-headed, but it didn’t matter. Having spent the night beside this woman, he felt rejuvenated, ready to face whatever the day would bring him.
He turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Sabine?” There was a frisson when he said her name, a feeling of expansion in his chest.
She stirred and opened her eyes, red and strained with dryness and lack of sleep. He wanted to give her drops to soothe the dryness; he wanted to stroke each eyelid with his fingertips to relieve her pain. “I have to go now. I’ll send someone with something to eat in an hour. His name is Ram: he’s a surgical assistant. He helped me during your procedure.”
It would be better to protect everyone’s identities, so that later, when questioned—and that time would come, Julien knew Shifana and Green City too well to pretend it wouldn’t—they wouldn’t be able to incriminate themselves, or each other, to the Agency. Yet Sabine needed to know there was a family of a sort, a temporary one, that she could trust in, here in the hospital. Ram, and M
añalac and George, in those heated hours in the operating theater, had become her surrogate kin.
“When will you be back?” Sabine’s voice was low and papery. The morning light was having the opposite effect on her that it did on Julien: she shrank into the bed, smaller and more gaunt than she had looked the day before.
“On my break,” replied Julien. “Around eleven.” He was already worried how many times he could steal away from his duties and come to see her on this unfinished floor, worried that sooner or later someone was going to notice his absence.
She raised herself up on one elbow, propping her head in her hand. “You should go. I’ll be fine.” The tired corners of her mouth lifted in a small smile that brought an unexpected calm into his heart. His nerves, tight as wires, suddenly relaxed. “Come back as soon as you can.”
Walking down the corridor, Julien considered his next move. Sabine should be safe for at least today, but Green City Security made routine sweeps of the hospital every week. There were unannounced inspections during times of heightened conflict with the border insurgents, but the administrators refused to let Security just barge into sensitive areas and treatment rooms whenever they wanted. Because of this, tension always simmered between Security and the hospital administration. But Security might demand to inspect the unfinished floors, claiming that since there were no patients there, prior warning was unnecessary.
“Hello, Julien.”
Julien froze in the middle of the corridor. His heart kicked like a mule in his chest and a wave of cold sweat broke out across his back.
The stranger’s voice was unknown, yet familiar. There were shadows on the man’s face, but Julien could still make out his size, his height, the well-developed muscles underneath his jacket. The faint smell of cigars and leather surrounded him like a mist.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?” said Julien.
“My name is Reuben Faro. I don’t think you remember me.”
It came back to him in an instant: the large fleshy man who bent down to put the medal around his neck. That man had been fatherly, jovial, offering a smile for the cameras that bathed everyone in protection and warmth. This was a different person looming in the shadows. Gone was the avuncular pride; menace emanated from every pore of his body.
Black Diamond Fall Page 46