Mathew ate it up, poring over his Bible and raising his head to shout the occasional “Amen!” When Sam invited him to say a few words, Mathew had risen and stood beside his father with the gravity of a seasoned councilman. He’d taken a long moment to look around the room, a technique to quiet chatter and capture the congregation’s attention that their father often used. “Death,” he’d said once all eyes were on him, “is not real. My grandmother did not die.”
“Hallelujah!” voices shouted in the lull of his dramatic pause. “Give us the Word, Brother Mathew!”
Gabi watched her brother closely, heard the way he dropped his voice to a lower register to cloak the tremble beneath it, though his eyes were dry. “She has gone to the One God in heaven, as we all shall if we live in the Word. The faithful do not die.” Sam beamed at his son, the ashen lines of his face brightening as he glimpsed the man Mathew would become.
Gabi saw something very different. There was a desperation to Mathew’s tone and a rigid set to his jaw that told Gabi he wasn’t only preaching—he was pleading. He needed it to be true that a boy could not be orphaned twice, and he needed the faces of his fellows to mirror that truth. His Bible was the proof he lay before the jury that, judging by the circles under his eyes, he’d spent the night using to erect a shield of doctrine between him and the void. Despite his ambition, Mathew had always been game to mime a yawn or share an eye roll with Gabi during an overly long service or when Messenger Nystrom came for dinner and went on about some point of doctrine. But the face he presented to the fellowship now was as impassioned and pious as that of any councilmember.
For Gabi it was like losing Gram all over again, watching her brother wave his Bible and thunder hallelujahs in his dark wool suit. She couldn’t bear it. Though she was in the front row of the innermost circle, the crowd was standing and swaying like aspens in a gale, and no one noticed Gabi leave. The double doors to the sanctuary had remained open so that those attending the memorial could filter in and out. One never knew how long these things might go on, especially when messages began to come through. With only her thin dress coat to shield her from the wind shearing across the plaza, Gabi pushed through the outer doors of the temple and struck out for the Care Center on the other side. For Gram, working at the Care Center had been the ultimate form of worship, and more than anything, Gabi needed to feel closer to her grandmother. The icy gusts were at her back, and she ran with her arms hugged around her as the wind propelled her forward. Why had she always been so afraid to run?
“Hi, Gabriela, is everything okay? Is the memorial service over already?” Officer Katz was on duty as always, reading a book behind the reception desk and taking cursory glances at the monitors on the wall. Gabi hadn’t really thought about how she might explain herself to the security guard. The urge to be closer to Gram had been such a biological necessity that she hadn’t questioned it or paused to consider that anyone else might.
“I started feeling sick. There are so many people in the temple. I think yesterday just caught up with me.”
“Of course,” Officer Katz cooed. “Your grandmother was a fine woman. I sure am going to miss her quirky sense of humor and that apple cake on Fridays.” Katz squinted at Gabi over her reading glasses. “Your color is a bit high. Do you want me to call up for a doctor?”
Gabi’s hand flew to her cheek. Her color had never been anywhere near “high,” but when she looked in the mirror that morning, her pallor did seem to have gone from skim milk to whole. She felt like she was slowly becoming real, like the story from her childhood about a rabbit who was loved so much that he came to life. Maybe sadness could do that too?
“No!” Gabi blurted as Officer Katz reached for the Call button. The guard’s rust-colored eyebrows crawled up toward her hairline. “I mean no thank you. I just needed to get away from everything, walk around a little, but it’s so cold outside. Do you think I could hang out here for a bit? Just until the service is over?”
Katz looked around the empty lobby and at the ice-lacquered plaza through the doors. The monitors showed quiet corridors, with a few Minders pushing patients in wheelchairs and an orderly dozing at the ninth-floor nurses’ station.
“Well, I suppose that would be fine. We’ve got some back-issue bulletins over there, and they’ve just finished the new mural in the cafeteria if you’d like to go have a peek. Stick to the main floor, though. It took quite a while to get things settled down after all the commotion yesterday. Long night for everybody around here.”
Gabi nodded and smiled her thanks before turning the corner toward the cafeteria. She had little interest in the mural, but there was another reason her feet had carried her to the Care Center.
The orderly was still asleep at the nurses’ station on the ninth floor when she got off the elevator, and though she could hear murmurs from the doctors’ lounge and a couple of the patient rooms, the hallway branching off toward D Wing was clear. The ninth floor was for those Returned just back from the coasts—a place where they could get stronger before graduating to the rehabilitation floor. Gram had always called what happened on Ninth “the sleeping cure.” Even the staff found its drowsy energy hard to resist. The lights were dimmer, the voices hushed, and no machines whirred or beeped from the rooms. Gabi was lulled by the nursery-like atmosphere as well, but this was no time for a nap.
She edged up to the sliding doors that led to D Wing, grateful she had thought to bring her father’s passcard along rather than returning it as she’d intended. Noticing the card reader to the right of the doors, she offered silent thanks to Gram for her foresight. Her grandmother must have known that Gabi’s powerful curiosity would overcome her fear. Gabi paused with the passcard poised at the top of the scanner. Her father had the highest clearance on the council, but she had no idea if that applied to the entire complex or only the temple. What if she swiped and an alarm went off or the swipe was tracked and recorded somewhere? Before her resolve could weaken, Gabi slid the passcard through, and the doors opened. She kept her eyes trained on the slumbering orderly as she stepped backward over the threshold into D Wing.
Immediately Gabi gagged on a lungful of fetid air. It wasn’t an odor exactly, but more like a distorted transparency laid over everything. It reminded her of stale urine and things unwashed, the musk of frightened animals and the copper burn of extreme pain. Head swimming, Gabi bent over and braced her hands on her knees until the floor stopped bucking beneath her. The corridor was silent and unlit except for the glowing Exit signs at either end, yet every micron of space was infused with terror. It only grew stronger as Gabi advanced, hugging the wall to her left as she inched forward. She checked each door until she found one with a sign that read “Cleaning Supplies.” This was where Gram had come yesterday morning, but what next? From here Gram had followed a doctor and a Minder into one of the rest wards. That’s where she’d seen it, whatever “it” was.
There was nothing to hide behind in the corridor if anyone came along, but Gabi had come this far, and the memorial service wasn’t going to last forever. She would be expected to be there for the closing, and the processional to the incineration unit where all deceased fellows were taken. The primitive ritual of burying the dead in the ground seemed much more fitting for Gram, who had so loved the earth, but even the Tribes rarely practiced it anymore. The little soil that was left after endless cycles of radioactive seepage, drought, freezing, and flooding was either terminally compacted or too dangerous to handle.
The small window of time to honor Gram’s wishes was shrinking by the minute, and along with it, the meager ration of courage that had buoyed Gabi thus far. She noticed that of all the doors along the hall, only one had a card swipe beside it. The door with the passcard reader had a window in it, but all Gabi could see on the other side was a tiny vestibule and another door, this one windowless. A splinter of dread pierced her at the thought of being trapped in that space with a locked door on either side.
Stop dithering, Gabi chided her
self. You’re here now. Just go! She approached the door, swiped her father’s card, and stepped into the vestibule.
She tried to keep her foot wedged to prop the door behind her while she jiggled the handle of the windowless one, but she couldn’t quite reach both at the same time. Reluctantly she stepped all the way into the vestibule and clasped the knob in front of her. As the door clicked shut behind her, there was an answering click in the mechanism of the knob in her hand. She pushed the door slightly open and slipped through.
The ward was divided into cubicles by curtains suspended from rods. Gabi felt the sudden terror of exposure as the fluorescent lights overhead stripped any concealing shadows from the room, so she dove into the nearest cubicle after a quick look to ensure that it was empty. There were two beds inside, one flanked by a tray of surgical equipment and the other by a carousel of hanging IV bags. The bed with the surgical tray next to it was heavier, its frame made of metal and its surface rubberized, with a small gutter running along the outside. The metal bed lay completely flat, whereas the other was a plush adjustable one like those in the other wards.
The sound of metal rings scraping across curtain rods startled Gabi, her heart crashing until she realized the sound had come from the cubicle next door. The jolt made her aware that she’d been frozen like a frightened animal when what she needed to do was hide and think. After dropping to her hands and knees, Gabi crawled around the side of the plush bed and wedged herself into the narrow space between it and the nightstand by the dividing curtain. The nightstand was taller than the top of her head if she hunched over and hugged her knees, and the bed concealed her from anyone who might happen to peek into her cubicle. Once she got herself situated, she saw that a slice of the cubicle next door was visible through a crack where the curtain didn’t reach the wall. Voices issued from the other side, and she leaned her head against the wall to peer through.
She could only make out the bottom half of the adjustable bed in the other room, which was laid out in an identical format to her own. Recruiting as much of her spindly leg strength as possible, Gabi pushed herself up the wall until she could see over the top of the bed, biting the insides of her cheeks to keep from crying out at what she saw.
A human skeleton with a translucent hide stretched over it and the visible outline of a syringe pumping IV fluids under its skin lay propped up on the adjustable bed. Its lips were colorless, pulled tight over protruding yellow teeth, and its eyes were great glass marbles glinting from its skull. The skeleton’s hands, which lay draped across the sheet, looked like the pearlescent whale bones in the stolen photograph, but this was a human and he was alive. Barely. A tall, dark-haired man and a silver-bobbed woman, both draped in white lab coats, were turned away from the emaciated body, bent over another figure on the rubber-sheeted table before them. Their conversation reached Gabi as her gaze was pulled again and again to the pitiful creature lying close enough to reach out and touch.
“I don’t know what he will be able to digest at this point,” said the older woman. “He’s gone too long is my guess.”
The man turned his face toward her, revealing a salt-and-pepper beard and eyes bracketed by deep crow’s-feet.
“Could be, but I think it’s the perfect time. The body has to reach extreme deprivation to override this kind of thing. The gene mods can only do so much. If he’ll take it, we can bring him out of ketosis easily enough.”
“Only one way to find out,” the woman said. “Remember, it’s important that he see the incision being made. Shall we begin?”
The man nodded, and the two stepped apart, turning toward the starved figure and revealing another body on the metal cot behind them. Gabi strained to see around the doctors, searching for signs of life in the second supine form, whose skin was marked with ink from midriff to thigh as though a cartographer had mapped its contours. The dimensions of this body were smoother and more padded with flesh than those of the wasted man closer to her. There were scrapes and massive bruises too, which looked like the flattened mountain ranges on an explorer’s map.
The female doctor put a hand on the skeleton man’s arm, glanced at the clipboard propped on his bedside table, and spoke to him in a honeyed croon. “Marcus, can you hear me? I’m Dr. Yancy and this is Dr. Gearhart. We’re here to help you get better. You’ve been through an awful lot, and we have been working very hard to make a treatment plan for you. Can you understand me?”
The man turned toward the sound of her voice, scratching at the bedcovers with his blade-like fingers. “That’s good,” Yancy said, nodding encouragement. “Very good.” The man’s fingers crept toward her hand. A creaky groan issued from his lips, which were stretched so taut that they refused to meet over his teeth. The word came out as “Hlease.”
“We know you are very hungry, Marcus. We perfectly understand that, and we want to help you. As soon as you’re stronger, you can be moved to the rest ward and then down to rehab. If you follow the protocol closely, you will recover fully and return to your loved ones before long. You want that, don’t you? They must be so worried about you.” At the doctor’s words, Marcus twisted on the bed and let out a tortured animal sound as tears bled from his eyes. “We know you miss them, Marcus,” Dr. Yancy soothed, as she turned to the tray of surgical implements and revealed another section of the marked body behind her.
This one had reddish whorls of hair matting his unmoving chest, a slight cleft to his chin, and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. His face was slack, and though his eyes were partially open, they saw nothing. It was the first dead body Gabi had ever seen, and it made her want to burst into the room and cover him—cover those sightless eyes and that vulnerable cleft chin.
“Surely you want to return to your family healthy and strong? As you are, you would only be a burden to them, so let’s just focus on getting you better. Your loved ones would want that.” As Dr. Yancy pivoted toward the metal cot, Marcus seemed to notice the other body for the first time. His eyes bulged farther from their sockets, and his hand twitched toward the corpse.
“Before he passed,” Dr. Gearhart continued, picking up Dr. Yancy’s monologue as she swabbed the exposed haunch of the man on the metal cot, “your friend Nicolas asked us to make sure you understood that he gladly gave his life for yours. He knew how you would suffer from this illness and that there was only one thing that could cure you. He gave of himself in the tradition of our Lord and asked only that his sacrifice not be in vain.”
Gabi’s eyes could not stop looking at the dead man’s body, searching for some sign of life. Her gaze found the soft jumble of flesh in the nest of hair between the dead man’s thighs, and she jerked her eyes back to his torso. With more of his body exposed, Gabi could see a patch of shiny pink scar tissue on the left side of the man’s rib cage.
Dr. Gearhart’s words were strange and hypnotic, like a sermon. What was he talking about? Was the marked man Nicolas? The word sacrifice flashed at her like a neon sign. It was as though Dr. Gearhart was quoting a translation. The starved man, Marcus, thrashed weakly on his bed, which barely caused the sheets to shift across his shrunken body. Dr. Gearhart looked over his shoulder at Dr. Yancy, who was bent low over the flank of the corpse. “We need to go ahead, or we’ll have to sedate,” he said, impatience straining his professional monotone.
“Yes, ready,” Yancy answered. “I needed to make sure not to take something too tough. It would have been better to start internally, but it’s too upsetting for the first dose. We’ll start small. Get me the dish.”
Dr. Gearhart passed a kidney-shaped steel bowl from the surgical tray to Yancy. As she reached for it, Gabi noticed she had donned surgical gloves and that the fingertips were coated in blood. There was a moist plop as she placed something into the dish, then set it on the corpse’s naked belly as she pulled off the soiled gloves.
Turn away now, Gabi commanded herself, but she couldn’t to save her life.
Dr. Yancy turned, exposing the hip of t
he marked man, which was bleeding from a neat incision where the flesh of his left buttock swelled out to the side. Blood wept from the wound and into the narrow gutter that encircled the bed. After picking up the dish from the dead man’s stomach, Dr. Yancy handed it to Dr. Gearhart, who cradled it in one hand while he chose a pincer-like instrument from the surgical tray with the other. Marcus was sobbing in earnest now, saliva soaking his chin and the top edge of the sheet. Dr. Gearhart grasped the contents of the dish with the pincers and raised it into the light. It looked like a blood-soaked wad of chewing gum. Dr. Yancy was frowning.
“Are you sure he’s been coded for this procedure?” she asked. “If the gene mods had taken hold, I doubt he would be so agitated. Perhaps we should try again later with an anonymous donor, put him on some liquid nutrition to prevent organ failure until the behavioral tendencies can be confirmed.”
With a shake of his head, Dr. Gearhart set down the tray and dipped his finger into it. He was not wearing gloves, and his naked finger emerged with a vermillion-coated tip.
“Some resistance is normal. You know as well as I do that in the first phase, it’s crucial that the donor be familiar to the subject. He’s ready. Hold his head.”
Dr. Yancy edged around Dr. Gearhart to station herself by the top of the bed. She placed her hands on either side of Marcus’s skull as Dr. Gearhart lowered his bloody finger to the patient’s mouth. With a gentle caress, Gearhart painted blood across Marcus’s lower lip.
“Marcus, listen to me,” Dr. Yancy coaxed, her mouth close to his ear. “This will save your life. You are in the advanced stages of illness, and there is no other way to jumpstart your failing organs. Nicolas died with great dignity and for the sole purpose of saving your life. Please just take a moment and think about what I’m saying.”
First Girl Page 7