Marcus grew still. Yancy and Gearhart seemed to be holding their breath, and Gabi realized she was holding hers too. She trembled with shock and nausea but was coherent enough to know she did not want to pass out in this gruesome place and wake up in one of those beds.
Gabi kept her eyes fixed on the doctors, unable to stand the sight of Marcus’s blood-smeared lip, so she knew the moment something changed. Yancy and Gearhart’s faces loosened, and the hint of a smug smile plucked at the corner of Gearhart’s mouth. Gabi dragged her eyes toward Marcus, and saw that the tip of his tongue was cautiously licking at the blood on his lip. As he swallowed, his face took on a fiendish animation. He pulled his entire lower lip into his mouth and sucked on it with loud smacking noises. His eyes were closed, but he pawed restlessly at the starched sheet. Dr. Gearhart dipped his finger into the dish again and dabbed at Marcus’s lip. Without hesitation Marcus sucked at the blood, drawing Dr. Gearhart’s finger into his mouth up to the second knuckle.
“Ouch!” Gearhart yelped, retracting his finger. He shook his head and chuckled. “I’d say he’s ready, Dr. Yancy, wouldn’t you?”
No no no no no! Gabi screamed inside her head.
Dr. Yancy extended the morsel of flesh toward Marcus as Gabi heard the whistle of the executioner’s blade cleaving time in two. As she watched Marcus snap at the slippery human flesh, eyes wide and crazed, she couldn’t imagine what the future could possibly hold. Surely the world would be obliterated, crushed to dust under the weight of what people, her people, had become. Marcus was no longer Marcus. His eyes were lasers latched on to the incision site on his friend’s flank as if it were the mouth of God. The cords in his neck stood out as he lifted his head and jutted his chin toward the exposed flesh, his face alive with ravenous want. “’Ore,” he wheezed through his protruding teeth. “Hlease!”
The moment Dr. Yancy carved another, larger portion from Nicolas’s buttock and offered it to Marcus, first taking care to dissect the skin away for easier chewing, Marcus tore at it with ferocity. Yancy and Gearhart bowed their heads, lips moving in sync.
They’re praying, Gabi realized as she watched the familiar contortions of their mouths. It was a prayer received by Messenger Nystrom and translated by her father only a few years after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gathering In, when the first Witness teams were being trained for coastal expeditions. Gabi knew it by heart: “With love and compassion for our lost fellows, we venture forth knowing the perils that lie ahead, and the worse fate for those who suffer separation. Through our actions, which are ordained by God and given to us by true message, we seek not to harm but to fulfill our destiny as stewards of humanity. Though the actions of the shepherd are firm, it is only by a strong hand that his flock may be Returned, in the spirit of peace, unity, and protection.”
“Amen,” whispered Dr. Yancy.
“Amen,” affirmed Gearhart. “You’ve done well, Marcus,” he said, using a swab to clean the dribble of blood from Marcus’s chin in a parody of paternal tenderness. Marcus strained toward the inert body across from him, blind to anything else in the room.
“We’ll call in an attendant to administer the rest of the dose, then take him back to cold storage,” Dr. Yancy said to Gearhart over her shoulder as she turned away to make notes on her clipboard.
“It’s important that you take it slow in the beginning, Marcus,” said Gearhart. “Your stomach has shrunk, and this is rich fare. Still, we’d like to get you on organ tissue as soon as possible, as these are the most nutrient-dense foods.” Gearhart reached over and removed a switch-bearing device from the wall. “We’ll be keeping you on the electrolyte drip, of course, but you can use this Call button to page a nurse whenever you’re feeling ready to eat again. You were dangerously malnourished when you came to us, so this will take some time. Be patient with yourself.”
Dr. Gearhart moved to the portable sink, and used a stiff brush to scrub under his fingernails. Steam rose from the sink, and the bristles turned pink as they worked the dried blood from his cuticles. Gabi looked from the brush to Nicolas to Marcus and knew she was going to throw up. She wanted to vomit out all that she had seen, purge it from every corner of her mind, but she was infected with something she could never un-know. Gabi unglued herself from the wall and staggered across the empty cubicle to where the edges of the curtain met to form an entrance. It felt like a thousand years since that steel doorknob clicked under her hand. Her shirt was soaked with sweat and clinging to her skin, but she was cold to the marrow of her bones. The edges of Gabi’s vision grew diffuse as bile inched up her throat.
After a quick look through the curtain revealed that the coast was clear, Gabi dove toward the exit. Though she wanted to bolt right through both doors to the nearest bathroom, she forced herself to support the first door behind her as it closed to prevent it from slamming before opening the second. She couldn’t recall having seen a bathroom between the entrance to D Wing and the passcard-protected room anyway. She needed to get out.
Gabi staggered down the dim hallway toward the D Wing entrance, wiping her sweaty hands on her thighs. She extracted the passcard from her pocket and swiped it with a jerky motion. The light on the scanner glowed red, and Gabi fought the urge to bang wildly on the doors with her fists. Instead she swiped again, taking care to do so in one smooth motion. The light glowed green, the doors shushed open, and Gabi toppled through them. She could just make out the outline of the orderly where he hunched over his desk at the nurses’ station.
Wake up, Gabi begged mutely, no longer caring if her presence roused suspicion. As she took a step toward the orderly, the tiled floor opened up beneath her. Vertigo unleashed the vomit in her throat as she hit the floor on her hands and knees. She heaved until there was nothing left, her body clinging to consciousness to make sure she didn’t choke on her own sick.
Somewhere above her a voice was shouting, but the floor spun so crazily that she couldn’t look up, feeling as ephemeral as a bird carcass of sinew, feathers, and hollow bones. Gabi felt herself being scooped up just as she began to sink into the pool of vomit. The arms were strong, and stubble abraded the place where her forehead tucked into the neck of whoever held her. Now she would be placed in a bed, and doctors in white lab coats would hover at her side with their pitiless eyes and sharp, shiny instruments. Gabi opened her mouth to scream, but the sound died as blackness consumed her—a lid on a shoebox closing over sinew, feathers, and hollow bones.
“GABI? GABRIELA?” A light shone against her eyelids, making them glow a vein-crossed pink. Gabi cracked one eye open, and the light lanced through it, triggering a pain that stretched from the bridge of her nose to the nape of her neck. “She’s awake. Call in Brother Sam.”
“Dad?” she croaked.
“I’m here, Gabriela” came her father’s voice, taut with concern. “I’m right here.”
Gabi opened her eyes wider as her pupils tried to adjust to the glare of the room, but it hurt too much, so she closed them again. Chirps and beeps punctuated the air, and the smooth outline of an oxygen mask circumscribed her lower face. She was in a bed. A bed just like the one—Gabi’s eyes flew open and she ripped off the mask. She tried to flail her arms and kick her feet beneath the tightly tucked sheets, but they refused to obey. “Help!” she rasped. “Dad, help!” The beeps and chirps sped up. Her father hovered at her bedside, a young male doctor at his elbow. Sam placed his hands on Gabi’s shoulders and urged her back onto the mattress.
“Shhh, honey, it’s okay now. You’re going to be fine.” There were no curtains in this room, just solid, chalk-white walls and two large windows that overlooked the plaza. The door to her room was open, and orderlies wheeled patients down the hall, chatting breezily. She was no longer on the ninth floor, but how did she get here? She could remember nothing after falling through the metal doors. Had she been caught? Gabi tried to read her father’s face for signs of anger or disappointment but saw only worry and the slow dawning of relief. He picked up her ha
nd and covered it with his, the motion causing a tug at the IV needle inserted at the crease of her elbow. It was connected to delicate tubing that led to a pouch of amber liquid hanging by her head. The pouch was only a quarter full, unlike the bulging bags of electrolyte fluids she’d seen in Marcus’s curtained room. Even this shallow dive into her memory made her wince.
“Gabriela, are you in pain?” her father asked, shooting a look at the doctor beside him. “Can’t we give her something?”
“No,” Gabi whispered. “I’m okay. I don’t want anything.”
“It’s probably better to hold off if we can,” the doctor said as he scanned his clipboard. “It will make it easier to assess how she’s responding to the new dose.” He scribbled a few notes, took a reading from the monitor at her bedside, and nodded at Sam before exiting. Gabi was crumbling under the weight of what she’d seen, yet the echo of Gram’s note stopped her from sharing it with her father. “You will know soon whether or not your father—” But Gabi didn’t know anything anymore. She didn’t know what the rest of Gram’s sentence might have been or why torture and murder were happening right here in the Care Center, and most of all she had absolutely no idea who to trust with this awful secret. It was her father’s passcard that had gotten her into D Wing, after all. Could it be that he already knew what Yancy and Gearhart were up to? Taking a sip from the cup of water Sam offered her, Gabi kept her eyes averted as she spoke.
“What happened? How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember? An orderly found you by the nurses’ station on the ninth floor. He brought you down here, then sent someone to the temple to find me.” Gabi cringed at the image of her father being pulled away in the midst of his mother’s memorial to be told that his daughter was lying unconscious in a Care Center bed.
“Gabriela, I need you to tell me what you were doing on the ninth floor. You know you’re not supposed to go wandering around the Care Center like that. What were you even doing over here during the memorial?” As he said this, Sam glanced over his shoulder and Gabi saw the bright roll of Officer Katz’s chignon. Her back was to them, just outside the door, and she was speaking to the young doctor. Gabi played the only card she had.
“I didn’t feel well. I needed to get out of there. There were too many people and so much noise. I couldn’t breathe.”
“Okay, I can understand that. But why here? Why—” He looked toward the doorway again. The young doctor was gone, and Officer Katz had taken up a Minder pose in front of the door, hands clasped behind her back. “Why the ninth floor?”
“I wanted to feel closer to Gram. She spent so much time here. I was just going to look at the mural. Officer Katz said I could, but I got woozy and nauseous. You know how I get?” Shameless. “I thought I could find my way here, but I must have punched the wrong button in the elevator. I was really out of it.”
“Officer Katz did say you looked off when you came in. Why didn’t you let her page someone?”
“It got bad fast. I thought I could walk it off. Sorry, Dad. I know I made things worse for you today.”
Sam worked his fingers under his glasses, pressing them into his eye sockets. When he pulled his hands away, the indigo half-moons under his eyes had gone almost black.
“Oh, Gabriela, that’s not really possible. It’s not your fault. With everything going on and Gram not here to help you remember your medication, it’s no wonder. We even missed your monthly checkup. I forgot to tell your gram that it got moved because of all the new Returned being admitted this week.”
“Dad?” Gabi ventured. “What did the doctor mean, ‘new dose’? Is that what this is?” Gabi held up the crook of her arm with the inserted needle and looked over at the deflated pouch of fluid hanging beside her.
Sam nodded. “The tests showed extremely low levels of medication in your blood. The doctor thinks it’s only partially due to a missed dose. He says your body chemistry is changing more quickly as you become a young woman and that you’re metabolizing the medication faster because of it. He’s just tinkering with it so we can keep something like this from happening again. He wanted to do the IV to get the levels back up as soon as possible, but you can switch back to the pills after you’re discharged. You should be feeling better in no time.”
Gabi nodded to appease her worried father, but she knew without a doubt that “feeling better” would never be possible with that vile medicine poisoning her system. “Better” was the opposite of how Gabi felt now that the stronger dose was invading her bloodstream. Despite the harrowing events of the last two days, Gabi had experienced a level of vitality that she never knew existed. It could have been that she was too preoccupied with watching her life fall apart to pay much attention to her illness, but when a person spends sixteen years struggling to perform basic functions like breathing, they notice when things change. Now, the bluish cast had returned to her skin, and every breath once again felt like a stolen sip. The medicine was not helping her, and as soon as she got unhooked from that poisonous little bag, she would never allow it into her body again.
Thinking about her health, as disheartening as it was, was so much easier than reflecting on all that she had seen and heard on D Wing. Now she understood why Gram had written “you might think it unfair of me to burden you,” because that was exactly what it felt like—a monstrous, suffocating burden. Gabi couldn’t think of anyone less suited to the heroics Gram expected of her. Mathew would have been a much better choice. People looked up to him, believed in him, the way they did her father. When fellows looked at Mathew, their eyes shone with approval and respect, rather than clouding with pity the way they did when, on the rare occasion, they landed on her. She would tell her brother, Gabi decided. She would confess it all and ask him what they should do. He understood how the world worked better than she and could see the situation strategically. She wouldn’t have to carry this alone.
Chapter SIX
MONDAY MORNING was an awkward, dislocated shuffle in the Lowell house. Nobody knew what to do without Gram running things. Normally Gram would wake early, make breakfast, then rouse Gabi and Mathew to eat and get ready for school. Sam rose before dawn to pray and meditate before emerging from his room, but if Gram didn’t tap on his door to bring him back to reality, he would stay lost in his devotions all day.
Gabi had slept little, haunted by gory flashbacks from D Wing. Long before her clock struck seven thirty, she was dressed and roaming the silent house, no Gram bustling from sink to stove to refrigerator, no steam fogging the windows from a bubbling pot of oatmeal. So this is what it means when someone dies, Gabi thought. Every space that person filled, everything they used to do, would never be filled or done by them again. She found herself shuffling across the worn parts of the kitchen linoleum that Gram had traveled, hoping to soak in some of her grandmother’s spirit. Monday had come like it always did, and things still needed doing.
Gabi pulled down the tin of oatmeal from the shelf above the stove and carefully measured three portions into a pot. It was important to do this, as even an extra tablespoon of cereal could mean running out before the end of the week when new rations were delivered. Taking a pinch of salt from the dish on the counter, Gabi sprinkled it onto the dry oats and stood there, staring down into the beige flakes. She’d never woken up early enough to see how Gram did it. Salt was added to all their food no matter what, because it was enriched with iodine and other minerals to help offset the effects of dehydration caused by water rationing. But what else did Gram use? How did she make everything taste so good when there was so little good to be had?
Gabi reached for the canister of fortified powdered milk and added a spoonful to the oats. The Lowells’ remaining three cinnamon sticks would have to last them six more months before spice rations were replenished. Gabi grated a dusting of cinnamon into the pot along with a splash of juice from the raisins soaking in the fridge for sweetening, then added water and set the pot to boil. The sky was fully light now, and Gabi listened fo
r sounds from down the hall. Still quiet. This was something else that needed doing, so she did. Gabi knocked on Sam’s door, and her father opened it wide enough to peer out. He looked like he’d slept less than Gabi.
“Morning, honey,” he said, his voice gravelly with lack of sleep. “Do I smell oatmeal?” Gabi nodded, and he reached his hand out to rumple her hair. “Thanks for doing that. I should have thought of it. This is all going to take some getting used to.”
“I don’t mind,” Gabi said with a shrug. “It might not taste very good, though.”
“I’m sure it’s fine. Is your brother awake?” No light shone from under Mathew’s door.
“I don’t think so. I’ll get him.”
The only surefire technique to rouse Mathew was to turn the radio by his bed up to maximum volume while jostling him under his mound of covers. Gabi had performed this ritual while Gram put the finishing touches on breakfast or chopped ingredients for soup. It seemed a harsh way to wake him after such a brutal weekend, so Gabi decided to just do the jostling part and skip the ear-piercing Christian rock music. She pushed his door open, but even with the shade pulled down over his window, she could see that her brother’s bed was empty.
“Mathew?” A startled cough came from the corner of the room. It took Gabi’s eyes a minute to adjust enough to see that Mathew was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his Bible cradled in his lap and a lit candle on the nightstand. “What are you doing?”
“You could knock, you know.” He sounded more embarrassed than annoyed.
“Sorry. I thought you were asleep. What are you doing?”
Mathew flicked on the lamp, blew out the candle, and set his Bible on the nightstand. He was still in his pajamas, his face puffy from sleep.
“Praying and meditating, what does it look like?”
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