Fear My Mortality (8 page)

Reid crashed to the ground, curled up, head in his hands, while panic and chaos swarmed around me.

I jumped away from the chair, crouched, bent my legs, preparing to launch myself forward as people teemed inside the room, all of them grasping at me. Struggling to get away from them, I threw myself at the rose on the wall, my entire body connecting. The flower burst against me and the scorpion slipped away. The collision fed every nerve along my side, releasing something inside me, something that had to get out.

The sound died down around me as though I’d startled them with my crazy jump. One of the watchers threw an arm out, stopping the others as they rushed toward me, herding them back to where they floated in my blurry vision as if they were waiting now, to see what I’d do next.

I struggled to think, to reason. To see clearly beyond the haze, the shadowy edges of my vision, the sloshing room, and the energy shrieking through me. I fought the nectar pulsing my veins, beating at me, and thumping with every beat of my heart, pounding around and around my body. The green lighting came back into focus. So did the door.

If I could get to it, maybe everything would stop. Maybe I’d be okay.

In and out of view, the room around me blurred and cleared, showered in light and dark and shadows everywhere. I forced my legs to move, lurching across the floor, footsteps compacting the ground, jarring deep into my bones.

The trolley with the scalpels and syringes was in my path and I heaved it aside. It bounced against the wall and rebounded, spraying instruments around me, cutting my face and arms. I flinched, trying to stay focused on the silhouette of the door handle.

Someone grabbed at me and I shoved him, both hands connecting with Reid’s torso. He crashed backward, rammed into the wall. I stared at his crumpled body while I swayed on the spot, nausea bearing up through me. I didn’t know how I’d pushed him so hard. All I knew was I had to get to the door. I took a step, jerked at the cold steel of a knife under my foot, biting me. I jumped, stumbled. Slipped on another instrument.

The floor came up at me, pebbled with sharp knives and cutting things—things that would slice me in a thousand places. I tried to regain my balance, reaching out into the air with nothing to stop my fall.

There was a shout. A struggle somewhere beyond me.

Suddenly Michael was there, an outline stretching toward me. I crashed into his arms, and he punched us backward and away from danger. We landed in the corner of the room where it was quiet.

His body cushioned the impact, his arms tightened around me, smothering the roaring and crashing, pulling me in to the shadows where I was safe. Where I could breathe again for the first time.

I tried to see his face. I started to speak even though I didn’t know what I was going to say, but someone else lifted me up and wrenched me away from him and I started screaming.

“Tie her down. Do it fast. Don’t let her get you.”

There was a flurry of movement. My back hit the chair. Black-clad figures rushed around me, tugging my arms and legs as I tried to fight them, kick them, scratch them. Scissors flashed, ripping through my clothes, material falling away and air rushing in. I searched for Michael, but he was gone. It wasn’t really him, just somebody trying to grab me and stop me getting to the door.

“Get off me!” I yanked at the new holds they’d tied to my wrists and ankles, pulling and shoving, jerking upward as hard as I could.

Reid’s voice was close by, and I craned to see him, imagining that he rubbed his chest where I’d shoved him, that there was a wince in his voice. “Sir?” he asked. “What should we do now?”

“Give her another dose of immortality.” This was a new voice, combined with a person-shaped shadow across the floor.

There was a pause, and the surprise radiating off Reid hit me. “I don’t think we should, sir. Her reaction already—it’s incredible. She’s amazingly strong. We don’t know what another dose will do to her.”

“Reid. That’s an order. Give her another dose. We’re breaking new ground here. I want to see what she does.”

Reid slammed a syringe into my arm. The nectar burned under my skin.

No rose this time. No honeyed sugar warming me.

The wall blistered, red paint rising in welts. The wall in my head blistered too, burnished iron glowing hot. I sensed a prickle against my legs and looked down just in time to see my bare calf glowing.

I turned my hands over, palms up, and puddles of heat shimmered in them. It couldn’t be real. The volcano trapped inside me. Even if the leather restraints around my wrists crinkled and contracted as if they’d been thrown into an oven. But the strength in my hands was real. The horrible pounding of my blood was real.

I screamed with effort as I pulled my wrists upward and the bands around them stretched. The arm of the chair lifted. The leather frayed even more, giving me hope that maybe I could get out of this. Get away from these people and all the craziness.

With a rip, the bands warped and stretched, shrieking apart. The arm of the chair came with it, separating with a groan and a
snap
. I flexed my fingers, feeling the strength in them. My ankles wrenched free. I didn’t really know how, but I stood up and walked off the chair.

To my right, Reid froze, hands splayed out as if he was warding off the heat waves rising around me. His Hazard suit shone, drooping at the wrists as though it was melting off him. I crouched, just a bit, the way I’d seen Josh do, right before he leaped at Michael and almost took his head off. Except that I didn’t have a weapon.

I snatched the broken arm of the chair, lifting it into the air and hurling it across the room. It struck Reid in the shoulder and his face flashed pain before he cried out, grabbing at his arm. I didn’t think I’d thrown it that hard, but his arm flopped as if I’d dislocated his shoulder. I wondered what would happen if I pitched the whole chair at him. I spun, ready to wrench it off the floor, but I didn’t realize that the other person, the shadow, waited behind me. His drone hummed as it rose, its black and gold body brilliant in the light.

Crack
.

The dart was a prickly weed in my side, and I plucked it out. I half-turned before the drone got off another one, this time in my neck. It pulsed there, forcing me to my knees. I reached out, heaving fire out of my mouth, feeling it spread from every pore in my body as if I’d turned into some kind of girl-dragon.

Forget dragons. Forget Reid. I was going to throw the chair at the guy with the drone.

A third dart hit my chest as I managed to turn. My knees scraped the floor as I finally saw his face. It was the medic from the Terminal. The man who’d administered the recovery dome. Cheyne. Michael’s godfather. The man who told me to come to the recovery center. His big body blocked the light, blocked the door, drone control visor masking his eyes.

“Well done, Ava,” he said, right before I fell onto my face.

Boots ran past me and fire extinguishers hissed, surrounding me in clouds of foam, killing my hope of escape.

The room shifted. My cheek dragged the floor, skipping over every little groove in the concrete as they each took one of my feet and pulled me along. A silvery trail followed me, but it took me forever to figure out it was made of tears.

They heaved me onto a white bed in a white room. My head lolled to the side as they maneuvered me onto my stomach on the plastic covered surgical bed. I tried to move my eyes. There were metal domes and glaring lights. Drones floated around me, chattering and zooming in and out.

Cheyne shouted orders, and I guessed we weren’t alone. “Take her blood, measure her hormone levels. We need to know what happened in there and why.”

Someone else said, “Her heart rate’s off the charts, sir, and so is her brain activity. Her thought patterns are segmented. Look at this. Her frontal cortex—it’s out of step with the rest of her brain.”

Cheyne leaned in with a sudden laugh. “No,” he said. “It’s not out of step. It’s in control.” He smirked at me. “She’s compartmentalizing her brain to protect herself. But we need to know how.”

“We’ll find out soon enough. We can’t give her anything else until we get the bone marrow. It could mess up the results.”

Cheyne grabbed the top of my head with his thick fingers and tilted it so I looked up at him. “It seems that the more nectar we give you, the stronger your reaction. Given your response just now, we can’t give you any more. So, I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt after all.” He paused and added, “Of course, the paralytic we shot you with might help a bit. But not much.”

As if he was sorry. The smirk on his face told me that he didn’t care. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for it—his panic at the Terminal, as though he was trying to look after me, help me. I couldn’t believe I’d let Michael drive me to the recovery center, the very place I should have stayed away from.

Something pressed on my ankles. I couldn’t sense much of it, but I assumed they were clamping restraints on me. I discovered I was right when they hefted my arms and clipped my wrists to the side of the bed. My finger twitched. The paralytic might be wearing off, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

They talked among themselves—medical jargon I didn’t understand. More talk of hormones, molecular structure, pituitary-something-or-other. Recalibrating nectar dosage to achieve equilibrium, whatever that meant. At one point, Reid sauntered into the room with a bunch of vials and Cheyne greeted him with, “We can regulate the dose. It should still work.”

Reid nodded and said, “Yes, sir. Just like before?”

Then they receded out of view, and somehow that scared me more. I was sure I was going to die. They’d never let me go. They’d tell Mom that something happened to me, that I didn’t make it. Like Josh.

Reid poked his freckled face into mine. “We’re going to take the bone marrow now. Try not to move.” He laughed at his own joke and disappeared again.

I shut my eyes and tried to breathe, tried not to be afraid, but as the needle pierced my hip, a scream formed in my windpipe. A scream that never came out. Was never heard. But lasted too long.

“Almost done now, Ava.”

Somebody dressed in white moved at the edge of my vision. I cracked open my eyes, desperate to see where I was and who was speaking to me. No more green-lit room and steel chair. No more white bed and sharp lights. But the pain lingered in my lower back and hip, a dull throb.

“It will take a while for her to become fully conscious.” The same quiet voice said, “Can I get you anything, Mrs. Holland?”

Mom’s voice murmured something, and Dad’s joined hers, a rising growl that drew me further awake.

“Yes, very soon, I think. She’ll be perfectly fine.”

Dad’s sharp words cut through the haze. “Don’t lie to me! She’s not fine. She’ll never be fine.” There was a pause and a sob. “I can’t believe we almost killed her at Implosion.”

The white figure tensed and retreated from the room.

Somebody leaned in and stroked my hair. I recognized the ring Dad gave Mom for her fiftieth birthday the year before. “She’ll never be fine again.”

“Mom?”

“Hush. Don’t try to talk.”

“Mom, they did stuff to me.”

“They ran the tests, honey.”

“They put me in a chair and stuck needles into me. They had this stuff and it was black and they called it nectar. Michael’s godfather was there and they took my clothes. And then they pulled out my bones.”

Dad leaned in. I smelled his aftershave. I frowned because Dad only shaved in the mornings, making me wonder how much time had passed. Worse, I wondered what had happened while I was unconscious. “It’s all right, honey. The doctors explained … The drug they gave you to administer the test causes hallucinations. You’re okay. It wasn’t real. Whatever you thought happened, it didn’t.”

“Hallucinations.” I said the word slowly. “Drug. You mean nectar. The black stuff.”

My head ached. I tried to see them better. They had their foreheads together—Mom’s tilted toward the crook of Dad’s neck as he stroked the shoulder of her favorite blue cardigan. She’d had time to go home and change. My neck was stiff, but I attempted to see the window to figure out whether it was night or day.