'The other Crims didn't have brain damage, Tally. Just the bubblehead lesions. You know Zane was different.'
'But this is a city hospital. What could go wrong?'
'Shhh, Tally-wa.' Shay took a step forward and put her hand gingerly on Tally's shoulder. 'Be patient, and they'll tell us.'
In a flash of anger, Tally's focus narrowed to the door of the recovery room. Shay was close enough to punch in the face; Ho and Tachs were momentarily distracted by the arrival of a second doctor—Tally could get past them all if she struck now…
But anger and panic seemed to cancel each other out, paralyzing her muscles and twisting her stomach into a knot of despair.
'This is because of the attack, isn't it?' Tally said. 'That's why it's going wrong.'
'We don't know that.'
'It's our fault.'
Shay shook her head, her voice soothing, as if Tally were some littlie who'd woken from a nightmare. 'We don't know what's happening, Tally-wa.'
'But you found him in there all alone? Why didn't they evacuate him?'
'Maybe he couldn't be moved. Maybe he was safer here, hooked up to those machines.'
Tally's hands tightened into fists. Since becoming special, she'd never felt so helpless and average, so powerless. Everything was suddenly going random. 'But…'
'Shush, Tally-wa,' Shay said in her maddeningly calm voice. 'We just have to wait. That's all we can do for now.'
An hour later, the door opened.
There were five doctors now, leftover from a steady stream of hospital staff that had moved in and out of Zane's room. A few had given Tally nervous looks, realizing who she was: the dangerous weapon who had escaped earlier that night.
Tally had passed the time fretfully, half-expecting someone to jump her, put her to sleep, and schedule her for despecialization again. But Shay and Tachs had stayed close by, staring down the wardens who'd arrived to keep an eye on them. One thing about Maddy's cure, it had made the other Cutters a lot better at waiting than Tally. They remained eerily calm, but she hadn't been able to stop moving for the whole hour, and half-moons of blood covered her palms where fingernails had driven into flesh.
The doctor cleared his throat. 'I'm afraid I have bad news.'
Tally's mind didn't process the words at first, but she felt Shay's grip upon her arm, iron hard, as if she thought Tally was about to leap at the man and tear him apart.
'At some point during the evacuation, Zane's body rejected his new brain tissue. His life support tried to alert the staff, but of course there was no one nearby. It tried to ping us, but the city interface was too overloaded by the evacuation to get a message through.'
'Overloaded?' Tachs said. 'You mean the hospital doesn't have its own network?'
'There is an emergency channel,' the doctor said. He looked in the direction of Town Hall, shaking his head like he still didn't believe it was gone. 'But it goes through the city interface. Of which nothing remains. Diego's never had a disaster like this before.'
It was the attack…the war, Tally thought. It is my fault.
'His immune system thought the new brain tissue was an infection, and responded accordingly. We did all we could, but by the time you found him, the damage had already been done.'
'How much…damage?' Tally said. Shay's hands squeezed tighter.
The doctor looked at the wardens, and in Tally's peripheral vision, she saw them readying nervously for a fight. They were all terrified of her.
He cleared his throat. 'You realize that he arrived here with brain damage, don't you?'
'We know,' Shay said, her voice still soothing.
'Zane said he wanted to be fixed: no more shakes or lapses in cognition. And he requested a physical control upgrade—as far as we could push it. It was risky, but he gave informed consent.'
Tally's gaze fell to the floor. Zane had wanted his old reflexes back, and better, so that she wouldn't see him as weak and average.
'That's where the rejection hit him hardest,' the doctor continued. 'The functions we were trying to repair. They're all gone now.'
'Gone?' Tally's mind reeled. 'His motor skills?'
'And higher functions, more importantly: speech and cognition.' The doctor's wariness faded, his expression now set to classic middle-pretty concern, calm, and understanding. 'He can't even breathe on his own. We don't think he'll regain consciousness. Not ever.'
The wardens had glowing shock-sticks in their hands now. Tally could breathe in the electricity.
The doctor took a slow breath. 'And the thing is … we need the bed.'
Tally sagged toward the floor, but Shay's grip didn't let her fall.
'We have dozens of casualties,' the doctor continued. 'A few night workers who escaped Town Hall have terrible burns. We need those machines, the sooner the better.'
'What about Zane?' Shay said.
The doctor shook his head. 'He'll stop breathing once we take him off. Normally, we wouldn't move this quickly, but tonight …'
'Is a special circumstance,' Tally said softly.
Shay pulled her close, whispered in her ear. 'Tally, we have to go now. We have to leave this place. You're too dangerous.'
'I want to see him.'
'Tally-wa, it's not a good idea. What if you lose it? You could kill someone.'
'Shay-la,' Tally hissed. 'Let me see him.'
'No.'
'Let me see him or I'll kill them all. You won't be able to stop me.'
Shay's arms were wrapped around her now, but Tally knew she could break the grip. Enough of her sneak suit still worked that she could turn it slippery, slide out, and start swinging, go straight for their throats…
Shay's grip shifted, and something pressed lightly against Tally's neck. 'Tally, I can inject you with the cure right now.'
'No, you can't. We have a war to stop. You need my brain the messed-up way it is.'
'But they need those machines. All you're doing is—'
'Let me be the center of the universe for five more minutes, Shay. Then I'll go away and let him die. I promise.'
Shay let out a long sigh between her teeth. 'Everyone, get out of our way.'
His head and arms were still connected, the wild chorus of beeping replaced by a steady beat.
But Tally could see that he was dead.
She'd seen a dead body once before. When Special Circumstances had come to destroy the Old Smoke, the ancient keeper of the rebels' library had been killed trying to escape. (That death had been her fault too, Tally remembered now; how had that little fact slipped her mind?) The old man's body had looked misshapen in death, so twisted that the entire world had distorted around it. Even the sunlight had looked wrong that day.
But this time, staring at Zane, everything was much worse—her eyes were special now. Every detail was a hundred times clearer: the wrong color of his face, the too-steady pulse in his throat, the way his fingernails were slowly fading from pink to white.
'Tally…' Tachs's voice choked off.
'I'm so sorry,' Shay said.
Tally glanced back at her fellow Cutters, and realized that they couldn't understand. They might still be strong and fast, but Maddy's cure had made their minds average again. They couldn't see how maddening death really was, how colossally pointless in every way.
