him.
“The Doctor will join us shortly, but he requested we take a few notes before he arrives. Do you mind?” he asked.
Would it matter if I did?
“What kind of notes?”
“He wants to see what progress you’ve made after yesterday’s procedures.” The male nurse was holding a clipboard and pen.
I imagined stabbing him in the throat with that pen. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing big.” He was treating me like I was a nervous patient he was trying to soothe instead of a walking, talking experiment. “Blood pressure, heart rate, and um…we need to check for scarring?” His gaze drifted to the front of my shirt.
“No scarring.” This wasn’t entirely true, but they wouldn’t see the kind of scars one would expect to find on a human.
“We need to
I stood up and pulled my shirt off, bracing my hands on my hips and glaring at her defiantly. In spite of the thin pink lines on my chest—which the female nurse was noting on her clipboard—I said, “No. Scarring.” I turned to the male nurse who was blushing furiously—I was starting to think he must be new—and asked, “Is that enough, or do you need to touch?”
“Th-that’s enough,” he stammered. “Thank you.”
I tugged the shirt back over my head and plopped onto the bed, holding my left arm out to them. “Do whatever you came to do.”
They set about checking my temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and a half dozen other bizarrely normal things, as if I were a human patient recovering from surgery in a real hospital.
“What do you get out of this?” I broke the silence when it became too much for me to just listen to them work. “What does he tell you about us that lets you justify your actions to yourselves?” I stared right at the new guy, who fumbled while writing something on his clipboard. He couldn’t look at me.
“He tells us not to
“Because he doesn’t want you to figure out we’re real. We’re
“You’re not a person.” She took the blood pressure cuff off my arm and rattled off the numbers to her partner. I continued to watch him instead of her, his fingers trembling on the pen.
“He thinks I’m a person,” I observed.
“He doesn’t know any better yet. But if you talk to him like you talked to Geoff yesterday, he’d come to the conclusion pretty quickly. Why don’t you tell us about how our families are disposable?”
I shifted my attention to her, noting the way she fixated on the bridge of my nose. She’d been here a long time if she was willing to stare that close to my eyes.
“You’ll all get what’s coming to you,” I whispered. The male nurse’s pen clattered to the floor.
I could go for it. My strength was still up from the previous night’s feeding, enough I felt confident I might be able to take these two out. My gaze was transfixed on the pen, wondering how quickly I could kill them both and get through the door. How fast would security come down on me?
How long would it take before the collar blew?
The
I swore internally as loud as I could. Instead of going for the pen, I sat perfectly still and looked at the nurse again. “You dropped your pen.”
He scooped it up, and I asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
Judging by the aggravated sigh the other nurse let out, I assumed they weren’t supposed to engage in personal conversations with us. That made sense, considering I couldn’t have been the first one to threaten an employee’s family.
“Me too,” I told him. “I bet this is your first
They left, and a moment later the door reopened. This time the familiar figure of The Doctor filled the frame. Tonight he was dressed up, wearing a nice pair of slacks and a velvet tuxedo jacket in a rich blood-red color. On another man it might have looked ridiculous, but he owned it somehow, appearing fierce and regal.
He scared the shit out of me.
Before now I’d thought the only person I could be so afraid of was Sig. But what had me afraid of Sig? The idea he had the power to kill me? He and I shared blood. He loved me in a demented way, and I’d spent such a long time being afraid of him I hadn’t really noticed.
The Doctor didn’t love me. Not unless Madame Curie loved polonium. I was a discovery to him, and the awe and adoration on his face whenever he looked at me was nothing more than a gross fascination with what my existence could mean to him.
Fortune and glory. Wasn’t that the ultimate goal?
I was his polonium. His insulin or his skeleton of the first
“Are you going to take me to Holden?” I asked.
“We made a deal, did we not? Do I strike you as a man who does not live up to his word?”
“You strike me as the man who held my…heart…” I struggled with the words, suddenly short of breath as I recalled the experience. “Someone who held my heart in his hands while I was still awake. That’s the man you strike me as.”
“And what a fine, strong heart it is.”
He was totally unmoved by my words, further convincing me
The Doctor held out a dress. It was the same color as his jacket, which explained why I hadn’t noticed it strung over his arm when he’d arrived.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dress.”
He didn’t
Six years working with the council hadn’t broken me.
Two years with Lucas and his pack hadn’t broken me.
I didn’t
Now I knew better.
There was a third option, and no one talked about it. Fighting was brave and running was smart. The final choice was neither and both at the same time.
Confronted with the end of my life, I didn’t go down fighting.
I kneeled.
I