“Huh?” That is the best response I have. I'm too distracted by what she's doing with her hand.
“You'll be fine. So, you must be 80. Paz has told me about you.” She adjusts my shirt and smiles. “It's great to meet you. My name is Dr. Kivuli.”
“You know Paz? Can you take me to her?” I catch the rudeness in my voice and correct myself. “Sorry. It's nice to meet you too.”
“It's quite alright, dear. Yes, Paz and I work together. I do the same thing she does. Come, I'll take you to her.” She turns and walks toward the open wall of the medical bay of the compound.
She does most of the talking on our walk, which is fine by me; it lets me focus on the path we take to do it again without getting lost. It's nice to have Dr. Kivuli by my side as we walk as well because the few scientists we pass don't give me a second look.
I only catch a handful of what she says, but it sounds like it's her interpretation of what she believes to have caused my development. Something about new synapses firing and awakening new parts of my brain. She also mentions something about how if there were more time, she would study me to see if it were possible to arouse other parts of the brain in real humans. Those last words hurt, but they bring my focus back to her and what she says next.
“Paz's room is at the end down there on the right.” She points toward the end of a hallway. “It was great to meet you, 80.”
“Yes. Same. Thank you.” I peel away to Paz's room, and I feel Dr. Kivuli turn back in the other direction behind me.
When I reach Paz's door, I put my ear to the cold metal to try to listen inside. I don't want to interrupt if Farouk is in there with her. A part of me hopes he is still here so that I may see him once more. The metal might be too thick because I don't hear anything.
I knock and stand with my hands clasped behind my back. After a couple of moments, the door opens, and I see Paz standing in the doorway. Her eyes are puffy and red.
“Hi, 80.” She opens the door wider for me to step in. With her free hand, she wipes any new tears that sneak away from her eyes.
Her room is large, with two beds. The bigger bed is empty, but I see wisps of blonde hair poking out from under the covers of the second bed. The rhythmic rise and fall of the blankets tell me that Pocket is sound asleep.
The door clicks shut behind me, and I turn to see Paz standing lost and hurt, unable to speak. Though I'm sure she understands Farouk's reasoning, she's still heartbroken. I know that a conversation is the last thing that she wants to have right now.
I step up to her and wrap my arms around her. My hands don't quite reach each other on her back, but I do my best to pull her in tight for comfort. Her head collapses onto my shoulder, and her tears soak through my shirt.
Minutes pass, and I can feel her body getting limp in my arms. If I don't get her into her bed soon, she'll collapse in my arms.
I walk her to the side of her large bed and pull back the bedding so that she can crawl in. After covering her with the blankets, I walk over to the bed Pocket is asleep in and sit back against the wall.
My slight shaking of the bed steals Pocket away from sleep. A mumble escapes her mouth and her eyes eek open until she sees me. She smiles as she crawls from under the blanket, and curls into my armpit. I hold her until she falls back to sleep, and a few moments after, darkness overtakes me as well.
I'm back in the city outside of the stadium in Nairobi. I look around and notice that the streets are clean. The rubble that littered the grounds around the fractured buildings is no longer there. The buildings themselves look mended, and the sky is clear of the heavy clouds that hung above the city.
Down a long alley, a single figure approaches. It's KJ. Her sharp blue eyes rival that of the sky, and her smile shimmers like the glass on the metal buildings. She takes my hands when she reaches me and looks into my eyes.
I take in her beauty once again. Ethereal and alive. My lips won't let me speak to her, and I see the struggle behind her eyes as she tries to communicate through her frozen smile. We are stuck, unable to utter the words we both long to say.
The harder she tries, the more the skin on her face shakes. The vibration erases her nose, followed by her mouth. My head screams, but no sounds escape. I watch as the last part of her face disappears before me, her eyes, leaving a blank canvas behind.
I search hard into the depths of my mind to try to remember her face, to try to bring it back, but it's gone. My memory of what her face looked like is gone.
“80?” a small voice calls from outside my head.
I leap through the darkness and open my eyes to see Pocket looking up to me. Her face reminds me of KJ, and I breathe a sigh of relief to know that I experienced a dream.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I look down at the small human in my arms. Her pure innocence is a blanket of relief. She has suffered immeasurable loss, yet she's too young to understand it. She's too young to understand anything of this world.
“I am.”
