I’m in the infirmary. Was I dreaming? My actions feel far off and hazy. Memories of running through the woods come back to me in blurry flashes. I know it happened though, because I ache everywhere, especially my feet, which are bandaged at the end of the gurney. Bright lights burn above me. A steady throb keeps time behind my right eye. I try to curl on my side but can’t. My wrists and ankles are bound.
With one eye closed protectively against the glare of the overhead light, I look around the room. Charlie sits in front of a microscope, examining something with intense concentration. Next to him, the pod with SC-13 inside is plugged in, the red heart light barely visible through the fogged glass.
“You kept him alive,” I say.
Charlie starts and turns toward me. “Hi.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, SC-13 is proving stronger than I predicted and, as it turns out, these pods are made to be self-sufficient for the duration of the fetal development period. How are you feeling?”
“Sore.” I tug against my restraints. “Can you untie me?”
Charlie pulls his tiny flashlight out of his lab coat pocket and approaches the side of my bed. “What’s your full name? The one you were given, not your alias.”
“Lydia Troyer. Charlie, you know me. Why are you asking me that?”
“Is the wolf you told me about in the room?”
My face twitches. I don’t like that he knows about my wolf. Why did I tell him? “No,” I say truthfully. “Please untie me. My back hurts and the light is too bright. It reminds me of the lab.” I’m parched. I glance toward the sink, longing for water.
He looks me in the eye and then pulls a lever to raise the head of my gurney. Without another word, he moves to the small refrigerator in the corner and retrieves a reusable bottle of water. He holds it to my lips and helps me take a drink. “There’s something I have to tell you. If I were smart, I’d keep you tied up while I do. But I’ve never been accused of being too smart.”
“Sounds serious.”
He goes to work on my left ankle. “You injured someone last night. You might have killed them if David and Korwin hadn’t caught up to you in the woods.”
My feet are wrapped in bandages. Flashes of the chase flit through my mind. “I was hunting, I mean, chasing… There was someone in the woods. A spy for the Greens. I set off the flashers. Charlie, I’m so sorry. Ugh!” My head pounds and I squeeze my eyes closed.
“What’s happening?” Charlie asks worriedly.
“Headache.”
“Do you want pain medication?”
I roll my ankle as he moves to the next restraint. “No. I have a bad reaction to it.” A few deep breaths and the pain ebbs.
“I remember. Vomiting and seizures. Only, sometimes the side effects are worth a break in the pain.”
“Not this time. You were saying? About the spy I injured.”
Charlie shakes his head. “Before we get to that, I finished analyzing the results of the tests we did to try to determine why you’ve been hallucinating and sleepwalking.”
I hold up my wrist and he starts unbuckling the restraint. “Did you find out what’s wrong with me?”
“As you know, your cells are different than the rest of ours. Even though David and I have electrokinetic power, our cells aren’t stable. We burn energy at the expense of our own bodies. That’s why we have to take the serum. We have human cells with electrokinetic DNA. You and Korwin don’t. Your cells are different. You don’t need serum.”
“What does that have to do with my hallucinations?”
“When David gave you the Nanomem, it was the first time that drug was used on a person of your genetic makeup. Nanomem works by copying memory proteins from a donor, in this case David, to a recipient, you. Those proteins take root in the brain. Unlike in human trials, David’s proteins weren’t a match with your own. Different cells; different proteins. My theory is that your body is viewing David’s proteins as foreign substances. For lack of a better way to put it, you’re having an allergic reaction to his memories.”
I laugh. “I’m not allergic to my own brain. I haven’t so much as sneezed.”
“Not that kind of reaction. When your brain waves change due to extreme fear or going into deep sleep, the biochemical changes you experience trigger a reaction to the proteins in your brain. That’s when the wolf manifests. The wolf is your brain’s way of attempting to restore homeostasis. When you are afraid, it urges you to fight. No guilt. No hesitation. When you feel weak or inadequate it tempts you to be strong, to be the predator. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I murmur.
“Those new emotions produce chemicals that eventually rebalance your brain chemistry. A nifty self-healing property if you think about it.”
“So, the wolf heals me. That’s not so bad.”
“Unfortunately, there are two problems with this process. First is, while it’s happening, you are not in control. The wolf is in control. And the wolf isn’t good at discerning right from wrong.”
“You mean, she puts me in danger.”
“The wolf puts you and everyone around you in danger.” Charlie unbuckles my final restraint. “The second problem is, the restoration is far from perfect. The places where these events occur in the brain become like scar tissue. The next time they occur, they don’t happen over the same damaged area. The imbalance occurs in a new area of the brain and forms new scar tissue. With less healthy brain to work with, the imbalance is more pervasive. The wolf has to show up more frequently, and she sticks around longer. She makes you do things you would never do if you were mentally healthy.”
“Who did I hurt last night, Charlie?”
He ignores my question and taps a monitor on the wall. A body-shaped outline appears on the screen. “This is your body scan. This bright red with a core of yellow-orange is normal for you as is the aqua blue of your skin. These white spots in your brain are the scarring I’ve been talking about.”
The white spots are scattered across my head in the picture. Two are quite large and I can see why Charlie is concerned. “There’s more than I expected.”
He rubs his chin. “Your body will compensate until it can’t. These spots are electrical anomalies. Cool spots. For lack of a better word, you have a short in your electrical system.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand what he means.
Charlie pulls a watch out of his pocket. “This is the old-fashioned kind with the touch screen, from before they went out of fashion. It runs on a battery.”
I take it from his hands. “It isn’t working.”
“Exactly. This watch has a short. It started with one black square in the corner where the power from the battery couldn’t reach the screen anymore. The power that was supposed to go to the screen was bleeding off somewhere inside, going somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. No matter how many times I charged the watch, power could not flow to that square of the screen. The problem wasn’t the power; it was the delivery. Over time, the black spot spread until the entire screen went dark. The watch had a short, Lydia. Instead of the power going where it was supposed to go, a part of the current took an unintended path. A path that didn’t lead to the functioning of the watch. Now it doesn’t work at all.”
“The white spots are shorts in my electrical system?” I stare at the pattern of white on my scan.
“The scar tissue doesn’t transmit electricity easily. Electricity flows along the path of least resistance. For now, the current is navigating these land mines, but eventually, if the white continues to grow, there will be no place for the red to go. You’ll lose your spark.”
“I won’t be electrokinetic anymore?”
He shakes his head.
“Are you sure about this? I haven’t had any problems using my spark.”
“No? What about passing out in the garage yesterday? You haven’t had any weakness?”
For some reason my mind flashes on a few days ago in the cafeteria, when the current that usually flowed between Korwin and me felt like a trickle.
“Can you stop it?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Charlie frowns. “I have a few theories, but you are one of a kind. I need time to consider a viable therapy.”
I step gingerly down from the gurney. My feet sting beneath the bandages. “Normally, I would have healed by now.”
“Already the flow of energy through your body is compromised.”
I take a few experimental steps, wincing from the pain.
“You’re a tough cookie. I put over a hundred stitches in those size nines.”
I groan. “Stop avoiding, Charlie. I’m falling apart. I get it. Just tell me who I hurt last night. Was it Laura again? One of the Liberty Party soldiers?”
“Come on,” he says solemnly. He helps me out the door and down the hall of the medical complex. “I know you, Lydia. This isn’t going to be easy on you, but I don’t believe for a minute you would have done this if you were healthy. I won’t keep it from you though. You need to see what can happen if you don’t take your disease seriously.”
I cross my arms over my waist and hug myself, dread wrapping like a vine up my body and squeezing. Who did I hurt?
When we reach Room 3, he opens the door for me. I enter a homey medical room with a hospital bed and a bank of bags dripping into a tube attached to a man’s arm. The IV is taped to his forearm over coarse blond hair. The rest of the man is more bandage than skin. He has an eyepatch and stitches where his neck meets his shoulder. Most of his face is black and blue. One arm and one leg are casted and there are bandages wrapped around his rib cage.
“What happened?” I ask. “He looks like he’s been in a car accident.”
“You happened,” Charlie murmurs.
I turn toward him but he doesn’t look like he’s joking. “No. Not just me. I couldn’t have done all of that.”
“Yes. Those stitches are from your bite. You broke his ribs, his arm, his leg. We have him sedated to jump-start the healing process.”
I swallow hard, tears forming in my eyes. “I didn’t know. Who is it? One of the patrol?”
Charlie shakes his head. “I wasn’t sure who he was at first, but David and Korwin recognized him. He’s from the preservation. Name is Jeremiah Yoder.”