He couldn’t stop staring at his skin. Wrinkled and veined and ashy—but fading. It would take a couple of days, maybe weeks, for all of it to be gone.
He was back in the hospital bed, legs and arms strapped down. The speaker box and camera lens were his only company, but he didn’t even care.
Dr. Ferrad entered through a hatch-type door—this thick, bulky metal that looked more like something out of a submarine than a research facility. She left it open and entered the room, her white suit and plastic face guard so bright it almost hurt his eyes.
When Dr. Ferrad moved to his bedside, he saw Kailyn waited in the doorway almost like she was afraid to come in.
“I won’t bite,” Alden croaked.
“You might,” Dr. Ferrad said. “You haven’t received the full dose yet.”
Kailyn didn’t say a word.
Dr. Ferrad lifted thin tubing—there were two of them, red, full of blood. The tubes were inserted into each of his arms. The blood ran through a machine. The motor that powered the machine hiccuped sometimes. In his dreams, Alden had thought it was someone beating a drum, but now he knew it was the machine’s pump.
The lines snaked onto the ground and across the room, disappearing behind a door.
“Does the machine clean my blood?” Alden asked.
“Yes, it prepares it,” Dr. Ferrad said.
“What does that mean? It’s the cure right? The machine cures the blood?”
Dr. Ferrad stopped checking his monitors. “Something like that.” But her words were too careful, there was too long of a pause between his question and her answer.
“The V girl—is the cure from her?”
There was a moan. Alden thought it was Kailyn, but she stared at him with those wide eyes behind those glasses, looking exactly like before. Light glinted off her glasses and sort of outlined her body. She didn’t say a word. It was weird she was there at all if Dr. Ferrad really meant he wasn’t fully cured yet. She didn’t have any protective gear like what Dr. Ferrad wore.
The moan sounded again, but Dr. Ferrad didn’t act like she noticed anything. Was it all in his head?
“That would have been ideal. But no, we have not found a way to cure her or use her to cure others.” Dr. Ferrad cocked her head. “No, we still have not found the way.”
“But—”
“There now.” She patted the sheet, but her kindness felt forced, what with the full bodysuit and all. She left, walking right through where Kailyn stood like she hadn’t even seen her.
Alden realized she hadn’t seen her—Kailyn had never been there. What had Maibe called them?
She’d been a ghost-memory.
Kailyn disappeared but his panic remained. He stared at the machine, listened to its hum, and watched his blood flow through it, along the ground, disappear behind a door, and return back to him through the other tube. He willed it to go faster.