| |
“OH, IT’S FUSED, ALL right.” Doctor Simon sounded confident about her diagnosis. “And before you ask—no, I don’t have the first clue how to remove it. For all I know, extracting it could kill her.”
“Removing the prod might kill it?” Don spoke up from the foot of the gurney, his self-appointed post since their return to the Hub. He stubbornly refused to follow Doc’s lead in referring to the Soul-less as “she.” He sounded hopeful when he overheard her dire prediction.
Aubrey stood on the opposite side of the gurney, gazing at the Soul-less with awkward fascination. It—she—was awake again, but not moving, or attempting to escape the restraints which secured her to the gurney. Not doing much of anything, really.
Looks like she’s lost her will to live. Aubrey found it odd she felt none of the normal compassion she would have if the body in the gurney had been . . . well, human.
“Has it—I mean she—said anything else?” Aubrey asked, curious despite her reservations. If I hadn’t used the prod when I did, she would’ve killed me. What if Don’s right?
Doc shook her head. “Nothing since she first regained consciousness. None of it made much sense. She seemed rather disoriented. I got the impression she expected to see somebody else, not us.”
The Givers—she kept asking for them. Aubrey shuddered, remembering her shock when the Soul-less first spoke a few days earlier. After what the Hoarders did to her, she calls them “Givers”? It sounded like she practically worships them.
Don crossed his arms over his broad chest, staring down at the Soul-less. “I can give you an educated guess what it meant by ‘harvest’.”
He caught Aubrey’s eye. “That means you. Or Amos. Any other unlucky Runner. You’re just another Implant, as far as it’s concerned. It’s a killing machine, nothing more.”
Aubrey didn’t take the bait, looking back at Doc. “So, the working theory is that the prod shorted out her ability to communicate with the Hoarders? As well as preventing her from detonating?”
Doc gestured at the workbench behind her, covered in the tools of her trade. “It’s just a theory, but there’s a couple of good indicators. First, judging by how abandoned our Tracker appears to feel, it stands to reason she can’t contact them, or vice versa.”
She raised a wry eyebrow. “And second, we haven’t been slaughtered in our sleep, which is probably the best argument that she’s been cut off from the Hoarders.”
Doc leaned against the workbench, fidgeting absent-mindedly with her microscope. “As for the rest . . . Well, if I had access to a Hoarder medical facility, I could analyze my findings better. But as it stands, I can’t say for sure.”
Her attention returned to the gurney’s occupant. “This much I can tell you—based on the tests I’ve run: her blood isn’t strictly human anymore. Chemicals have been mixed in, but what kind, or to what end, I couldn’t tell you. Physical endurance, perhaps? Some kind of mind control?”
Aubrey perked up, intrigued. “Mind control? You know, when she woke up, she sounded like she’d been brainwashed, or programmed, or something.”
“Whatever it was before, the Hoarders changed it into something else.” Don was insistent, trying to be reasonable. “You can see the physical changes, sure, but even its mental processes have been altered. Brainwashing doesn’t begin to explain it. You can’t seriously think we could de-program it.”
Doctor Simon massaged her temples with her fingers. She seemed exhausted, worn down by the past few days. “This whole discussion is probably moot, anyway. I don’t dare remove the prod, or treat her injuries without knowing what they’ve added to her blood. And I couldn’t even begin to untangle all the mechanical changes the Hoarders have done to her.”
She heaved a sigh, shaking her head. “Frankly, I’m not even sure she’ll survive the next few days. Her blood isn’t clotting normally—I have no idea what ‘normal’ means for a Tracker. The worst is, there’s no way to diagnose the extent of the prod’s damage to her nervous system.”
She reclined against her workbench with a look of weary resignation. “Even if I could make a valid diagnosis, nobody outside of an Enclave has the technology to do anything about it.”
Aubrey was the first to notice.
The Soul-less convulsed, writhing on the gurney, her mouth wide open as she tried to speak. Her single eye was fixed on the ceiling, and Aubrey would’ve sworn the Tracker was overwhelmed by grief.