Glowing ice blue, the shape of a coffin but transparent, it looks like a teleporter machine from the future.
It hisses as the pressure lock releases and the door slides open.
The nurses help the man off the bed. I still can’t see his face properly but now the gown is gone and he’s dressed in a pair of shorts, I notice how similar his skin colour is to Rez’s. Oh God. His knees buckle and nurses rush to stop him collapsing. His head rolls to one side, slumping to his chest, while his arms swing heavily like a rag doll.
They ease him into the machine, securing him upright. He’s strapped down and linked up to wires and tubes. Then a brace clamps around his neck.
The door slides shut with a loud clack. A light flicks to red. Seconds later, an image of his face is projected onto the screen.
Brown eyes, dark hair reaching around his shoulders and a soft jawline, he can’t be older than twenty-five. It’s not Rez. My cheeks puff out with relief but then I notice what a kind face this man has, which instantly makes me feel sad.
‘Joe? Can you hear me?’ A female voice with a French accent echoes high into the chamber.
His mouth droops, eyes opening and closing.
‘Joe?’ The audio being fed into the chamber moves around the room via speakers.
My gaze is pulled up towards a glass box, to the shadowy figure standing behind a bank of electronic screens. The flashing lights cast eerie shadows across her face.
‘Joe, can you hear me?’ She leans into a microphone.
There’s a drawn-out silence and then: ‘I can hear you . . .’ His eyes close again.
‘Thanks for confirming, Joe. And congratulations for making it this far.’
A weak smile.
‘We’re almost ready for the treatment.’
Treatment? My stomach heaves.
The whirring fires up again and the medical team on the ground take a step back.
‘Are you comfortable, Joe?’
He moves his head a fraction. Straining against the neck brace.
‘Yeah,’ he murmurs.
‘OK, great. Welcome to FreezeLAB. And I’m sorry you’ve had to wait so long but we had a few complications that delayed our schedule. I’m happy to say that we’re now back on track.’
There’s a burst of applause, an echo of congratulations moves around the room. I notice how the woman in the glass box is smiling. I feel a flicker of recognition – where have I seen her before?
‘We’re very excited about the next phase in your treatment and we’re all hopeful today will be the start of a new life for you, free of pain.’
A weak smile slowly works across Joe’s face.
‘Joe . . .’ She pauses. ‘You’re aware the initial shock of the treatment can be painful, which is why we’ve given you a local anaesthetic.’
Another thin smile appears. He swallows and shows some teeth.
‘I’m ready for it, Doc.’
Shock. Treatment. Nothing about this is legal. It feels experimental and dangerous, why else hide it away inside a mountain?
Lights flicker and blaze while I scramble to make sense of what’s coming, dread sinking through me.
‘OK, Joe, the countdown will begin shortly.’
His eyes close and I notice that he’s clenching his jaw in anticipation. The room dims and the LED strip running across the chamber blinks red. A high-pitched bleeping rings out while a veil of white mist descends over Joe until he vanishes from view entirely.
Four sets of numbers appear on the large screen. His body temperature. Heart rate. Blood pressure. And the temperature of the chamber, which is the first thing to drop.
Within seconds, it’s fallen from twenty-one degrees to minus three. Vapour continues to be pumped into the small space; by the time it clears, the new temperature reads minus 150 degrees.
Joe reappears, his face frosted white, his eyelashes shimmering silver under the ice-blue light.
I know what this is. It’s a cryotherapy chamber. I stumbled across the wellness trend while researching Ariel’s ice-water therapy. It’s the new craze, popular with athletes hoping to heal nagging injuries. They’re crazy for it in the biohacking world, seeing it as a way to manipulate genetics. It’s dangerous and controversial and I’ve read numerous accounts of frostbite, with one woman coming close to losing her entire arm when it froze solid.
The treatment typically lasts three minutes. Any longer and you’ll die.
I anxiously watch the clock. Three minutes forty-five seconds and counting.
Get him out. Any second now his pulse will plummet, his blood pressure will skydive, vessels will constrict and blood will rush from his extremities to protect his vital organs as hypothermia sets in.
What are they doing? This is insane.
His fingers and toes, nose and ears must be throbbing with pain. Fuck’s sake, pull him out of there.
Four minutes fifty-eight seconds. His nerve endings will be dying off, soon he’ll lose his limbs. Then his ability to speak or think clearly as he slips into a coma and then . . . Then he’ll die.
‘Commence suspended animation,’ the woman in charge announces.
‘Commence suspension,’ someone on the floor echoes.
There’s a sudden sucking noise. Pumps shuffle back and forth as pipes are connected and a thin tube feeding into the chamber lights up in neon blue and a liquid is injected into Joe’s hand.
No, no, no! Get him out! His pulse has dropped below fifty-five, his body temperature is twenty-eight degrees. He’s dying.
What should I do? My gut twists with indecision. I’m outnumbered, they’ll stop me before I reach him. But if I don’t do anything, he’ll die.
Then his eyes snap open.
The whites become red as the capillaries fill with blood.
What’s happening? What the hell did they give him?
The ECG monitor spikes as his body temperature rockets. His pulse leaps to a hundred and forty beats per minute and his chest lifts off, his arms quivering, his body convulsing like he’s been struck by lightning. Liquid is fed through the tube and Joe strains against the ties holding him down.
His face twists, his mouth is frozen to one side like a stroke victim and his eyes bulge out of his skull. His face is as frightening as a Halloween mask. I peer through my hands, terrified of what he’ll turn into next.
Then, all at once, he sinks back down, his body exhaling. He remains completely still, his features falling slack while the ECG begins to level out.
Silence. Then: ‘Joe?’ Can you hear me, Joe?’
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t respond.
‘Joe, if you can feel anything, can you blink for me?’
Still nothing.
‘OK, team, suspended animation successful. Orbitex is now circulating in the blood and stabilizing Joe’s body temperature, but we don’t have long. Everyone, ready please, time is critical, we’re about to enter cryo phase one.’
Orbitex, what the hell is that? A drug to keep him alive? There’s no way Joe’s heart should still be beating.
The nurses return to their workstations, heads bowed over their monitors. Eyes narrowed with intense concentration, they process the fresh data. The frantic tapping of keys echoes into the chamber.
There’s a ghostly hissing as cold air swamps the chamber and Joe is swallowed up by the mist. His pulse grows weaker. I watch the gentle spike and fall on the ECG as it slows from 85 to 77 to 73. His body temperature is now a fatal twenty-four degrees Celsius. How is he still alive?
‘Joe, I know you can hear me,’ the voice says. ‘Joe, listen to me carefully. I need you to walk towards the light.’
The light?
His lips are blue, his earlobes are a deep shade of purple. A mottling across his knees and feet indicates death is close. His blood pressure is fatally low, his heart rate is falling by the second. He’ll be dead within a minute, if that.
They’re killing him.
‘Joe, if you can see the light, move towards it.’
Hallucinations, hearing voices – when someone is close to death, they see things. My mind scrambles over old textbooks and literature. Those who’ve survived near-death hypothermia have described sitting peacefully on a bench in the snow. Historical accounts of those pulled back from the brink describe a light at the end of a tunnel.
‘Go to the light, Joe. It wants you to go towards it,’ she commands.
I’m hit with a sudden sense of déjà vu. Where have I heard that before?
‘Bathe in its warmth and, wherever the light touches, you can begin to heal.’
Those words, they’re frighteningly familiar.
The ECG beep beep flattens to a murmur, a gentle rise and fall until there’s no pulse at all. The ECG is now one long noise. The sound of Joe’s heart flatlining fills the room until someone turns it off, and then, silence. A held breath. So quiet you could hear a pin drop.
What have I just seen? Murder. They’ve killed a man.
‘OK. Get him out,’ the French woman says calmly.
The machine hisses open, ice-white vapour pours out, spreading across the floor. It takes four nurses to unfasten Joe and more to help heave his dead weight back onto the bed.
That’s impossible. I let out a small gasp. He should be frozen solid. It’s scientifically impossible that someone could be subjected to minus 150 degrees Celsius for nine minutes and not be a block of ice. Whatever they injected into his veins had an antifreeze effect, but nothing of that technical advancement exists. It’s the stuff of science fiction.
People in green gowns rush around, connecting probes to Joe’s chest. A defibrillator machine is wheeled to his side while someone begins compressions, one hand folded over the other as they pump his chest.
As I watch them try to restart his heart, my mind reviews old articles. During the Space Race in the sixties, NASA poured billions into biological research to see if humans could be placed in a state of artificial preservation. The objective being to make astronauts sleep their way to the stars, protecting them from the ageing process and the dangerous cosmic rays zapping through space.
There’s a humming, a whine as high-pitched as a mosquito, as the resuscitation machine boots up.
People have been attempting artificial preservation for decades, freezing bodies in liquid nitrogen with the hope of reviving them in the future, but no resuscitation method has been devised. It’s all in the realm of science fiction.
I stare at the chamber. What I’m witnessing is experimental and highly illegal.
Voices yell over each other.
‘Clear.’
Everyone takes a step back as the high electrical charge fires into Joe’s body. His chest lifts off into the air.
Nothing.
‘Again.’
The humming of electricity. The whine of the external voltage. Joe rockets skywards, his head rolling to one side as he lands on the mattress with a thunk.
Still nothing, then:
‘We have a pulse,’ a male voice with an Eastern European accent confirms.
It’s faint. It’s barely a murmur, but there is a heartbeat. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
‘Well done, team,’ the woman in the control room says in a congratulatory tone.
The room implodes with applause. People pat each other on the back and exchange high fives. Jesus.
‘Take him back and administer digoxin while we wait to commence stage two.’
Stage two? Dread grips me like a vice. I clutch my aching chest, crouching in the darkness as Joe is wheeled past. His head is twisted to one side, eyes wide open and staring directly at me. I start, because for a moment I think he’s seen me. But there’s nothing there, nothing at all. He’s dead behind the eyes.
He leaves, pushed through the heavy double doors, and someone shouts: ‘Lights!’
Shit, I’ve got to get out of here. I push up onto my hands and knees and, keeping low to the ground, I crawl towards the exit. Glancing over my shoulder, I pivot, making my escape before anyone sees.
My heart is thrumming and my fingers have found their way to Luca’s knife. I hold it tightly in my pocket as I stalk the nurses who’ve taken Joe away.
I watch from a safe distance as they slow to a stop at the end of another corridor. A code is punched into a keypad and a door swings open. The drone of machines swells and then fades as they disappear inside.
Quickly crossing the wide-open space, I creep up to where they’ve just been and then I hesitate. The door has a window and I’m almost too frightened to look. I have a ghastly feeling. Dread is tearing at my insides because I’m certain, without a shadow of a doubt, Martyn and Rez will be on the other side.