Robert Crane - Family

“Eve?” I asked, and the woman nodded. “What happened to you?”

“Battle scars,” she said in her Germanic accent, “from my time in Kansas.” She focused back on Parks. “The two I caught in my nets killed themselves with cyanide capsules in hollow teeth. Same with the others.” Her scarred face didn’t show much, as though her nerves had been destroyed when she’d been burned.

“You’re telling me we took them all out and have no prisoners to show for it?” Parks stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. “What about the chopper?”

“Flew off,” she replied. “Roberto said they were headed southwest, but since we can’t track them on radar…”

“They got away,” Parks finished, and turned back to me. He took a small strip of fabric out of his beltpack and I felt him wrap it around my arm. “Dr. Perugini is gonna have to pull any bullets out that might be left inside you,” he said to me. “My skills as a field surgeon are at their limit.”

“Just do it,” I said. “Get a pair of tweezers and do it. You know as well as I do that if you get them out now, I’ll heal in the next few hours and be fine as a fiddle or whatever. You wait, and take me in that helicopter, and this flight is gonna suck for me.”

Parks had a smile hidden beneath his blood-soaked beard. “Kid, this flight is gonna suck for you no matter what. But you got it.” I heard the respect in the way he said it, and it meant something. At least for the five seconds it took for the agonizing pain to start. Clary turned metal and pushed me down, forcing my legs and arms into the dirt. I saw a flash of light, and I didn’t know whether it was Eve using a net to bind me to the ground to keep me from squirming, the sun overhead going nova, or just the pain overwhelming my other senses.

I could still smell blood, mine and that of others, mingled with the dirt, the sweat, and the other smells of the world around me. The steady thrum of the chopper landing in the field next to us was muted, as were the urgent, insistent conversations being held by my comrades. I struggled when the pain got worse, trying not to. I focused on Kat first, thinking of her, of where she might be; then thought of my mother, who had kidnapped Kat for some unknown reason. Then I thought about Zack, and turned my head to see that Eve was tending to both him and Reed, who seemed to be starting to come around.

Lastly, my thoughts turned to Andromeda. I had known her for only hours, and she had already saved my life twice. I slammed my head against the forest floor, trying to resist the pain, both physical and mental, and I pushed my hair against the dirt and leaves, grinding my skull against it, into it, feeling the sharp pressure of some rocks and sticks poking at me. As the pain got worse, surging up my arm, my thoughts were reduced to a staccato burst.

Kat gone. Mom back, then gone again. Andromeda, dead. I was eighteen years old, and she wasn’t the first person I had seen die, nor was she the first to die for me. Not even close. I pushed harder against the ground, and my right hand found a rock. I pushed it into my palm, felt the smooth contours, felt it give way and break under the pressure of my grip. I screamed, unintentionally. It felt like the stabbing pain was back, a million times worse, and when my eyes snapped open, the pretty blue-white background above was blood red. It suddenly felt far away, far, far away from me, the sky above just a pinprick of light that faded the smaller it got.

I awoke hours later, in the medical unit at the Directorate. I remembered nothing of the chopper ride home, or of being wheeled in. The steady beeping of a monitor gave me the first clue of where I was as I opened my eyes. The second was the sight of a hospital bed next to mine, filled with the corpulent frame of Kurt Hannegan.

“Welcome back,” he said, his weathered skin looking especially bad in the overhead fluorescent light. “Next time, wait until I’m discharged before you wake up, will you?” Petulant. Lovely.

“If I waited for you to discharge,” I said, my throat feeling scratchy, “prematurely, and whatnot…connect the dots and make your own insult out of that, will you?” I waved my hand at him, the pulse-oxygen monitor hampering my ability to do it. I felt woozy and his face was distorted, as though someone were playing with a funhouse mirror in front of him.

“That the best you got?” He looked at me, unimpressed. The smooth metal walls of the medical unit and the hospital beds were running together.

“When it comes to you, Hannegan, do I really need any better?” I tried to shake off the wooziness, but I started to feel sick. “What the hell am I on?”

“Painkillers and chloridamide,” I heard a voice say. I turned, and it felt like I was moving underwater. Dr. Perugini was there, walking toward me from her office. “I didn’t want to give you both at the same time, but Scott said you were starting to hear the voices.”

“I was,” I said, “when we were in the woods. I hadn’t taken the chloridamide since…the night before last, I think.”

She was at my side then, her white lab coat falling to below her knees, the dress she wore underneath it something of a blur. It was blue, I thought – no, yellow. My vision was changing color like the lights in a disco. Which I had never actually seen, except on TV. But that’s what it looked like. “What color is your dress?” I asked her.

“It’s black,” she said, after staring at me pityingly for a moment. “You’ll be fine in the morning, and I think we’ll avoid giving you any more painkillers tonight.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “Is Zack all right? And Reed? And—”

“Thanks for asking about me,” Kurt said.

“Both fine.” She waved her arm at the beds behind her. Zack was lying in the one nearest me, Reed in the one just past him. Neither appeared to be conscious. “Zack will need a few days to recover before he’ll be fully healed, but your other friend is fine; just sedated and resting right now.”

“Did they get Andromeda’s body out of the woods?” I felt a tug of sorrow that I wished I didn’t feel at all.

“Yes,” Perugini answered. I let the question rest, the haze surrounding my mind not permitting me to think deeper about it. Perugini excused herself a moment later, returning to her office where I saw her through the blinds, making a phone call. She hung up and glanced back out at me, then sat at her desk and began working on something.

I spent the next few minutes trying not to talk to Kurt, who seemed equally eager not to talk to me. I was in no condition to trade barbs with him anyway, feeling heavy of tongue and slow of mind. I was fairly certain he’d say that that was normal.

The doors to the medical unit slid open a few minutes later with a gentle whoosh. Ariadne came in first, her usual gray suit with skirt combo not doing any wonders for her pale complexion. Her red hair was light, and this time bundled over her shoulder in a ponytail, out of the way, an afterthought. I understood that, not liking to spend much time on my hair either, but I always thought she might be taking it to an extreme. She wore no makeup; or at least so little as to be unnoticeable, which meant her faded lips blended with her cheeks, and her eyelashes didn’t stand out at all.

Old Man Winter followed her, his nearly seven-foot tall frame barely fitting through the door. He didn’t even pretend to duck, and instead acted as though the top of the door frame would move out of the way for him. I couldn’t be sure, as I was much closer to the ground and looking up, but I suspected he only missed bumping the top of his head by centimeters.

“Ariadne,” I said as she approached. “You aren’t in Kansas anymore.” I looked down at her feet. “And no ruby slippers, though that’s hardly a surprise.”