Скотт Вестерфельд - Specials

"Shay? What's that sound?"

The answer came in a tense voice. "Tally, you better come down here. Room 340."

Tally turned away from the window, stepping quickly across the broken vases and dead flowers, heading for the door. The beeping sound grew louder as Shay moved closer to something, and a sense of dread began to fill Tally. "What's going on, Shay?"

Shay popped the channel open to the other Cutters, panic in her voice. "Someone get a doctor up here." She repeated the room number.

"What is it, Shay?" Tally cried.

"Tally, I'm so sorry …"

"What?"

"It's Zane."

Tally ran, heart racing in her chest, the beeping sound filling her head.

She jumped the handrail of the fire stairs, descending in a controlled fall down the center of the stairwell. When she burst out into the third-floor hallway, she saw Shay and Tachs and Ho outside a room marked recovery, staring through the door like a crowd gawking at an accident.

Tally pushed between them, skidding to a halt on shards of shattered window glass.

Zane lay in a hospital bed, his face pale, his arms and head hooked up to a collection of machines. Each was making its own beeping noise, bright red lights keeping time with the sounds. A middle pretty in white doctor's scrubs stood over Zane, pulling back his lids to peer into his eyes.

"What happened?" she cried. The doctor didn't look up.

Shay stepped up behind her, taking her shoulders in a firm grip. "Stay icy Tally."

"Icy?" Tally pulled herself from Shay's grasp. Adrenaline and anger surged through her blood, chasing away the numbness that had come over her after the attack. "What's wrong with him? What's he doing in here?"

"Could you bubbleheads be quiet!" the doctor snapped.

Tally spun back to face him, teeth bared. "Bubbleheads?"

Shay wrapped her arms around Tally and pulled her off her feet. In one swift movement, she carried her backward out of the room, set her down, and shoved her hard away from the door.

Tally regained her footing, crouching low with fingers curled. The Cutters stared her down, while Tachs gently closed the door.

"I thought you were rewiring yourself, Tally," Shay said in a hard, even voice.

"I'll rewire you, Shay!" Tally said. "What's going on?"

"We don't know, Tally. The doctor just got here." Shay placed her palms together. "Control yourself."

Tally's mind spun, seeing only angles of attack, strategies for fighting her way through the three of them and back into the recovery room. But she was outnumbered, and as the standoff continued, her flash of anger was transforming into panic.

"They operated on him," she whispered, her breath quickening. The hall began to spin as she remembered the Crims all headed into the hospital, straight from the helicopter.

"That's what it looks like, Tally," Shay said, her voice even.

"But he arrived in Diego two days ago," Tally said. "The other Crims were at a party the night they got here—I saw them."

"The other Crims didn't have brain damage, Tally. Just the bubblehead lesions. You know Zane was different."

"But this is a city hospital. What could go wrong?'

"Shhh, Tally-wa." Shay took a step forward and put her hand gingerly on Tally's shoulder. "Be patient, and they'll tell us."

In a flash of anger, Tally's focus narrowed to the door of the recovery room. Shay was close enough to punch in the face; Ho and Tachs were momentarily distracted by the arrival of a second doctor—Tally could get past them all if she struck now…

But anger and panic seemed to cancel each other out, paralyzing her muscles and twisting her stomach into a knot of despair.

"This is because of the attack, isn't it?" Tally said. "That's why it's going wrong."

"We don't know that."

"It's our fault."

Shay shook her head, her voice soothing, as if Tally were some littlie who'd woken from a nightmare. "We don't know what's happening, Tally-wa."

"But you found him in there all alone? Why didn't they evacuate him?"

"Maybe he couldn't be moved. Maybe he was safer here, hooked up to those machines."

Tally's hands tightened into fists. Since becoming special, she'd never felt so helpless and average, so powerless. Everything was suddenly going random. "But…"

"Shush, Tally-wa," Shay said in her maddeningly calm voice. "We just have to wait. That's all we can do for now."

An hour later, the door opened.

There were five doctors now, leftover from a steady stream of hospital staff that had moved in and out of Zane's room. A few had given Tally nervous looks, realizing who she was: the dangerous weapon who had escaped earlier that night.

Tally had passed the time fretfully, half-expecting someone to jump her, put her to sleep, and schedule her for despecialization again. But Shay and Tachs had stayed close by, staring down the wardens who'd arrived to keep an eye on them. One thing about Maddy's cure, it had made the other Cutters a lot better at waiting than Tally. They remained eerily calm, but she hadn't been able to stop moving for the whole hour, and half-moons of blood covered her palms where fingernails had driven into flesh.

The doctor cleared his throat. "I'm afraid I have bad news."

Tally's mind didn't process the words at first, but she felt Shay's grip upon her arm, iron hard, as if she thought Tally was about to leap at the man and tear him apart.

"At some point during the evacuation, Zane's body rejected his new brain tissue. His life support tried to alert the staff, but of course there was no one nearby. It tried to ping us, but the city interface was too overloaded by the evacuation to get a message through."

"Overloaded?" Tachs said. "You mean the hospital doesn't have its own network?"

"There is an emergency channel," the doctor said. He looked in the direction of Town Hall, shaking his head like he still didn't believe it was gone. "But it goes through the city interface. Of which nothing remains. Diego's never had a disaster like this before."

It was the attack…the war, Tally thought. It is my fault.

"His immune system thought the new brain tissue was an infection, and responded accordingly. We did all we could, but by the time you found him, the damage had already been done."

"How much…damage?" Tally said. Shay's hands squeezed tighter.

The doctor looked at the wardens, and in Tally's peripheral vision, she saw them readying nervously for a fight. They were all terrified of her.

He cleared his throat. "You realize that he arrived here with brain damage, don't you?"

"We know," Shay said, her voice still soothing.

"Zane said he wanted to be fixed: no more shakes or lapses in cognition. And he requested a physical control upgrade—as far as we could push it. It was risky, but he gave informed consent."

Tally's gaze fell to the floor. Zane had wanted his old reflexes back, and better, so that she wouldn't see him as weak and average.

"That's where the rejection hit him hardest," the doctor continued. "The functions we were trying to repair. They're all gone now."

"Gone?" Tally's mind reeled. "His motor skills?"

"And higher functions, more importantly: speech and cognition." The doctor's wariness faded, his expression now set to classic middle-pretty concern, calm, and understanding. "He can't even breathe on his own. We don't think he'll regain consciousness. Not ever."

The wardens had glowing shock-sticks in their hands now. Tally could breathe in the electricity.

The doctor took a slow breath. "And the thing is … we need the bed."

Tally sagged toward the floor, but Shay's grip didn't let her fall.

"We have dozens of casualties," the doctor continued. "A few night workers who escaped Town Hall have terrible burns. We need those machines, the sooner the better."