James Axler - End Program

“Good to meet you, Roma-by-the-way,” Ryan said with a self-deprecating smile.

Roma left and the door to the room sealed behind her. Alone, Ryan paced, deep in thought. There was a mirror located on the wall beside the basin, set at a height to shave by, and when Ryan paused before it a hidden light tucked into a fold in the mirror’s frame glowed brighter, lighting his face for the reflection. He looked at himself, assessing his appearance as if for the first time. Black curly hair, a little disheveled where he had been sleeping in the coffin-drawer. Chin, clean shaved for the first time in weeks.

Eyes—two.

The right one was an intense shade of blue, the left a little duller perhaps, but a close enough match. He looked at it in the mirror, the way it rested in his socket as if it had been there forever. As he looked, staring more and more intensely at the workmanship that had gone into that artificial orb, the crosshairs reappeared over his vision, like a faint blurring in the air, forming a central point that had been left open to view.

As Ryan continued looking, the vision in his left eye magnified—x2, x5, x10—running through the magnifications in rapid succession, so quick it made him feel nauseous. Ryan’s right eye, his real eye, remained at normal focus, unable to magnify, leaving him with the disorienting double image of distant and close-up at the same time.

He closed his eyes, brought his hands up to his face, breathing fast.

“What did they do to me?” Ryan muttered, trying to keep from being sick.

Behind him, there came a light tapping at the door followed by Roma’s voice. “Mr. Cawdor, are you decent?”

“Decent?” Ryan asked the air.

“Are you dressed? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Raising his head tentatively, Ryan opened his eyes and reached for the SIG Sauer blaster that rested on the bedcover beside his piled clothes. “Yeah, I’m decent,” he said, flipping off the safety.

The door slid back on near-silent runners and Krysty stepped into the room, while Roma waited obediently outside. Krysty looked beautiful—more beautiful than Ryan had remembered, he would swear. Her vivid red hair swirled around her pale face like a flame, her eyes the green of sunlight through emerald. She was dressed in a version of her usual clothes—blouse, jeans—but they were white. Only her familiar blue cowboy boots remained as Ryan remembered, and even they had been reheeled and polished to remove the scuffs from walking thousands miles of the Deathlands. The boots looked almost new. Ryan held his breath as he saw her, his heart pounding.

“Ryan, I’m so happy to finally see you!” Krysty ran the last few steps and flew into Ryan’s arms, hugging him fiercely. She pressed her face into his neck, as if she could not get close enough. “You’re okay,” she sobbed, “you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Ryan assured her, stroking her red hair with his free hand. She smelled of soap and cleanser, fresh like mountain air.

With his other hand, Ryan slipped the safety back on the SIG Sauer and dropped the blaster back onto the bed before bringing his arm back around to hold Krysty to him. “I’m all right,” he told her again. “What about you? Are you okay?”

Krysty nodded her reply; Ryan felt the movement against his neck.

“What did I miss?” Ryan asked, his eyes locked on the door to the room to check it had closed, and that they were alone.

“Two weeks,” Krysty said, the words coming out like a sigh. “You were two weeks in that bath, Ryan—”

“Bath?” Ryan asked, confused.

“Nutrient bath,” Krysty said, pulling herself reluctantly from Ryan’s strong arms. “When we got here, you’d been hit by the imploding wall of the mat-trans—did they tell you that?”

“J.B. and Mildred said something about it,” Ryan confirmed, reaching for his pants. They had been freshly laundered and smelled—well, they smelled clean, which was nothing short of remarkable, considering how long he’d been wearing these particular duds.

“You were badly injured,” Krysty explained. “We all were. A great chunk of that glass had jumped with us when the mat-trans activated, and we brought it with us in the jump. When we materialized, the glass was still moving. You got the worst of it, but Doc and Jak got a couple of nasty cuts too.”

“And you?” Ryan prompted.

Krysty shook her head. “A few cuts and grazes,” she said, pushing her right sleeve up and showing him the skin there. It was unmarked. “Had a few scabs here a week ago, but they’ve healed.”

“Sore?”

“No.”

Ryan nodded, slipping out of the dressing gown and reaching for his shirt. As he did, Krysty pressed her hand against his chest, running her fingers through his chest hair.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

Ryan was a pragmatist. He desired Krysty in that moment, but he wanted to stay alive too. He knew that staying alive sometimes meant foregoing the things he wanted. Right now, he needed to know all the facts, before someone put a bullet in the back of his head or dumped him back in that coffin where he had woken up.

“You said about a nutrient bath,” Ryan said thoughtfully, pushing Krysty gently away.

“After you were hit by the glass, you fell unconscious,” Krysty said, picking up her story. “You’d lost a lot of blood—were still losing it. We were all in a mess.”

“What happened?”

“Someone outside the chamber somehow opened the mat-trans door. Doc figured they did it with a comp,” Krysty said. “It was the people here, a team of them, and they came to help us. They took us away, nursed everyone’s injuries. Mildred said they did a commendable job.”

“What about me?” Ryan pressed.

“You’d suffered the worst of us,” Krysty told him, and he saw worry in her face as she thought back. “There was a whole pool of your blood on the mat-trans floor. They took you away on a gurney, rushed you over to their medical center—”

“And you let them?” Ryan bit off the rest of his comment. It wasn’t an accusation or criticism; he was merely surprised to hear his companions would have been so trusting.

“Like I said, we were pretty messed up after the jump,” Krysty explained. “J.B. questioned them, tried to stop them, I think, but none of us was in a state to put up much of a fight. We didn’t need to, thank goodness.

“They took care of you, lover. They took you straight to surgery and removed the glass, then they started patching you up. They have advanced techniques here—that’s according to Mildred. She understands more about it than I do. She says they used nanobots to repair your body, dunked you in a nutrient bath full of them to give you time to recover.”

“How long?” Ryan asked.

“Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.

“Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him. “They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile state.”

Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the eye?” he said.

“I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him. “None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident, I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”

Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.

“It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process it?