Chapter 26
Bretta lay on the cot every member of Unit Seven had occupied as I ran an exam. Her skin was scalding to the touch. Her body trembled from the fever. She was impossibly pale, her breathing difficult. Whatever the illness was, it sat in her lungs.
“When did this start?” I asked as I wrapped my stethoscope around my neck, looking between them.
They were identical in coloring, but Bretta’s blond hair was long, braided intricately down her back.
Her crystal blue eyes sat among full lips and delicate cheekbones.
Her soft femininity clashed with Ingrid’s brute strength.
“Two days ago,” Ingrid said confidently.
I waited. Bretta confessed the truth. “A week.”
“What do you mean a week? What do you mean a week, Bretta? Why didn’t you tell me?” Ingrid’s panic filled the small space until there was room for nothing else.
Ingrid was a force who attacked everything head-on, without fear. But as Ingrid stared at her sister, I saw something different, something that stole my breath. Her words were not so different from the ones I had shot at Lara when her illness became impossible to hide.
“I didn’t want you to worry.” Bretta breathed out, her eyes heavy. “You always worry, especially since Lily. I didn’t want you to be like when we were kids after Dad died.”
Ingrid trembled. I saw her, truly saw her. I saw myself in her desperation as she asked—no, demanded—the impossible.
“Save her.”
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off.
“Save her. I know you have no reason to help me. I have been terrible to you. I blamed you because I couldn’t face any of it. But I am begging you to save her, Sasha,” Ingrid beseeched, her voice fragile.
“Ingrid, I don’t know the illness. I don’t know how it will progress,” I told her honestly, the beast pacing at the impossible request. I knew how these things ended. Nothing I did would spare Ingrid the pain that lurked.
Ingrid wiped wildly at her face. “Please,” she pleaded—suddenly small, voice breaking. “I will give you anything you want. I will do anything. I will never say another bad thing about you. Please, Sasha.”
A ghost I avoided at all cost waited. I tried to shove it away—to bury it.
“Ingrid, stop. I can go to the Ward,” Bretta whispered.
“You can’t. Your health score…and she has told us you won’t get access to what you need. Right?”
“Yes,” I admitted heavily.
“You can’t ask this of her,” Bretta coughed.
Ingrid brushed her sister’s words aside.
Her eyes bored into me like I was the only person left in the world.
I held her broken gaze as my insides sat in ruins.
The decimation destroying my soul—at the pain I might not be able to stop.
At the agony I knew. That I carried, an ever-present plague that left me more beast than human.
“Please save my little sister,” Ingrid choked out. “I can’t lose her. She’s all I have left.”
I stared between them, but I wasn’t there as the ghost won.
I lay in a Ward cot, my body wrapped around a frail, dying excuse of what had been my sister. The war had taken everything from her. Lara’s pink cardigan engulfed her. I should have come to Haven sooner. I had hesitated.
“Do you remember when we were little,” Lara began, her breathing difficult.
She had been doing this for fifty-one bells.
I remained quiet, listening to her stories, a living recording of the things that mattered most to her, the things she had to share as death lurked just out of sight. “We used to play princess and knight.”
“Yeah, I remember. It was your favorite game.”
“You always played with me, but I always made you be the knight. Made you fight dragons and monsters. You always did.” Lara took a deep breath that rattled in her chest. “You were the best knight. I wish we had never stopped playing that game.”
“Me too.” I could remember the game vividly.
Lara in my mother’s dresses and pearls while I wore my dad’s uniform jacket, brandishing anything that resembled a sword, saving her from near death as she sat perched on the couch cushions piled high.
An aluminum foil crown decorated her head.
She had loved it. Her scenarios became more and more elaborate, with mermaids, giants, and other creatures for me to vanquish and save the day.
I couldn’t save her now.
“I wish we could still play,” Lara told me, her bony hand wrapping around my wrist. “I never let you be the princess. It wasn’t fair that you always had to save me. I should have saved you just once.”
Silent tears welled in my eyes as my throat became too tight for words.
“I knew even then that I would never be strong like you.” Her hand tightened as much as she could.
“I was so jealous of you, Sasha. At your strength. How Dad saw you for more than a princess. I’m sorry,” she croaked as tears leaked down her face.
I pushed myself up, wiping her tears as I shook my head, fighting for words.
Her hand remained on my wrist, feeble. “I’m sorry I never saved you. ”
“Don’t,” I started, my own tears falling onto her.
Her eyes locked on mine, the life there dwindling.
“I’ll tell Eli how brave you were. I’ll tell Dad he should be proud.
” My chest caved in on itself as the last bits of my soul unraveled at the inevitable peeking out from behind the veil.
I knew death was waiting. “And I’ll tell Mom she was wrong about you, Sasha. I’ll tell her she was wrong.”
I bent down, holding her face in my hands, as despair wrecked me, my forehead resting on hers, our tears mixing, as I pleaded. “Stay with me instead, please.”
“I will,” she reassured me, her hand finding my chest. “I’ll be right here. I love you, Sasha. You are the best big sister. I am sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Her hand fell from my chest, her lungs giving out. I wrapped around her once again, like I could block death from taking what he had already claimed.
“Find someone who can save you, Sash.”
“Sasha, please.” Ingrid’s pleas pulled me back to the small closet.
I shook my sister’s ghost away as my hand found my chest. There was a warmth there that did not belong to me.
“I’ll try,” I said.
Ingrid collapsed, falling into a squat as her own tears fell. I pulled the bag toward me, taking items for Unit Seven, rifling through them, taking anything that might help.
A bell tolled sometime later as I gathered the med bag. Bretta was positioned comfortably on the cot, a bag of fluids attached to an IV, while Ingrid sat crouched on the floor before her, Bretta’s hand in hers.
“You know what I want right now,” Bretta told her, her eyes growing heavy. “Mom’s chicken and rice soup. Remember how she always made it when we were sick? You loved it. You would fake sick just to get her to make it.”
“I do,” Ingrid whispered. “It was my favorite.”
Ingrid nodded at me, as much of a thanks as she seemed to be able to manage. I understood it. I pulled the door handle and slipped out, while everything I had held at bay slipped in, drowning me.
My feet dragged me onward but not toward the living quarters, not yet.
I wrestled what roiled beneath my skin into submission for just a bit longer as I returned to the Ward.
There was one more thing I had to do, the risk be damned.
I was going above soon. I didn’t know for how long. Someone needed to know about Bretta.
Health score wouldn’t matter if Bretta died. Ingrid could fight me about it later. I might even welcome it. If Bretta tanked while we were gone, someone needed to know, someone who understood medicine. My feet took me to Owen. I didn’t waste time with pleasantries.
“Remember the closet?”
His brows furrowed in surprise. “Vividly.”
“There’s a member of the Kitchens Sector in there. She has the illness—” Owen opened his mouth, but I held up a hand, silencing him. “I treated her behind the system’s back. She has no chart, and no harm will come to her health score. I need you to check in on her while I am above.”
“Sasha.”
“I know what I’m asking. If you feel obligated to tell someone, the blame falls on me. Do you understand? Nothing comes to the girl in that room. I took her there, I treated her. I lied. She was too ill to fight it. Keep her in that closet,” I ordered.
Owen eyed me. “So the rumors are all true? You’ve been lying all this time?”
I didn’t run from his stare. I met it, unapologetically. “We aren’t gods. We shouldn’t get to decide who gets care and who doesn’t. Can I rely on you or not?”
“I’ll handle it.”
“I’ve got tomorrow, but when Unit Seven goes above, it’s on you. I need something else.” My hand rested upon the bag.
My stethoscope sat upon a small chest. I had demanded to know where the little girl went. Owen had fought me on it before he caved, bringing me to a small curtained room I sat in now. The girl’s mother perched on the cot next to her. The father had taken off for his evening shift in Expansion.
The girl’s symptoms were the same as Bretta’s. Everything in my bag was for adults, unsuitable for her tiny veins. The gauges on my needles were too big. I didn’t know how I could help her.
“All the kids in the kitchen were exposed. She was fine yesterday, then today this. She’ll be okay?” her mother asked as I withdrew my stethoscope.
Another impossible question. “They will take care of her. If she gets worse, demand to see Dr. Kumar or Dr. Allard. Do not let them make you leave here. I will come back tomorrow.”
“Are you Death’s Angel?” the woman whispered.
I placed my items in my bag before withdrawing antibiotics.
If this was bacterial, antibiotics would be the hardest thing for the girl to get access to.
If the illness was viral and lingered too long and morphed…
these might give the girl a chance. It was all I had to offer.
What if I needed the extra doses above? My hand shook as I passed them to the woman.