Chapter 11 #2
I take my hands off the hilt.
Blood soaks my gloves and sleeves when I gather her in my hands.
‘You’re okay.’ I tuck her against my chest. ‘You’re okay. Don’t worry.’ Somewhere along the way, her sobs have subsided. She’s weak, her skin cold and clammy. She’s going into shock, and if I don’t get her help soon, it’s going to be a long, painful death.
I slide my hands under Lune to pick her up.
Somehow, it’s scarier to be steeped in her blood and not my own, to be marked so heavily with responsibility for someone else. Leading the clan is difficult, but I have the Elders, the system of family and hierarchy.
Here, Lune’s entire world rests, tiny and dense, in my palms, one life a thousand times heavier than the hundreds I’ve had to steer.
It clicks in my head: I might be a capable fighter, but I’m a scared-as-shit caretaker.
I cross a rooftop, jump. Well and truly passed out, Lune doesn’t make a sound, even as she’s being jostled.
‘We’re fifteen minutes away from Lain,’ I say to no one but myself, because something has to keep me going or I’m going to glance down, and Lune might actually be dead.
And I would have succeeded.
I—
Fuck, I’ve failed.
Cold washes over me, my chest seizing with a panic, smothering and tight. I’ve failed the task. It doesn’t mean I’ve lost my chance, not yet. I still have time. I just— This wasn’t meant to happen.
But I get to Lain Co. without remembering a single step of the journey, and I cast a final look at Tia: all the life leaked out of her, death’s pallor plaguing the apples of her cheeks and those dumb cupid-bow lips, my blade still jutting from her chest.
Just this once. I was too cruel to a girl so kind. I do not owe her a life, but I owe her a gentler death.
I smash a window on the medbay level, and leave her on the floor.
I wake up in the morning to a house that reminds me of both before and after. Which is to say, before I came to Lain, and after my parents died.
‘ALFRED, where’s everyone?’ Empty, still air, a deathly silence. It’s a combination of all my worst nightmares at once.
‘Boss, their boyfriend, and Tia have been in the medical bay since four a.m.’
Oh.
Tia’s limp, death-wrought body last night flashes across my vision. ‘How is Tia?’
‘Tia has been grievously injured. Niko has recommended you begin work in the labs without her.’
Right. I should probably do that. Of course.
But my fingers press the Braille-nubbed lift buttons for the medbay before I can stop myself, dimpling the word into my thumb.
It takes a few corridors of determined wandering – I’m a DIY-treatment type of injury-prone bitch, so I’m not down here much – before a voice stops me in my tracks.
‘Harper?’ Kiran. His dad-vibe slides slap across the tiled corridor like he’s modelling his crinkled pyjamas and doing a piss-poor job at it. His black curls are a mess, his dark lips pale. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘ALFRED told me Tia would be here.’
The way Kiran’s gaze cuts away feels haunted. ‘She’s not ready for visitors, but I can bring you to the viewing panel. It’ll be . . . overwhelming, though. Are you ready?’
I swallow and nod.
He takes me down a corridor, and we stop in front of a nondescript door that’s clinic-white and stainless steel.
Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, a soundtrack to the turbulence in my chest.
When I slip through the door, everything goes silent, smothered with shock.
The room we’re in has a huge glass panel, past which is a hospital bed that holds Tia like a slab in a mortuary, every bit Frankenstein’s monster in a baby-pink gown. Wires run from underneath her and snake into a thousand devices around her bed.
A heavy metal contraption sits on her chest, locked on like a parasite. As I near, the contraption pulses with light. Each pulse succeeds the previous with eerie regularity, but something about the rhythm feels uncannily familiar.
‘Is that . . . ?’ I draw right up to the glass and squint. It can’t be.
‘The machine?’ Kiran’s fist clenches and unclenches as he watches Tia through the glass. ‘Yeah, it’s her heartbeat. A rib cracked and got her heart.’ Kiran sucks in a breath. ‘The doctors worked round the clock to formulate a new one, but she’s not out of the woods yet—’
‘I’m sorry, a new heart?’
‘She’ll be strong.’ His voice cracks. ‘She is. We’re very lucky that we had new biomatter on hand for her, and our medical team has the capacity for her. Full moon is also this weekend, so that’ll help. Don’t worry.’
The hospital bed engulfs Tia, making her look like a baby bunny on the cusp of death. Clad in full PPE, Niko holds Tia’s hand as they sit in a chair by her bed, their gaze tense but tender.
I look at her arms and remember how they felt tight around me, trembling as she sobbed. I look at her face and suddenly I can’t conjure a reality where her brows aren’t knotted with pain.
What are we going to do when she wakes up? Go back to normal? Act like I wasn’t right there when she was crying and limp in my arms?
How am I supposed to kill you? I feel like I’m going to puke. How am I supposed to kill you when it aches to see you hurt?
But I shouldn’t have come down to see this. I was better off not knowing.
‘I think I need a walk,’ I say to Kiran, and leave.
TIA
The moon is full tonight.
Tracking the moon cycle comes instinctively, after years of practice, and I count my time and energy in the wax and wane of moonlight rather than in days or weeks. A full moon means my magic peaks for a couple of nights.
When I’m injured, this means everything. Lain Co.’s doctors may be some of the most qualified in the world, but the moon knows a different treatment, a quieter healing pattern, so I chase it – as much as I can in a wheelchair – all the way to the roof of Lain Co.
Surprisingly, I’m not alone.
A figure stands against the edge of the building, her shadow swallowing the moonlight, her hands tucked in her pockets, short hair whipping in the wind.
‘Kit?’ I call.
Harper turns. There’s something unreadable in her expression, but it morphs quickly into a shallow, placid smile. ‘Out of the ward so soon?’
I make a vague, flapping gesture with my hands. ‘It’s already been almost a week, and I missed the moon. Let me do what I want.’
Harper folds her arms. ‘Are you high?’
‘No-o.’ The word drags out in my mouth, all syrup and cotton-like as I scrunch my face and squint at Harper.
Now that I’m looking her in her mean, pretty eyes, there’s something I’ve been wanting to confront her about.
Where is it? It takes a minute of rigorous digging around my pockets until my hand closes around a crinkled Post-it. ‘Did you put this on my bed?’
Harper turns to the Singapore skyline, towards Marina Bay Sands, like she’s taking in the massive ship buttressed by its three narrow buildings, towering over the surrounding land. In the moonlight, I swear I catch a hidden smile.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Rabbit food doesn’t sound familiar to you?
’ I raise a brow and flatten the Post-it out.
It’s bright pink, and I found it slapped across a pet-food packet vandalized in Harper’s recognizably drunken scrawl: For your consumption :) ‘You know, bedside gifts for dying patients usually tend towards comforting or helpful. This just feels condescending.’
‘Calm down. You’re far from dying.’ Harper turns to look at me, folding her arms. ‘I didn’t put that in your room.’
‘ALFRED caught you on camera.’
‘ALFRED is a lying snitch.’ She leans against the ledge of the building, a corner of her lips a little higher than the other.
When our eyes meet, though, there’s something in Harper’s gaze that feels restrained, and my suspicions are immediately confirmed when her eyes flick away, cutting to the horizon as if afraid to stay.
She’s upset about something.
She won’t push you away if you try. The assurance gives me enough courage to follow through on the question. ‘You okay?’
Harper refocuses her attention on me. The night sky makes her look almost sad. ‘It’ll pass.’
The note is warm in my hand. I’d laughed when I’d seen it, and even if it stings that Harper didn’t visit me in the last week I spent in bed, her humour had made up for it.
I pat the arm of my wheelchair. ‘Come on, sit with me.’
It takes Harper a second to process. I know she’s done when she scoffs. ‘You sure the chair won’t collapse?’
‘Niko made it. It’s good.’
Harper looks wary, but she shuffles closer until she’s right beside the wheelchair and gingerly balances her butt on it. Her arm snaps round the back of the chair to balance herself, and the nape of my neck brushes against her forearm.
It makes my skin tingle.
‘Is this okay?’ Harper dips to check on me, and her medallion slips out of her pyjamas, swaying and glinting in the light, shiny and inviting.
I’ve seen it before, every now and then, and I’ve always left it alone. Harper’s choice of jewellery is none of my business.
But, Christ, my meds must be strong. I swear I’m not doing it because it’s pretty, or because she’s pretty, or anything like that.
It’s just that when I tell my hands not to reach out and hook their fingers around Harper’s necklace, the commands jumble catastrophically in my head until suddenly the deed has been done and Harper has to bend low to not be strangled.
Our faces are millimetres apart. The proximity burns my ears down to my neck. To distract myself, I turn my attention back to the heavy pendant on the end of the chain, and my thumb finds bumps and grooves – an insignia.
I squint at it. ‘Why is this familiar?’ I murmur. ‘Looks like . . . like . . .’ I know it. I’ve seen it. Where?
‘I think you’re delirious,’ Harper whispers, and her breath ghosts my cheeks. She circles my wrist with her fingers, tugs it gently away from her necklace. ‘You should go back to bed.’
‘Take me there yourself,’ I find myself saying. Tia Njauw, when did you get so bold?