Chapter 15 Emery
I help Luca dress in sweatpants and a T-shirt and get him situated on the couch.
His pleading eyes beg me to skip the blood pressure cuff and various monitoring devices, but the memory of his cold, clammy skin is enough that I insist, at least, on the blood pressure and a pile of warm blankets.
Honey is thrilled by this idea and wastes no time climbing up next to him.
I’ve only managed to get protein shakes, a sandwich, and water in him for the last couple of days, and his stomach gives a healthy rumble. Once I’m sure he’s sufficiently tucked in, I leave him to go poke around in the fridge.
Eggs, some leftovers I should toss, a package of sausage, yogurt. Vials of a miracle resurrection compound.
My pulse rockets at the sight, and I shift the box behind a gallon of milk.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I say a few minutes later, carrying our plates of eggs, toast, sausage, and some sliced apples into the living room.
“What’s that?” he asks, looking up from the coffee table book on Dolly Parton he’d been flipping through.
“You do most of the cooking,” I explain. “I’m an enthusiastic eater. That’s what I bring to the table.”
“So to speak,” he jokes, and pulls a throw pillow onto his lap for me to set the plate down on. He takes the pills I shake into his palm—antibiotics and pain medication—and washes them down with a swig of water. Setting the glass down on the table, he asks, “What’s your favorite thing that I cook?”
“You’re a stud at the grill—fish, chicken, veggies, you name it. And you make a killer tagine.”
He hums, taking a bite of my sad, overcooked scrambled eggs. “Tagine…”
“Do you remember what that is?”
Luca squints, taking another big bite of food. I’m thrilled to see his appetite has returned. “Like a stew? With meat and dried fruit or something?”
“Exactly. It’s a North African dish that you fell in love with when you traveled there with family.”
“So weird that I remember the tagine but not the family.” He laughs, shaking his head. “Brains are weird, holy shit.”
I curl up in the chair across from the sofa, tucking my feet under me and digging into my breakfast. “They are, for sure. And I guess since we don’t know how long your memory will be affected, we should plan how to manage suspicion about what happened.”
Luca swallows a bite. “Why are we worried about suspicion? Does this have something to do with what Annie said about breaking laws?”
“Yeah.” I huff out a dry laugh. “You could say that.”
“I assume you weren’t supposed to take me into the lab?”
“Uh, that’s a no.” I laugh-wince. “The diagnostic and initial healing capabilities of the BioVIVE are currently being evaluated.” At the realization that the studies are, in fact, on hold, I’m suddenly not very hungry and pick at my eggs.
My job isn’t the priority here, but the twisty sense of disappointment comes flooding back.
“One of my colleagues, Vince, brought it up during a presentation with the board and trustees of the company.”
“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”
“Definitely not. It wasn’t ready for full presentation yet,” I explain. “But we’d already saved at least a dozen—”
“Dogs,” he says dryly.
“And cats,” I say with jazz hands. “And now you!” An awkward laugh.
“Ah.” He takes a giant bite of toast, chews, and thinks. “So, after the presentation tanked, if anyone found out about me, it would be even more problematic.”
“To say the least.”
“And you’re the person who invented this resurrection machine? Wow.”
“The machine is only part of it, and that wasn’t just me.
It’s a big team.” I shift, setting my plate aside and grabbing my mug of coffee, cupping it in both hands.
“I’m trained in cardiology and did a fellowship in cardiophysics, which is essentially the study of the electrical properties of the heart.
I came to BioNEX right out of the fellowship, and—”
“Wait. How old are we?” he asks, frowning.
“You’re twenty-nine. I’m thirty-four.” Off his look, I explain, “I know. It seems like the math isn’t mathing. I started college at fifteen and finished my MD/PhD at twenty-two.” I wince again. “It sounds more impressive than it is. I didn’t have much of a social life.”
Luca wipes a hand down his face. “Jesus. Was I intimidated the first time I heard this, too?”
I laugh. “A little, but mostly you were distracted by my enthusiastic reaction to your nakedness.”
“I bagged an older woman. A doctor,” he adds. “Good job, past Luca.” He sets his plate on the coffee table and lifts his chin to me. “Okay, keep going. Tell me about this resurrection machine.”
“Over the past decade or so, my company has developed a machine called the BioSCAN. It was created by a different team, led by Vince, the absolute douchebag I mentioned earlier.”
“Was he a douchebag before, or just at this meeting?”
There’s that protective tenor again. My stomach flutters. “Pretty much from the start. He took an immediate dislike to me the day I came on board.”
“Probably because you’re so smart.”
I smile at him. “Well, I appreciate that, but I think it’s mostly because I was brought on to take this thing he had worked so hard on and make it… more. I’m sure it felt to him that it encroached on his work, but innovation and progress is fucking science, dude. Grow up.”
Luca grins at this. My moxie, I think. There’s one thing he liked about you, Emery.
“Anyway, the BioSCAN is the scanner that combines X-ray, MRI, and CT. I joined when they were working on adding in the cellular-level scan. The executive team brought me in because they wanted to find a way to use it to diagnose injury and disease, and I’d done a ton of work on cardiothoracic imaging.
But, in the end, the diagnostic addition was actually much easier than I expected. ”
“Of course it was.” He laughs my favorite laugh in the world, and the sound shoots straight through me, bright and alive.
“So, I got started on the aspect of it that interested me the most: using the pod to treat disease and repair tissues. The team had all these prototypes of surgical tools, and things like direct chemotherapy delivery or laser-targeted tumor ablation. It was just a matter of putting it all together and automating the process.”
“Easy,” he jokes, grinning.
“That’s when we named it the BioVIVE. The first things we were able to treat were situations of hemorrhage and blood loss, because blood vessels are easy to image, and we know a lot about their structure.
We eventually moved to laser-targeted tumor ablation, directed radiation, and even targeted gene therapy.
But the hemorrhage work was always the furthest along.
At some point, I knew that, if we could find a way to keep the heart beating after an accident, it would allow us to get the patient to the BioVIVE to be treated.
We could save someone who was near death. Or… maybe even recently deceased.”
Luca watches me intently. “You’re talking about the stuff you injected me with.”
“Yes, Compound Y. I partnered with some medicinal chemists to develop it during my doctoral training,” I say.
“It causes a drop in body temperature, a contraction of cardiac muscles, and stimulates brain activity in the brain stem, which controls respiration. I was initially developing it as an alternative to pacemakers, because I found it could artificially keep a heart beating. It didn’t seem to be very useful for that—mainly because it’s not very bioavailable—what I mean is, it has to be delivered directly to the heart to work, and I can’t imagine many people wanting to do that every morning before leaving for work. ”
He rubs at his chest and huffs out a laugh. “No.”
“But once we were able to quickly heal certain types of vascular damage, I found that, if administered an hour or less before getting a patient into the BioVIVE, Compound Y and the pod could be used to save and even bring back some patients.”
“Like animals that had been in accidents.” He pauses. “Or someone who was hit by a car.”
I nod.
He goes quiet and then reaches up, sending both hands through his hair. “Sorry—I’m just taking all of this in.”
“Of course. It’s a lot.”
“This is really amazing, though. I mean, is this a normal level of invention? This feels… out there.”
“It is very far out there,” I admit. “And very, very classified. The board didn’t technically know I was working on Compound Y.”
After a few silent beats, he says, “Please tell me we have a lot of stock in this company.”
“While the shell company, SurgOptix, will launch an IPO soon, BioNEX itself is not actually publicly traded. It’s not… public at all.”
Luca looks over to me. “What does that mean?”
“No one knows about it except the people who work there and the board and trustees. The labs are belowground, built into the side of a mountain behind a building.” This is the conversation I’ve been alternately hoping for and dreading since the day Luca and I met.
I take a deep breath. “Everyone outside my job thinks I work as a project manager for a surgical laser company.”
He seems to hear the difficult admission in my words. “ ‘Everyone’?”
Remorse stings through my sternum and I take a sip of coffee to wash it down. “Yes. Everyone.” Another breath, and I steel myself before meeting his eyes. “Before this, you didn’t know what my real job was.”
He frowns. “Ever?”
I shake my head. “I had to sign about a million NDAs when I began working there. I met you about ten years into my job at BioNEX.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“I’d decided to tell you that night, but then the accident happened.
Which was good, because I’m not sure how else I could have explained how you woke up in the lab, inside a futuristic pod, with no recollection of anything.
” Shrugging, I admit, “Or maybe I could have lied.” Smiling sadly at him, I say, “I probably could have come up with something, but the truth is, I didn’t want to.
I hated the lies, and I’m glad you know.
It’s… yeah. It’s been hard to keep it from you. ”
“I hope so.” Luca blows out a breath, turning to look out the front window. “I feel like I should be upset, and on some level, I guess I am, but…”
“There’s no context to make it feel real.”
“Yeah.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Luca,” I tell him. “I never thought I’d be in a relationship long enough that the lies would matter, never mind married. Then you happened and… that was it. I couldn’t be without you.”
“The company didn’t make you sign something about getting married?”
I shake my head. “Just about spilling the beans to any current or future spouse.”
He’s quiet for a moment and I’m afraid to breathe, afraid of what he’s going to say. Finally, he lets out a small laugh. “You don’t have another husband somewhere, do you?”
I exhale. The resurfacing of another Luca trait: easing the tension with a joke. I give him a grateful smile and shake my head. I know I’m not necessarily forgiven—that would be impossible right now given the circumstances—but it’s more than I deserve. “Definitely not.”
“Good,” he says with a nod. The silence stretches, broken only by Honey’s snores.
“I should also tell you that I had to go into the office today.”
“You did?”
“I didn’t want to—believe me—but I had to. It’s complicated, but the lab has all kinds of systems to monitor who comes in and out.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah. I needed to delete any video footage before someone realizes you were there. I swear I wasn’t gone long, though, and I had Annie come over to watch you.”
His back straightens slightly. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I know that, but you weren’t fully awake yet, and you do need to be medically monitored, at least for now.”
He nods, pacified but clearly not happy about it. “Were you able to clear everything?”
“I think so.” I lean forward then, hoping he really feels the weight of this. “And, Luca, I know it’s a lot to ask, but I need you to promise that you won’t tell anyone about this.”
“Who am I going to tell?” He smiles, but his eyes look sad. “I don’t know anyone.”