CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE—COMPLICATIONS 

+

The emergency department lobby was much busier than Heather was comfortable with, but she focused ahead. She stuck close to her parents, who dragged James in through the automatic doors, headed for the big wood-paneled check-in desk. Sesame walked next to her, carrying the car battery attached to her chest.

She felt gazes following them across the room. Suffering people waiting for help, others waiting anxiously to hear about their loved ones’ treatment. The intake administrators watched her and Sesame approach with puzzled expressions like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“Something’s very wrong,” Richard said. “We think he’s dying.”

The administrator pulled up forms on the monitor in front of her. “What’s his name?”

“James Siles.”

“What symptoms are we dealing with?”

“High fever, severe abdominal pain, extremely rapid weight loss,” Su listed. “Joint pain, exhaustion, dizziness, which has graduated to general lack of consciousness—” James’ body convulsed weakly, and the black bile made its appearance again. “Also that.”

The administrator stared, surprised.

“He was injected with an experimental substance against his will,” Heather blurted. “It’s killing him. Please, he needs help!”
 The administrator nodded, typing, her lips tight. She paged somebody.

“Do you know what the substance was?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Heather cried. “It’s not gonna show up on any of your forms!”

“Heather…” Su placed her free hand on her shoulder.

Heather ignored her. “We can try to explain it later, but right now we don’t have that kind of time.”

A nurse appeared from a side door with a wheelchair, headed for them. He helped the Knights lower James into it, and then wheeled him away. Richard volunteered to go with him, as the rest were advised to take a seat in the waiting room. Heather tried to follow James.

Su held her back. “Your dad can handle it.”

“No, I have to make sure he’s okay.” Heather glanced at the cords in her chest, at Sesame, who held the battery that was a third of his size. She took a step after James but her metal peg leg felt unstable on the polished floor.

“The more space we can give the doctors to work, the better,” Su said.

“You don’t understand,” Heather’s voice mistuned, quiet and broken. “I asked him to make a shield with the Q-13 at Empetrum. He pushed himself too far because of me.”

“None of this is your fault, sweetheart. You each did what you had to do.” Su hugged her, careful of the cords. The double doors closed behind James and her dad. “And James made his choice.”

+

Hours later, Heather sat in a dim hospital room in the ICU, holding vigil over her friend’s failing body. She held his hand, as if that could keep him tethered to his physical form. Her hopes that he would begin to recover burned like a tiny, exhausted flame at the bottom of a well.

He was stable, for now. Her dad had gotten ahold of Alice Benson, who offered critical clues to the molecular nature of the Q-13, and what James’ body might need to stay the downward spiral.

“Give my regards to your daughter,” she had said when Richard mentioned what had happened to the Empetrum facility. “That was a hell of a move.”

A machine in the corner measured out James’ slow heartbeat. Oxygen tubes ran across his face. Electrodes dotted his chest under a teal hospital gown, and an IV fed a cocktail of medicines, nutrients, and pain killers into his system. The doctors had given him at least one blood transfusion—trying to give his body something uncontaminated to work with—but even though it was his blood type, he had broken out in hives. Q-13 was his new blood type.

They had attached a port to a vascular branch in his chest, where two capped catheters waited for another round of filtering.

He was lucky, the doctor had said. The toxins in his blood were similar enough to the regular dialysis candidates that they were able to get some results despite the completely foreign medical territory.

She heard the click of the door handle turning, and glanced back as it opened. A man and a woman stood there, older, mid-fifties. She had never seen them before, yet they were somehow familiar. She saw a bit of James in each of them.

He looked a lot like his father.

They glanced at her for only a moment, then their gazes found their son. Heather braced herself for questions, confusion, incredulity. She and her family had fielded the last several hours trying to explain the situation to medical staff, as well as law enforcement, whom the hospital called against the Knights’ wishes.

But the newcomers merely drifted into the room and pulled up a couple more chairs on the other side of the bed.

Finally, James’ father spoke, “Has he woken up at all?” His voice was deeper than James’. Soft and serious with a gravelly edge.

“No,” Heather said.

They sat in silence again, and Heather surreptitiously observed them. Both his parents were scrupulously maintained, their demeanor prim and distant, but she could still detect the exhaustion. His father was bald, his skin freckled and unevenly pigmented like he’d recently recovered from an extreme sunburn. Signs of his ongoing cancer treatment, she figured.

James’ mother sat with her hands in her lap, her shoulders straight and her gaze on James’ nearest hand, jet black and taped up with the IV.

Protective anger burned in Heather’s chest as she watched them, as she imagined James growing up under this frigidity. On some level she understood that everyone dealt with pain and crisis differently, but their response to all this felt eerie, empty, insufficient.

“This all started with you,” Heather said, darkly. “He just wanted you to love him.”

His parents looked at her. She had seen a version of their clinical, veiled gazes many times, in her friend. James’ heart monitor beeped on, and his eyes remained closed, oblivious to his surroundings. Heather figured he probably didn’t want them there. It was her own parents who had called them and told them what had happened. She didn’t disagree with their decision, exactly, but…

“We do love him,” his mother said.

+

James woke up, and found himself in a small medical room with cold gray ceiling tiles. His eyes widened, a rising sound of panic in his throat. His hand flashed black and skeletal across his vision as he pawed incoherently at the tubes on his face, which wrapped around his ears and stuck into his nostrils.

The cold, grinding ache of the Q-13 splintered up his back as he tried to get up, his need to escape drowning violently in the acute weakness gripping his limbs. He found more tubes connected to him—an IV attached to his right hand, a red, double-tubed catheter port at his left collarbone, tubes in his nether regions.

“No no no no no,” he gasped. Tears spilled down his face, his heart beating out of his chest while the stripes in his skin pulled colder and colder. A machine beeped frantically off to the side. Something frigid clamped down on his other arm.

“James.”

It was Heather. She sat close at his bedside, gazing earnestly into his face, a hand on his arm. The panel removed from her head and her broken auditory receiver hadn’t been replaced yet, but the bundle of wires in her chest were gone. Most of the charring had been cleaned off her body, and she wore an oversized lavender hoodie he’d seen often at Larkspur in the mornings. She appeared to have two arms again.

“James, you’re safe.” Her expression scrunched emotionally. Her voice mistuned and fizzled as she crumbled, holding his left hand in both of hers—one still mangled, the replacement very simplified. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

He grimaced in pain as he relaxed back into the cushions. A blanket lay over his lower body, not restraints on his legs, as he’d thought. A large window spanned the wall to his right, the blinds open to reveal a large lonely tree in a landscaped courtyard below. The heart monitor’s rapid rhythm began to stabilize.

“W-where…?”

“Hospital,” Heather said. “You’ve been here for six days.”

A wave of nausea buffeted him, but passed. He took a breath, trying to absorb more of the room, look for signs of danger. A dull ache burned in his upper abdomen. “Benson…?”

“Dhar pulled him from power, temporarily,” Heather said. “With a path to redemption, though, which sucks, but Dad thinks it lessens the danger of him going completely ballistic. His research facility is unrecoverable, and it sounds like Yeun quit. Another scientist, Jones, did too.”

Surprise fluttered in James’ chest. “Good for them.”

“Dhar was furious when he found out about everything. Apparently it was completely out of his zone of tolerance for whatever shady operation he has going, which helps us, I guess. We haven’t seen or heard from Empetrum at all since then.”

James sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he looked down at himself—stained, emaciated, covered in tubes and wires. His regular skin was overly pale, with an unsettling yellow tint. Emotion rose in his throat. He didn’t recognize his body.

Heather watched him take it all in.

“What…happened to me?” he asked. “I remember you waking up after we brought you home, then…not much.”

“Multiple organ failure,” Heather said, as gently as she could. “The doctors managed to get you stabilized before the point of no return—emergency dialysis, metabolic inhibitors, heavy duty anti-inflammatories…That stuff you were throwing up, they think it’s some kind of waste product from the Q-13. Your body seems to be able to filter some of it, but your system was flooded.”

James stared at the ceiling, exhausted and overwhelmed. “Am I going to make it?” he rasped.

“You’re not in the ICU anymore,” Heather said. “They say you’ll probably have to be on dialysis for a few more weeks, but your liver and kidneys are recovering, and you’ve even gained a little weight back since we brought you in.”

“So…hopeful,” he was afraid to say it. He tried to smile. “I guess the Q-13’s a tool I’ll have to shelve, huh?”

Heather’s expression clouded. “I asked too much of you that last day at Empetrum. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” James said. “I fully intended to bring the facility down on top of me. I’m alive right now because of you.”

“Yeah…It doesn’t hurt any less, though.”

James swallowed, and nodded.

Heather squeezed his hand and stood up. “I’m going to let your parents know you woke up. They made me promise.”

James startled. “My parents are here?”

“They’ve been here,” she said. “All six days.”

James felt a pulling sensation in his chest, nausea rising again. Surprise, warmth, fear. “Do they know…?”

“Yeah, we told them everything. Sorry…”

He sighed heavily, raising a hand to his head. “Fuck.”

She flashed him a sympathetic look, and left. James noted she had a replacement leg too, the progressive repairs proof of time passing. Every moment of his life up until the last couple of weeks had been frantically crammed with productivity. To have lost six whole days, to have nearly lost his life a second time to his body’s inability to metabolize its trauma, felt incomprehensible.

A minute later, his parents appeared in the open doorway, his father tall and his mother serious.

They stared at each other across the room for several long moments, like either party were perceiving the other as a ghost high up in an attic window, surprised and unsettled by each others’ presence.

He hadn’t seen them in over a year. His father’s appearance had changed a lot since then, the image of order and strict, snapping intelligence corroded by his own brush with death. Though he hoped the fact that he was here pointed to some optimism as far as treatment results. James couldn’t believe they had both waited here all this time, putting their lives, their careers, their attention, on hold—for him.

James swallowed, and finally his gaze fell to his hands in his lap. He laced his dark, bony fingers together. He exhaled.

Jonathan moved. The set of his mouth stern, he strode forward until he stood next to the bed, looming. James stole a glance at his father, whose brow plummeted as his face scrunched, his emotional expression of relief and sorrow looking obtuse and severe.

Finally, James’ mother crept over from the doorway, completely out of her depth. Her thin lips were pressed together, and her eyes welled up with tears despite her best efforts to distance herself from them.

James observed them—awkward, withdrawn, struggling—and life felt too fragile to feel anything but care for them in that moment. Grief for the pain they carried, gratitude for the ways their pragmatism revealed their love.

Their choices, well-meaning, deficient, had left scars on his life, but they were here. They had waited six days at an unfamiliar hospital surrounded by confusing and disturbing realities about his activities, hoping he would wake up and unwilling to leave until he had. They weren’t at all good with emotions, or affection, but they were trying.

He caught his mother’s gaze. “It’s okay,” he rasped. “You can cry. I’m sorry things got so messed up.”

Catherine covered her mouth and turned aside, crumbling but still fighting it. Jonathan shook his head, his jaw clenched and face bowed. James realized tears were streaming down his dad’s face already. James lifted his hand and offered the palm. Jonathan took it.

“I love you both,” James said. “Thank you for being here.”

Neither of them responded verbally, grappling to keep control. No amount of permission could crack it—if they allowed themselves this indulgence, there was no telling what more pain or chaos lay behind it. These walls were familiar.

If we was lucky, he might get the chance to feel frustrated by it in the future. But for now, he felt he was seeing the whole picture of them for the first time, and the nuanced truth of their soft, severe, faltering humanity felt sufficient.

“The Knights told us an insane story,” Jonathan said. “Is it really true?”

“Yeah,” James said.

“All of it?”

James nodded.

His parents sat with that, his confirmation sinking in. The dangerous and devastating things he had done chasing something that nobody else could ever give him.

He still didn’t know if he could find what he was looking for. Maybe the old souls, the kids who had to grow up too fast, were just irrevocably cursed.

“I never asked you to save me,” Jonathan said, his voice barely above a whisper, heartbroken.

“That’s not why I apologized.”

“I know.” James couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. “I wasn’t ready to face you. I thought it would fix things.”

Jonathan sighed. The sound of it was branded into the back of James’ mind, always demanding, never satisfied. But this one sounded tired, self-directed.

“Is your treatment still working?” James asked.

“Seems that way.”

“I’m glad.”

“What do you plan to do after you’re discharged from the hospital?” Catherine asked, ever the logistician. Numbers, strategies, were safer than emotions. James did that too, without even realizing it most of the time. “You’re welcome to stay with us while you get your strength back.”

“No plans yet,” James said. Distant amusement bloomed in his chest at the question. “I just found out I’m not dead a few minutes ago. Thank you for the offer, though. I’ll consider it.”

The last time he had seen his parents had been a fierce argument. They had tried to discourage him from accepting a permanent position at Larkspur, believing instead that he should seek out something with heavier biomedical leanings. Mechanical engineering for infrastructure wasn’t nearly close enough to his father’s biological career preferences to tolerate.

There had been threats, guilt, multiple attempts to claw down the tiny spark of independence James had cultivated for himself. He had left his childhood home fuming, swearing he would never come back, that he would never speak to them again, never give them another second of his life.

A year ago, staying with them to recover would have been a demand, not an offering.

He still didn’t know if he’d be able to forgive them for the past, whether he was ready to close the strict distance he had kept.

But he thought maybe, if given the time, they had a shot at starting over.

+

CHAPTER SIXTY—LIMBO 

“You don’t have to stay here all the time,” James said. At first, Heather thought he was muttering in his sleep, it was so quiet. “You should be with your family.”

Heather paused the video game she was playing, parked at the utilitarian loveseat by the window. Her hands didn’t match, and most of one was still missing, but she was grateful to finally have all her limbs back in some form. She’d finally managed to wrestle her handheld console away from Sesame, and had asked him not to rummage in her room when she wasn’t there.

She shrugged, evasive.

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

She glanced up at him with only her eyes, her expression reproachful.

James didn’t like that look. He was still groggy, but the shadow of his slowly returning eyebrows pinched downward. “What? We worked so hard to get away from Empetrum. You deserve to be home.”

“I know,” she said, turning her gaze out the window. “Home is…complicated. I don’t know what to do with myself there.”

Keeping track of James aside, it hurt to be home—surrounded by pictures of her organic self and reminders of the life she’d lost. By her parents, trying to process, one of whom remained hostile to James. By Sesame who loved his new life and didn’t seem to fear being a robot in a human society. Suffocated by how much she envied that.

Sesame didn’t wonder about how to tell her extended family, which of her loved ones wouldn’t be able to accept her.

She didn’t even know if she accepted herself. It didn’t feel right to continue being Heather, but it felt even worse to consider giving up that identity. She would never have confirmation on whether her soul had transferred with her cognitive pattern. The concept of souls was mythology at best, anyway. Speculative, unmeasurable.

Should they hold a funeral?

She had heard once that touch receptors in the skin were far enough away from each other that there was a closeness at which two points of contact felt like one. Maybe her existence was like that.

She didn’t have to grapple with these things in James’ hospital room. She could stay in limbo.

“Besides…” She tried to smile. “I can’t leave you here all by yourself.”

James’ parents had eventually had to go back to their jobs, as did her dad. Larkspur’s next steps were up in the air. Erika had gone back to her family, Su was fielding things at home, and Sesame didn’t like sitting around, so he had gladly left watching over James to the one person who seemed willing and able to do it.

The medical setting was too close to Empetrum for both of them, but especially for James. Every time a nurse or doctor came in, he got a really cornered look on his face, and by their departure, the Q-13 had been fluffed up enough with his fight-or-flight that his eyes were glowing. He’d had a panic attack when they were hooking him up for another round of dialysis.

“You can,” James said. “My needs don’t matter here.”

“Because I’m the only one suffering?” Heather said, injured. “I’m not in physical pain. Benson destroyed your body too.”

James frowned at himself. Heather willed him to hear her.

Her parents also asked her often if she was sure about staying at the hospital. Her dad was trying to take things one day at a time and wouldn’t open up to her any more than that. Her mom’s advice mirrored James’—that Heather had no more responsibility to him. It was easy to feel sorry for him in his current state, Su had said, but Heather should think about a version where he was healthy and unscathed in the aftermath, and let that color her judgment on the fate of their relationship.

But he wasn’t in perfect health. He had paid dearly for his attempts to make amends.

“I care about you,” she said. “I know you still feel guilty, but I want you to just focus on getting better right now. We can talk through everything later.”

He sighed through his nose. She refused to entertain his self-loathing.

“When you finally started to fight back,” Heather said. “That’s the apology that I accepted.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself,” James said.

“Try, please.”

+

The Knight’s house appeared between the trees at the end of their long driveway. James took a breath, idly massaging his aching hands, and trying to ignore the other corners of him that hurt.

He felt loosely stitched together with frayed twine. From the back seat, he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror, and looked away again. His irises were still Q-13 yellow. The black marks were blacker than ever.

After another week in the hospital, his hair was growing back, at least. He had half expected it to come in jet black like the stains in his skin, but it seemed to be the warm brown he was familiar with. A small comfort, as he was released to the rest of his life irreversibly altered.

Heather and Sesame sat at the top of the porch steps, waiting for them. The car came to a stop, and James waited for Richard to kill the engine before he opened the back door and pulled his legs around. Bracing himself on available anchor points, James slowly raised himself to his feet.

The early autumn breeze was gentle, but knifed right through him.

Sesame waved, and Heather got up.

Richard unfolded a walker from the trunk and brought it around. James thanked him. He watched his own hands close around the handles, trusting his weight to it. He watched how his hoodie and sweatpants hung off his frame like there was nothing beneath them. He felt like he was viewing a video recording of someone else’s body, someone else’s life. Empetrum smoldered at the back of his mind in a pile of confused, muted embers.

Then Heather was moving around the walker, her arm extended and leaning in to hug him. He adjusted his weight to accept it.

“The guest room’s all set up,” Heather said. “Are you hungry? Mom’s making dinner.”

James nodded, second guessing his decision to stay with the Knights until he was strong enough to make other arrangements. To his supreme frustration, instead of using his immense amount of downtime for planning next steps, he had spent the rest of his hospital stay either sleeping, or tight in the grips of a brain fog so thick he could barely speak. He was still on a slew of medications attempting to keep the Q-13 from vomiting toxins into his bloodstream while his health was still so fragile, but his liver and kidneys had regained enough function that the doctors decided against further dialysis treatments.

As far as he could tell, Heather had mostly orchestrated the boarding arrangement, and he had gratefully gone along with it. He hadn’t failed to notice the increasing emotional distance she kept with her family. It worried him.

He had known that one horrific night at Empetrum was going to change everything, but it killed him to watch the devastation continue to run its course. There was so much more to be done picking up the pieces, and he felt more burden than ally in that effort.

But if Heather wanted him close, he wouldn’t deny her anything.

It was a comfort, anyway, to be around someone who understood what the other was going through. It felt important to stick together.

He’d already started having night terrors. The doctor had prescribed him sedatives. For the sake of this stage of recovery, he wasn’t allowed to keep waking up screaming about Empetrum with glowing skin.

As he accepted extra help on the porch steps, he resolved to be as easy and quiet as possible. He hardly dared to imagine how the conversation with Su had gone. He hadn’t seen much of her at the hospital since his admittance.

The house smelled like pasta, and Su stood at the counter stirring sauce. Sesame talked brightly about the guest room and what they had all been up to that day as he led James across the house, Heather at his side.

Su glanced at James as he came by. He couldn’t read her expression. Resignation, perhaps.

“We picked you up some clothes while you were in the hospital,” Sesame said. He trotted over to the dresser and pulled it open.

James aimed the walker through the doorway. “Thank you. All my stuff is probably in a storage locker somewhere. If it still exists.”

“Wonder if you’ll get any of it back,” Heather said.

“I hope so.” He sat down on the bed with a soft grunt of discomfort. “My government documents are gonna be a pain to replace if not.”

Sesame showed him a t-shirt from the dresser, to which he nodded approval. He worked a thumb up the palm of his other hand, kneading at a dull, dripping pain that made his joints feel like they were slowly separating.

Richard peeked in the doorway. “James, can we talk for a minute?”

James glanced at Heather and Sesame, who took their leave. Heather shot her dad a look, half questioning, half warning, as she left them alone. James sat on the bed, trapped, waiting to hear what his former boss and the father of his victim wanted to say.

“Thank you for letting me stay here,” James said. He couldn’t stand the silence. “I’ll keep out of the way, and I’ll leave as soon as I can.”

Richard sat down on the bed next to him. “You don’t have to worry about that. Though I wanted to ask you to make sure you’re honest with us. No minimizing your symptoms, okay?”

James nodded, his gaze on his hands.

“And if they start worsening or new things come up, I need you to let us know immediately so we can get you help.”

James nodded again, emotion rising in his chest. “I really wonder if it’s worth fighting, though,” he said quietly. “Wasted resources on a losing battle…”

On a wretched, wasted life.

He winced. Benson’s words cut deep, ever looming over him like a curse. Logically, he knew there was no merit to them, based in a value system James had rejected. But his inner critic, surveying the damage he had both taken and inflicted, agreed.

A rising star reduced to a warped, blackened heap of failed potential. Just James—awkward, arrogant, emotional—had never been good enough, and this poisoned, broken version of him was worth even less.

“I hear you,” Richard said. “But any effort spent keeping you alive will never be wasted.”

“I don’t deserve it. I was supposed to die at Empetrum.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“So I suppose it’s time to build a new path.”

James frowned at his hands, dark and wiry, his joints swollen.

“You can’t blame yourself for falling prey to Benson,” Richard said.

“But I do, Richard,” James snapped. “I should have known better. I should have seen through it from the beginning, but I was too stupid, too selfish—” He faltered as a twinge rippled through his scars like a toothache. He hooked his hands on the back of his neck and bowed his head with a heavy sigh, abandoning what he was going to say before he got too worked up.

“Too young,” Richard stated, solemnly.

James squeezed his eyes shut. “That’s no excuse.”

Silence sat between them for a long time. James propped his forehead on the pads of his hands, elbows on his knees.

Finally, Richard said, “When I was a sophomore in college, I met a girl.”

James warily twisted around to look at him, wondering where this was going. “Su?”

Richard shook his head. “The attraction was immediate, and powerful,” he went on, pensively, his gaze far away. “She was intelligent and driven, and showered me with attention. She made me feel like I was the most important person in the world, and that I could do anything as long as my life revolved around her. Coming from a fraught home life, where I often fell through the cracks in my parents’ chaotic divorce…that kind of dynamic was intoxicating.

“I did everything she wanted, happily at first, but soon she was constantly asking for receipts for everything I did, testing my loyalty, putting me down, blaming me for her severe reactions, getting me in trouble, isolating me from my friends. I walked on eggshells. Nothing I did was good enough.

She continued to pull and sever more and more of my life, and if I ever pushed back, it came with an agonizing cycle of arguing, shaming, abandonment, and finally the overwhelming relief of repair after I gave in. She told me she loved me, and I believed her. We dated for two years. I did a lot of things during that time that I’m not proud of. It took me a long time to learn how to trust people again after it finally ended.”

James stared at the carpet between his feet. He narrowed his eyes.

“I was only twenty years old.” Richard paused, waiting for James to make the connection—though

James was twenty-one now. “I knew nothing about the mechanisms of abuse. Like a lot of people, I had to learn the hard way. But I was lucky—Nothing mortally dangerous came of that relationship. You weren’t so lucky, and that isn’t your fault.”

James didn’t move.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Your life is just beginning. It’s a good thing that you survived.”

Richard’s words sank oddly in James’ chest. He wanted to believe them, wished they brought him comfort and relief, as they were meant to.

But he just felt even more lost.

“Why are you doing this?” James rasped, hopeless.

Richard gently touched his shoulder, and stood up. “Dinner’s going to be ready in a few minutes. Join us?”

James drew his torso upright with a slow, resigned breath. He nodded. Richard smiled, a fatherly expression that James couldn’t acknowledge.

After Richard was gone, James sat alone, kneading his weak, stained hands in the silence. He stared at his walker with his brow furrowed, turning Richard’s anecdote over in his mind like a Rubik’s cube covered in thorns.

+

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE—FOR NOW

James wandered down the hallway, swaddled in a comforter. It was five something in the morning, but he had been scared off trying to sleep any more.

The stove light was on in the kitchen, dim and warm. The scent of eggs and toast wafted across his senses. He debated retreating, but didn’t want to go back to the guest room and lie awake and uneasy in the dark.

He had hoped to find Richard when he emerged from the hallway, but it was Su who stood at the stove. She wore pajamas, a robe, and slippers, pensively stirring a small skillet of scrambled eggs.

She glanced at him as he appeared.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” she asked quietly, a civil sympathy.

James tilted his head in a soft shrug. “Nightmares.”

“Are the sedatives not working?”

He hung back. “Not all the time.”

She turned off the burner and scooped her breakfast into a bowl. “Are you hungry?”

He shook his head. “Thank you.” Even if he were, he wouldn’t have admitted it. He didn’t want any of the Knights feeling like they had to take care of him. Especially not Su. At the moment, her poor view of him felt like the only honest one in the whole house.

As Su pulled toast from the toaster and went to the refrigerator for condiments, James drifted up to the stove. He stared at the hot pan, seeing other images behind his eyes—nightmare mixed with real memory. Benson cutting into him, killing Heather himself. His arms ablaze with the Q-13’s ravenous, chainsaw fire. The way it snuffed out, and his arms were still there, while everything else melted and burned around them.

He slowly extended a long, black hand from the blanket around his shoulders, hovering over the pan. The heat radiated upward, buoying against his palm. He felt himself breathing, but his mind drifted somewhere else, curiosity pushing against his body like a growing tide.

He lowered his hand into the pan. Heat pressed intense and crackling against his skin.

“James! Jesus Christ—”

He looked up and blinked at Su, at first not comprehending. He looked at the palm of his hand.

Remnants of scrambled egg and cooking oil stuck to it, but it was otherwise unscathed. Su stood at the fridge, clutching her breakfast in shock.
He twisted his hand, showing her his palm, unharmed.

She gaped at him. “Why did you do that?”

“Mom?” Heather appeared at the top of the stairs, alerted by the shout. Her oval eyes glowed in the dimness. “Are you okay?”

Su took her breakfast to the table in a huff. “I’m fine. James just put his hand in a hot pan.”

James held his hand up for Heather to see. “I think I’m fireproof.”

“Wasn’t there a better way to test that than going all in?” Su groused.

Dizziness pressed in on him and he leaned against the counter away from the stove, cradling his hand as he gazed down at it. He could feel every bone in his hands, his arms, shoulders, ribcage, spine… throbbing softly in time to his languid heartbeat.

Benson pushing the infusion needle into his arm. Closing the scanner lid on Heather’s lifeless face. His body, shredding, bursting into flames.

Dimly, he heard Su’s voice, talking. “He’s not all there right now.”

He closed his eyes, head drooping.

“No—Heather, I can do it.”

A cloth swiped his hand, and then something gently nudged his back, another modest grip around the thick blanket over his arm, guiding him to turn and walk.

Then, what little awareness he had dropped suddenly out from under him. He didn’t know where he was. There was something he had to do. Guards pushing him down a hallway, strapping him into a chair.

He jerked suddenly away with a gasp. He pitched sideways, something caught him and lowered him to his knees. He curled in on himself. Fear and fatigue, anger, grief, disorientation engulfed him. He was too weak to fight them. He began to cry.

Sitting on the floor of his lab, alone. The empty air ringing in his ears, as the isolation and despair pressed into his chest like a wooden stake. Dragged suddenly into the dark, unable to scream.

Someone kneeled behind him, a hand on his back. Frigid, angled hands took his, while he relived Empetrum again and again in a cruel riptide. Benson’s cold, curious hatred as he tortured him. His life under a hydraulic press, fed through a meat grinder. Blamed for Heather’s murder, blamed for his own.

Somebody gasped. Movement loomed suddenly behind him, footsteps veered away. “—Get away from him!”

The cold hands cupped his face. “James, come back.” He flinched, opening his eyes. His scars were glowing, blinding. He was hyperventilating. Heather’s face was very close to his. He grabbed her hands on either side of his face, struggling to focus on her.

“Come back,” she said. Her voice wavered, as she attempted to stay calm.

A cold washcloth descended onto the back of his neck, tethering him suddenly to the present.

The howling ghosts in his mind retreated into the background. Still there, but muffled. His breathing slowed down with effort. He bowed his head and began to cry again, softly, as he remembered where he was.

With an unpleasant twinge, his scars faded to black, and an abrupt feeling of weakness flooded into him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Heather hugged him. He clung to her and bowed his head, every faltering breath thick with grief, shame. and exhaustion.

He felt Su standing above them, her gaze on his back.

+

Once they got James calmed down and nested on the living room sofa with a big mug of tea and a nature documentary droning softly on the TV, Heather crossed back through the kitchen, brushing off her mom’s effort to comfort her, and opened the sliding glass door.

The sun hadn’t risen yet. She strode out to the end of the deck and sat down on the steps, cradling her face in her mismatched hands.

Her robotic body didn’t react to the trauma quite like James’ did, though more and more she wished it would. Her own experience of the events haunted her waking consciousness yet she didn’t know how to express or process them. She made herself scarce during mealtimes, turned photos around in the living room. She found herself spending more and more time hibernating in her room, avoiding everything. The rest of her life yawned before her like a cave full of monsters.

When she was organic and upset, she used to cry, or scream into her pillow where no one could hear her. Or she would try to tire her body out by going on a walk or sprinting until her muscles hurt more than the turbulence inside her, and the endorphins soothed the pain. Her robotic body didn’t have endorphins, and she still couldn’t tell if it simulated them in any way. All she knew was her usual coping mechanisms weren’t bringing her much relief. Either this body was incapable of release, or there was just too much pain.

A rustling in the bushes startled her. She looked up to see a dimly illuminated face panel coming toward her across the yard from the trees beyond.

“What are you doing out here?” she called softly to Sesame.

He looked perplexed at the question. “Exploring.”

“At night?”

“It’s different at night,” Sesame said matter-of-factly. “Two worlds in one yard. You should try it sometime.”

He paused at the bottom of the steps, gazing up at her.

He cocked his head. “You’re upset,” he noted.
 Heather scoffed, hopelessly. It came out buzzing and mistuned. “I’m always upset.”

He climbed the steps and wedged himself next to her at the top.

“When humans cry,” Heather muttered, “the composition of their tears changes based on what emotion is overwhelming them. It’s one way the body regulates.” She bent double, hugging her legs and staring at the trees off the edge of the yard. “But I can’t cry anymore.”

“Can you zap the ground?” Sesame said.

She looked at him. “What?”

“That’s what I do when I feel upset for too long,” he said.

Heather stared.

“Emotions are electro-chemical in a biological system,” Sesame said. “In our bodies, it’s just electrical. So when I need to, I focus on the sensation, and pretend my feet are a grounding rod, and send it out.”

“That sounds like cheating,” Heather said.

Sesame raised his virtual eyebrows, surprised. “Does it?”

Heather looked up at the sky, where the first hints of light were beginning to creep into the darkness. It occurred to her it would feel cold outside if she were organic. And cold would feel uncomfortable because organic bodies had a preferred temperature range.

Somehow, acknowledging that organic bodies came with their own form of programming felt like a betrayal. A moral shrug of her shoulders, that robotic was just as good, just as real.

It wasn’t. She could never have that life back.

But, curious if Sesame’s method held substance, she closed her eyes, and grudgingly allowed the miasma of her inner landscape to rise. She felt different emotions in different corners of her body. Grief, rage, exhaustion, anxiety, despair—their embodiment a simulation of her old biological systems.

She imagined a tiny river through her circuits, traveling from each of the centers, up to her face, where she imagined tears forming. With a pulling sensation, her face began to crackle with energy in that region, and she diverted it down over her facial panel, through her neck, arms, and out her fingertips into the wood she sat on.

She stopped channeling the energy, contemplating the results. A part of her felt quieter.

“Efficient,” she remarked, with relief and resentment mixed.

Sesame smiled.

“Do you ever miss your old body?” Heather asked quietly, staring down into the yard.
Sesame shrugged. “I don’t remember much about it. I miss the ability to feel warm and cozy though.” He swung his legs. “I figure I can fix that in the future.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would like to be human, but even that end goal is more limited than I would like to be. I’m not there yet,” Sesame said. He rapped a fingertip on his metal chest. “But this is good for now.”

A robin began singing, as dawn slowly approached.

She missed her organic body. It was the only existence she knew before Empetrum. It was imperfect, vulnerable, but it was home. Dunesborough on the east coast had also been home, but she’d had to leave that behind too.

Larkspur’s android had been an emergency choice. Sensors could be added, programs updated.

She had lost limbs and her friends had just made her new ones. If she had taken on Empetrum while still organic, her life would have ended many times over.

With her heightened processing speeds, she could teach herself engineering in record time, and build herself a whole new body, one that passed for organic for social benefit, as well as personal experience. Maybe senses with different composition could come close to organic experience, given the right parameters.

She no longer needed any of the things that had made her body so fragile—food, rest, hygiene, warmth. With the elimination of sleep, the time she had in a day had expanded to the full twenty-four hours.

With an inorganic body, she would never again be vulnerable to the chemical that had killed her. She would never have to face the kind of hospital stay or physical complications James endured, even many years into the future. No disease, no menstruation, no dentist appointments.

She was no longer a teenage girl and all that implied. It filled her with grief to be so changed, but as time trudged on, she actually felt safer for that fact.

And if Benson ever threatened her family again, she would kill him.

The stars were fading, barely visible high up in the atmosphere, as the rest of the world woke up and a new morning flooded in.

“Good for now…” she mused.

+