“We just know. After all, we’ve known him for what, almost two years now?”
“You knew my dad? How? We’ve only been in Neia for ten months. We’ve only ever been in one place for ten months.”
“You were in Okks before this, right?” He leads me down the black and phosphorescent hallway, down a few steps. I try to keep up with him. He may not have four legs, but he’s at least six inches taller than me.
“Right. South of Kansas City. How . . .” My mind churns in thought. I remember Dad’s work hours were even longer than usual while we lived there. He went from distracted to totally out of touch with our lives then, but we figured it was stress. Okks and Neia have a looser border policy with each other. He must have taken the high-speed magtrain into Neia all the time. I grunt, half exasperated, and half out of breath. “So, my life is an open book for everyone here, but no one’s bothered to tell me?”
“Whatever happened to ‘ignorance is bliss’?” Hex turns to raise his brows at me.
“Ignorance is a four-letter word to me.”
“Ah.” Hex stops at a door that’s lit with a faintly glowing oval medallion, pink instead of blue.
“Cy? We need to get into the infirmary,” he says to the door. I’m wondering if all the doors have assigned names, when the door clicks open. Hex snorts. “Good. He’s acknowledging my existence today.”
“The door?” I ask, confused.
“I wish. My life would be easier if I only had to talk to doors in this place.”
Hex touches the door and it slides open. Inside, it’s dim except for the yellowish glow along the edge of the floor and several green lights dotting the wall. I can see already it’s an oval room.
“Do you need permission to get into all the rooms here?” I ask.
“No, just this one. We kept running out of some of the meds because we helped ourselves to the first aid stuff. Only Cy has access now.”
Huh, so all the other rooms are a free-for-all. Otherwise, it’s only hard to get into Carus, or hard to get out. I tuck that away for future reference.
“Let’s see. How about a cheesy sunrise,” Hex says. The room obeys him, and the yellow brightness mixes with peachy pinks that increase at a gradual pace. In a few seconds, it’s easier to see an examining table and a wall of cabinets and drawers, each lit with a tiny green light. A variety of medical devices adorn the walls on clear shelves.
Hex pats the table. “Sit down. Your arms are pretty torn up. You’ll need someone to look at them.”
“But—”
“Hey, blood first, details later. Bleeding to death is one way to go, but I don’t recommend it myself,” he says, pointing to the blackish drops on the floor. Hex turns away from me, speaking to the center of the room. “Cy. She’s ready.” He stares up toward the ceiling, as if an answer might drop down. It stays quiet. “Dude. I think she only has a half pint of blood left.”
Suddenly, a voice comes from nowhere. It invades the room, like it’s materializing out of the air around us. “I’m busy. Ask Marka.”
The room is bright enough now for me to see Hex’s face flush. Ropy veins stick out of his neck. His next words come through his teeth.
“Cy, get your ass up here, or I’ll drag it over myself.” His voice scares me. I squirm away from him and pretend to study the medical gadgets on the wall.
“Goddamned meathead,” Cy responds. A crash of something hitting the floor above us echoes in our room.
“That person is going to help me?” I say.
“Yep. Welcome to the family,” he says with a sarcastic grin.
I turn back to the wall of gadgets. A cracked oval object sits on a tiny shelf. It’s a cardioscope for checking out the heart, but an old one. I breathe in sharply, recognizing the scuff marks. I know this scope. Dyl would steal it from my dad’s medical bag when she was a toddler. She’d sit on it for hours, pretending it was a magic egg.
I point at it, my finger shaking. “Is this . . .”
“Your dad’s. He left it for Cy, actually.” Hex shoves two hands in his pockets and rests the other pair on his hips. “He was our doctor. A mighty good one too.”
I pick up the cardioscope and put it against my heart, almost reflexively. The machine whirrs and I lift it away, to see the results, but the screen is cracked as well. My heart is unreadable right now.
“He wanted us to come here?” I ask, putting it back on the shelf.
“Yeah, if anything happened to him. Of course, I didn’t hear his conversation with Marka. Wilbert did, and Wilbert can’t keep a secret for the life of him, he’s the biggest gossipmonger—”
The door opens. The tattooed boy comes in, clad in dark jeans and dun-gray T-shirt. He’s taller than Hex, with wiry rather than bulging muscles. Up close, the tattoos look fresh and black. No fading to blue or blurred edges. On a firmly muscled left arm, there are bodies swirling in a dark river, shrieking in torment. On his right arm, three women cry out, their heads wreathed in serpents. The snakes climb up and adorn his right neck and sharp cheekbone.
“This is Cy,” Hex says, but Cy goes straight to the drawers in the wall without even glancing at my face.
“Marka should do this. I don’t have time,” Cy says. His voice is so deep, it almost sounds like a growl.
“It’s your job, buddy. Earn your keep for once.” Hex lays a heavy hand on my shoulder and the weight of it presses down on my spine. He whispers, “Don’t worry, he’ll take care of you. He knows I can break him like a twig.” With a wink, he’s out the door.
Cy keeps his back to me. “Sit down.” His order is so crisp that I immediately obey, but then I realize I’m afraid to be treated by someone who won’t even look me in the eye.
“Um. You seem kind of busy, so maybe I should just go to a hospital,” I say, easing back off the table and sliding awkwardly in my own blood. I flinch when he bangs a pair of metal tongs on the table.
Cy lifts his head. “You can’t.”
“But I’ll come back. I won’t run away this time. Marka can even send someone with me.”
“You can’t.” He stands there, a pillar of ash and ink. In contrast to his one pale cheek, his eyes are dark, stippled with gold. They flick down to meet mine, finally, and then to the drip of blood coming off my fingertips.
“Aren’t you capable of saying anything except ‘can’t’?” I snap, surprised at the sharpness of my voice. My mood isn’t helped by the fiery pain from ten or so bits of window still stuck in me.
Cy takes one step closer. “You can’t leave. And even if you did, you couldn’t call a magpod to take you anywhere.”
Now I’m panicked. Even when I was little I had the mag system. And even without a father, or a sister, I have the mag system—just like everyone else does. “Why couldn’t I call a magpod?”
“You’re not registered anymore.”
“You mean registered for magpod use?”
“No. You’re not registered in the entire system.” Seeing my alarmed expression, he throws me a tiny nugget of information. “Once you enter Carus House, outside this place, you don’t exist anymore.”
My hand instinctively goes to my holo stud, when Cy clucks at me.
“Don’t bother,” he says, but I pinch it on anyway. My screen is still just as salt-and-pepper fuzzy as it was on the agriplane. I force myself to breathe really fast, which is my usual reaction to bad things. My normal, shallow breaths are pitifully inadequate for freak-outs and anxiety. Cy watches me as I force the extra breaths in, preventing a wave of dizziness.
“What about my sister?” I say.
“She doesn’t exist anymore either. Especially for you.”
CHAPTER 6
I AM NOT A VIOLENT PERSON.
I am the timid girl in the back of the room, the one who finds comfort in the shadows of stronger people.