Dot caught Marcus before his knees reached the floor.
Bodhi took his weight from the other side. Between them they kept him upright, though his head had fallen forward and his shoes dragged across the polished corridor.
“Can he hear you?” Dot asked.
“He could a minute ago.”
“Marcus.”
His eyes were open. Nothing in them moved toward her.
Dot looked back at the intake desk. The tablet lay where she had left it, his dose written in the field beneath his name.
N9a.
The Company would come for him. Whether someone had already called was a question she could not afford to ask in the corridor.
“Hold him.”
She went ahead to Room Six. Empty bed, clean paper, a tray table pushed against the wall. She switched on the light and held the door while Bodhi brought Marcus through.
They lowered him onto the bed. Bodhi kept one hand behind his head until it reached the pillow.
“Close it,” Dot said.
Bodhi shut the door.
“Lock?”
“Just close it.”
A locked room attracted a different kind of attention.
She turned Marcus’s face toward her. His gaze remained fixed a little above her shoulder. His lips were parted. A thread of saliva had reached his collar.
“Marcus. My name is Dot. You’re at Millhaven.”
His right hand tightened against the paper.
Then loosened.
“What happened after he took it?”
“He was talking. Then he wasn’t.”
“Talking to you?”
Bodhi hesitated.
“No.”
She looked at him.
“He said something was there.”
“Something where?”
“I don’t know.”
Dot pulled the examination lamp closer.
She shone a penlight into Marcus’s eye. The pupil dilated in uneven pulses, widening, catching, then widening again under the steady beam.
“Keep talking to him. Things he knows. Your name. Where he lives. Nothing he has to answer.”
The face was attached to the wall.
Marcus knew that before he understood there was no body beneath it.
A woman’s face. Preserved so carefully that he could see the small irregularity at one corner of her mouth. Beneath her chin, a speaker moved the air. Her lips moved with it.
Beyond her, a man hung from the ceiling.
Four arms held him there. Hydraulic joints adjusted his position by increments too small to see until the distance had changed. One side of his skull was open.
Marcus tried to look away.
There was nowhere his eyes could go that was outside the room.
A hand crossed the table.
Too many fingers.
They continued working while the head above them turned toward him.
“His breathing’s changed,” Bodhi said.
Dot was already watching.
Marcus drew three shallow breaths, stopped, then took another with a small clicking sound in his throat.
She loosened his collar. His skin was damp and cold at the neck.
“Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get something.”
“What?”
She had her hand on the door.
“If anyone asks, you’re waiting for a reassessment.”
Bodhi looked at Marcus.
“Are we?”
“No.”
She left before he could ask anything else.
The medication room was occupied. Leena stood at the counter sorting the evening packs into blue plastic bins.
Dot went to the sink and washed her hands.
“Six?” Leena asked.
“Six.”
“Anything I need to know?”
“Not yet.”
She dried her hands and opened the lower cabinet.
Behind the sealed emergency kits sat a shallow carton of interface-reversal ampoules. Company stock. Issued after a maintenance contractor had seized on this floor six months earlier, then counted every Monday and never used.
The reversal agent interrupted the bond between circulating particles and neural tissue. It would not clear the particles themselves.
Dot took one ampoule.
Then a second.
The first went into her scrub pocket. The second she held openly while she closed the cabinet.
“Borrowing this,” she said.
Leena glanced at the label.
“That needs an incident number.”
“I’ll bring you one.”
Dot went back to the sink and dropped the empty paper towel into the bin. Her pocket touched the counter. She stepped away from it.
Leena was still looking at the ampoule in her hand when Dot left.
The cylinder contained a brain.
Not an image of a brain. Not a diagram.
Tissue, suspended in pale fluid, with filaments descending from its base. The fluid brightened.
Something addressed him.
He could not remember the words. He remembered that it had noticed him.
Then the jars.
A portion in each jar, joined by tubes. Something passed between them, arriving late in one vessel, early in another.
All of it belonged to someone.
Marcus felt his own teeth pressing together.
He could not make them stop.
Dot came back pushing the portable pulse unit.
Bodhi moved out of her way.
“That’s a defibrillator.”
“Not this setting.”
She pulled the EMP attachment from its recess beneath the handle. The cable had been wound tightly enough to hold the shape of the storage hooks.
“His heart—”
“I’m watching his heart.”
She put the ampoule on the tray table and cut Marcus’s shirt open down the front.
Bodhi watched her arrange the pulse pads.
“What does it do?”
“Disables what’s still circulating.”
“The compound?”
“The mechanical part.”
“And the rest?”
She held up the ampoule.
Bodhi looked from it to Marcus.
Dot waited until he met her eyes.
“I haven’t done this on someone who took street N9a.”
He swallowed.
“Neither have I.”
“Then hold his arm still.”
She administered the reversal agent. Marcus did not react to the needle.
Outside, wheels passed the door. Someone laughed once, quietly. The sound moved away down the corridor.
Dot selected the suppression cycle.
The unit requested an authorization.
She entered her badge number.
A second field appeared.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Dot entered the emergency override.
The machine accepted it.
There would be a record now. She watched the charge indicator climb and tried to remember whether the cabinet count was recorded before or after the shift handover.
“Move your hands,” she told Bodhi.
He let go.
The room turned toward him.
Not the bodies.
The room.
Every connection he had felt, every distant exchange, every signal that had seemed indifferent to his presence now carried the same change.
He had been found.
The face on the wall opened its mouth.
The pulse made a flat crack.
Marcus’s back lifted from the bed. His heels struck the mattress once.
Then he lay still.
The examination lamp went dark and came on again.
Dot checked his breathing. One breath. Another.
Bodhi stood with his hands raised slightly, as though she had told him to keep them there.
“Marcus,” she said.
His eyes moved.
Not toward her. Toward the corner above the door.
She followed his gaze. Bare wall. A discolored patch where an old bracket had been removed.
“Marcus. Look at me.”
His mouth worked.
She bent closer.
He came off the bed so suddenly that she stepped back into the tray table. His forearm caught its edge. The table tipped, struck the wall, and went over.
The unopened ampoule broke on the floor.
Marcus seized her hand.
His grip hurt. He was trembling hard enough that she could feel it through her wrist.
Bodhi said his name.
Marcus did not look at him.
“They are coming for me.”
Dot held his gaze.
Behind her, someone stopped outside the door.
A knock.
“Everything all right in there?”
Marcus tightened his grip.
Dot put her free hand over his.
“Dropped a tray,” she called.
She waited.
The person outside waited too.