Chapter 4
1036 Words
2
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Rodin was fast growing to despise this place.
The medibay was small, grey walls to three sides and a pale green curtain across the fourth. To the left of the uncomfortable bed was a collection of incomprehensible meditech devices connected to Rodin via various tubes and wires, and a couple of ugly chairs to his right. The white light was painful, and the aroma of antiseptic couldn’t quite remove the stink of sickness.
How Ellya coped all day in this place was beyond Rodin.
“The results are as we’d expect,” she said, standing by the curtain, never once consulting the screen she held.
He placed a hand on the bandages that wrapped his torso. “Didn’t need the tests then.”
“They provide confirmation.”
“And waste time.”
“You have that luxury while you recover.”
“There’s things to do.”
“And you are in no state to take part in them.”
“I need to do something.”
She glared at him. “Don’t be an idiot.”
There was no point arguing. Rodin didn’t respond.
“There were no complications to the surgery,” Ellya continued, as clinical as one of Daventree’s b****y reports. “Taking into account the risks we discussed, healing is occurring at a rate well within normal, considering the condition of your body.”
“My condition?”
“You know what I mean.”
He nodded, knew precisely what she meant. His body had suffered years of a***e, as Ellya reminded him at every opportunity. His flesh was a patchwork of scars, and her thorough probing—the first time Rodin had undergone a full meditech analysis in over a decade—showed internal trauma too. He’d been beaten, stabbed, shot and generally mistreated, never giving himself time to fully recover.
And then there was the poison.
It sat in his system, held at bay by the control that Ellya’s team created. But the control would only work for so long—eventually, his body would treat the control as an invader, countering its effects and allowing the poison to run riot.
The average life expectancy of someone infected with the poison was ten years. Average—some people survived longer, others died after only five years. Ironically, the healthier a body and the stronger the immune system, the quicker it would reject the control. The weaker a person, the longer they survived with the poison.
Despite the scarring and trauma, Rodin was healthy and strong—and so, he was dying. As he’d walked back to the Factory, relying on Paskia far more than he’d like to admit, he’d felt his body weakening, became aware of the effort to place one foot in front of the other, was constantly reminded of the energy needed to move his limbs. There had been moments when they’d rested, and Rodin had fought to keep his eyes open, dreading the bliss that giving up might bring.
If he’d mentioned any of this to Ellya, she would have said it was in his mind, that his body was simply doing what it could to limit the effect of the injuries from the warrior. As it was, she said he’d been lucky—another day without treatment might well have been fatal.
A small voice inside asked if that would have been better.
But he was still alive. Authority was still out there. He had to fight on. And he couldn’t do that from a b****y medibay.
“How’s work progressing?” he asked, changing the conversation before she could get any more insults in.
She understood what he referred to, and her shoulders slumped. She didn’t smile—when did she ever do that?—but she stepped away from the curtain, sat on the edge of his bed.
“There’s progress,” she said. “Slow, but that’s the nature of this kind of work. I received a chip from one of our partners yesterday—I won’t trouble you with the details, but there are some promising developments.”
Rodin nodded. If she even started to explain, the technicalities of the research into a possible eradication of the poison would go straight over his head.
He was conscious of how she gave no details of her partners away. Since getting rid of Machivelle, Ellya had been in contact with meditechs across the districts, all of them researching the poison. It was a slow process, with most communication happening through data on chips, physically carried from partner to partner—nowhere near as effective as using screens and systems, but the work had to be done beneath Authority’s radar.
“But we’re still a long way from a solution,” she said. “For the foreseeable future, we must rely on the control.”
“Which is why I need to be up and about,” he said. “Need to get things done while I still can.”
Her lips thinned, and her chest rose. “In my professional opinion you need total rest for at least another two weeks, followed by a slow, monitored return to normal activity.”
“You expect me to lounge about here for weeks?”
“If you wish to recover fully from the surgery, yes. This is my expert suggestion.”
Rodin nodded, held her forceful stare. “Suggestion noted. Different situation, I’d love to follow your advice.”
She inhaled, her nostrils flaring, and her eyes narrowed. Rodin waited for the condescending put-down, the inference that he was ruining himself, the insistence that he remain in her care.
But then Ellya exhaled, her lips parted, the air rushing out to tickle the hairs on his arm. She stood, then glanced at the bulge of his body beneath the covers. He winced, suddenly aware of the tightness from the surgery.
Ellya stowed her screen then stood.
“Just be careful,” she said.
“Always am.”
She didn’t return his smile, but she nodded, once, then slipped through the curtain.
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