INVALID

INVALID - Chapter 4: The Forge

The surgeon wasn't a surgeon. She was a veterinarian.

"You sure you want this, kid?" she asked, not looking up from her sterilizer. The clinic was in a shipping container behind the Outer Ring slaughterhouse. The smell of blood was real here.

Dr. Aris. Ex-GQ 92, stripped of her license for fixing a faith-born child's cleft palate without authorization. Now she fixed pigs and Invalids, which the Council considered the same thing.

Jerome sat in his chair, watching. "He wants it."

"It's not just fingerprints," Aris said, pulling on gloves that were too big for her. "To pass a Helios deep scan, I have to sand your phalanges. Literally sand the bone. Then graft his dermal layer onto yours. Your body will try to reject it for six months. You'll be in constant low-grade fever."

"Do it."

"And the eyes. Your myopia is structural. I can install a corneal inlay that will correct it, but it's from a Valid donor who died in a car crash. His family didn't know they sold his eyes. It'll be perfect vision, but you'll see floaters for a year that are actually his dead retinal cells."

"Do it."

She finally looked at me. "And the blood pump. That's the worst. I have to implant a subclavian reservoir here," she tapped my chest, right above my heart, "that will slowly leach Jerome's plasma into your venous system. Every time you get scanned, your sweat, your urine, your tears will read as his. But if it ruptures, you get a full-body histamine reaction and die in about 90 seconds. Also, you can't ever get hard again while it's in, because it f***s with your blood pressure. Just so you know."

From his chair, Jerome laughed. A real laugh, for the first time.

"Tell him about the legs."

Aris sighed. "He wants me to break your legs."

I turned to Jerome. "What?"

"Your gait," Jerome said. "My gait is recorded. I'm 6'1" with a 0.98 stride symmetry. You're 5'10" with a limp from carrying your brother when you were kids — you have a left hip tilt. The cameras will catch it. Aris has to re-break your femurs and tibia and reset them with my exact measurements. You'll be 6'1" after. But you'll be in agony for three weeks."

Eli's face. Blue lips. 19.4 years.

"How long does it all take?" I asked.

Aris checked her wall clock, a cheap analog thing like my father's. "If we start now? 14 hours. You'll walk out tomorrow morning as someone else."

"And Eli?" I asked Jerome. "You said you needed his blood too."

Jerome's perfect face went still. "The bio-printer needs a direct stem cell template from him to print the patch. It can't be frozen. It has to be live. Which means..."

Realization hit me like cold water.

"He has to come with us to the launch site."

"No," I said instantly. "Absolutely not. He's 11. He's sick."

"He's going to die here anyway, Micah. The air in the Outer Ring has 4x the particulates. It's killing his heart faster. On the Titan campus, the air is pure. He'll have a month of perfect health before we even launch. It's the safest place for him."

It was a lie. We both knew it was a lie. Titan launch had a 12% fatality rate during training.

But it was also the only truth that mattered.

Aris turned on the surgical light. It buzzed.

"Last chance to be ugly, kid."

I lay down on the pig table. The metal was cold against my back.

"Make me perfect," I said.

The anesthesia was cheap. I felt the saw start.

Somewhere, behind the pain, I heard Jerome whisper, "Welcome to being Valid, brother. It hurts more than being Invalid. We just hide it better."

The last thing I saw before I passed out was my own fingerprint, lifting off my finger in a thin sheet, like a tiny, discarded identity.

I didn't know it then, but they had already flagged Eli. A routine school scan had noticed his deteriorating cardiac signature. A Genetic Council officer was already on his way to our house with a letter.

Not a hospital letter.

A recycling notice.

For inefficient genomes.

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