The ambulance ride came in blurry bits and pieces. There were flashes of people beside me – Gabe’s face alternating with the ambulance staff. The gurney’s nylon straps held me down against my will. Several half-hearted attempts later, I settled on watching the blood bag dangling above me. The steady drip leading down to my arm was a constant to ground me.

When we arrived in front of the gleaming white hospital, that symbol of prosperity, there was a flurry of movement. I remember running. I remember an elevator. The dinging it made when the doors opened and closed was punctuated by a moment of silence. It was so quiet that I could hear the breath in my ears. Then, more running, and it wasn’t long before I was sedated, and my wound was sutured shut.

A doctor was standing in front of me now; he was holding a tablet in his hands. My nausea made my head feel too heavy to lift. Compromising, I settled on staring at the name tag above his right chest pocket instead. It read “Dr. Anthony Carter.” Ideally, I would have liked a face to add to the name. The stub left of my arm itched. I didn’t know what was worse – the pain or the itching.

“Miss Walker?” the doctor asked.

His words passed right through me. I blinked slowly.

“Miss Walker…” he repeated before pocketing his tablet in defeat. “I’ll come back later.”

His white lab coat nearly caught on the door as he sped out of the room. No rest for the wicked, indeed. Everyone always had somewhere to go. The brief moment of clarity was short-lived. Before long, my mind emptied, and I slept again. When my eyes opened next, Ethan was sitting beside me. He was sitting in one of the two beige folding chairs by my bed. The seat next to him was empty.

“How long has it been?” I asked before trying to sit up.

Ethan glanced up from his lap, eyeing me warily with bloodshot eyes.

“Don’t,” he sighed, his head still resting on his hands with his arms propped up on his knees. “You need to rest.”

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“About twenty-four hours,” Ethan said, peering at me from behind his glasses, his messy hair hanging in front of his face.

Ethan was the rock among the three of us. To me, he was like a pillar – strong and fearless. When we were still small, those four years he had on me felt like a lifetime of difference, and I’d be in awe of all the things he could do. I still remember the time he first learned to ride a bike, just eight at the time. His unsteady movements were offset by the training wheels, which occasionally met the ground. He was triumphant with his helmet far too large for his head, and his smile gapped from his adult teeth, not quite grown in yet.

‘If he could do it, I could too,’ I thought, heading towards him to claim my turn. My mother had other ideas. ‘No, Lana,’ she said, grabbing my arm. ‘Don’t bother your brother.’ Stomping my feet, I wailed until my mother led me back inside. When I was four, he was twice my age. Now those four years were utterly insignificant, and even in all those years, I’d hardly ever seen my brother cry.

“I’m glad you’re up,” he sighed.

“Where’s Gabe?”

“Keeping Noah company,” he said. “Thought he’d give us some space.”

Ethan leaned back; the chair creaked with his shifting weight.

“Don’t worry,” he said, reading my mind. “He’s just a bit shaken up. The doctor says he’ll make a full recovery.”

I sighed in relief as he straighten up, looking more like himself.

“I tried to call you,” he said. “Tried to tell you help was on the way.”

“I know,” I said. “You wouldn’t have left me on my own if you didn’t have to.”

It wasn’t his fault. The walls of their building, that repurposed Ether bar, were insulated somehow. If we had prepared better, maybe something could have been done about it, but with Noah’s life on the line, we were short on time and had no choice but to dive in head first. Our signal was already weak on the main floor, and by the time I was inside the basement, it was practically nonexistent.

“Hold on,” I said. “I was reckless too.”

“Lana,” he said. “I’m supposed to look out for you two.”

“Don’t,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Just let me be an idiot sometimes.”

For a moment, neither of us knew what to say until, finally, Ethan broke the silence.

“You’re not an idiot, Lana,” he whispered.

Then we sat in silence, equally lost for words. An eternity passed before we heard a knock on the door. The motion activated door slid open, and Gabe stepped through the doorway. With a half-hearted smile, he took one look at us and stopped in his tracks. We must have been a sight for sore eyes.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Bad time?” he asked, raising his brows.

“No,” I said. “You should stay; we could use the company.”

Gabe rubbed his jaw gingerly before sitting down in the seat beside Ethan. I noticed his stubble; it was more prominent than usual.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“Terrible,” I huffed with more honesty than I’d had in a long time, and we laughed – a full-bodied laugh where nothing else in the world mattered, if only for a moment. My father always said that if you couldn’t laugh at the way life went to hell sometimes, you’d never laugh at all. Wise words. Life was often cruel and ugly, no matter how you sliced it.

Gabe hunched over with his hands between his knees.

“Been feeling some sort of way,” he said, pausing. “Told you to deal with the guy on your own...”

He trailed off, and I finished where he left off.

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “You had faith in me, and we still took him down in the end. That’s all that matters.”

He nodded, satisfied.

“We couldn’t have done it without backup,” Ethan interjected, moving on. “It took a while, but I got the lieutenant to see things our way. With how everything was stacking up and his father distancing himself from the situation, it was only a matter of time. That’s why Zenith rushed the end; it was his final Hail Mary – his chance to go out on his own terms.”

He paused, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger.

“It’s infuriating how easy it would have been if they had just gotten there sooner. The tech specialists have toys we don’t get to play with; there wasn’t much to it once they broke out the electromagnetic wave emitter…”

I tried to scratch what was left of my arm.

“Don’t scratch,” Ethan said, scowling.

“I can’t stand it,” I complained.

“It’s supposed to itch.” He said, sighing. “That means it’s working.”

Nanobots. I knew a thing or two about them; they were an innovation of medical science. A hundred years ago, they were rudimentary at best, but now they could do almost anything – almost anything other than regenerate a missing limb, unfortunately for me. I closed my eyes, imagining those tiny, sphere-shaped pods swimming through my veins, hard at work with their tiny insectoid legs, picking and scraping at my cells where it was a lost cause and adding back material where it needed to be replaced.

“It’d be nice if they could regenerate my arm while they were at it,” I grumbled.

The image of the Zenith standing above me was still fresh in my mind – his stance, my arm dangling in his hand, the way my blood dripped from the fingertips. Over and over, it played in my head like a glitched loop with no way out.

“I assume Zenith didn’t make it,” I said, more of a question than a statement.

“No, none of them did,” Ethan said. “Their server and computer console were fried by the wave that took out Zenith. Willow lasted longer because she had fewer mods to fry. The medical staff reported that she was still breathing when they arrived on the scene, but she only held on for another hour.”

“She wasn’t spared, then, was she?” I asked and continued on without waiting for a response. “He probably thought it wasn’t worth the effort to augment her as much as the others. To him, all she was good for was luring in new recruits, serving refreshments, and dying looking pretty. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Gabe grunted in agreement.

“But there was one way that he treated them all equally,” Ethan said. “Everyone got the same dose, man or woman. Willow didn’t stand a chance; Noah got lucky.”

“Don’t worry about the guys in the pews,” Gabe said, reading my mind. “Most of them made it.”

“Only most?” I asked.

“We take what we get, Lana,” Ethan said. “None of us get to have it all.”

Those chalices – some still grasped in unconscious hands, their celebratory wine, both their final toast and their last meal. It was sick. They must have been happy, smiling widely in a room filled with only the chosen, their final companions. None of them knew what was coming, not until people started doubling over.

“What about the computer?” I asked. “Did it finish uploading?”

“No, the wave got to it before it could finish,” Ethan said. “In the end, all they uploaded were fragments of their digitalized personality.”

“So much for the next level,” I groaned. “All those people died for nothing.”

“They wanted to live forever, and they died for it; there’s an irony in that,” Ethan said.

I nodded, lost in thought. Considering how things turned out, it might have been an omen that our first victim’s name was a portmanteau of Ethan and Noah. Coincidences like that really make you wonder sometimes if people are connected together by red threads, even when you know it couldn’t possibly be fate.

The doctor knocked on the door again, and he walked in. This time, I caught his face. He looked ordinary.

“Are you ready to discuss your options, Miss Walker?” he asked, pulling out a tablet and a stylus pen from his coat pocket.

"There’s no need for discussion,” I said. “I’ll do it, just put me in surgery.”

Ethan sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“You’re lucky you have me to look out for you,” he said. “Fortunately, I knew you would be too eager to get it over with. I already discussed your options with him while you were unconscious.”

“And I knew you would have,” I said. “We make a good team.”

The doctor handed me the stylus, and I signed my name on the dot. My hand shook, and the result was ugly. My name looked like the scribbling of a child, wobbly and graceless, much like Ethan with his first time on a bike. If only learning to write again would be as easy.

At least there was a silver lining; the heavy-duty military-grade replacements the Luminaries favored came with a high risk of rejection, but lower-end models with less power also came with less risk. All I needed was my dexterity; even a weaker model would give me more power than my original limb would have.

For the skeptical, there were still old-school plastic prosthetics you strapped on in the morning and took off at night, but no one bothered with them unless they either couldn’t afford augmentation or were a member of the sole surviving sect of what was once the Amish.

“Thank you, Miss Walker,” he said as he took the stylus back from me. “You’re in luck; we’ll be able to fit you in for surgery tonight.”

“The department pulled some strings,” Ethan said. “The lieutenant said to consider it an apology. They’ll be footing the bill as well.”

“Thoughtful,” I said sarcastically. “I wouldn’t have lost my arm in the first place if they hadn’t gotten in our way.”

“That’s bureaucracy for you,” he sighed. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Then he motioned to Gabe. After a curt nod, they both stood to leave.

“When I was alone with him–“ I said, but he put up a hand to stop me.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll get it out of your Iris, and whatever I can’t, I’ll get from the suspects themselves. With how modified they were, digging through their memories is only a matter of hard work and patience. You have bigger problems right now. We can talk later.”

“See you on the other side,” Gabe said, before clapping me on the shoulder and heading out.