"Do you trust me?"
The words rang like church bells in Mara's ears, just as heavy and haunting.
Truth was, Mara didn't trust a single person involved with this mess. She was here to get paid and go home, she hadn't signed up for any of this Doctor Frankenstein fuckery.
But something worried at her heart, tugging like a child at their mother's apron strings.
Mara searched 37's face for any hints of deception or malice, only finding the kind of bare hearted truthfulness that only children could manage. Raw and unafraid of rebuke or the sharp dark feelings that came with adulthood, in spite of the fear that curled there in the depths of 37's wide and watery eyes.
"Yes, I trust you," Mara found herself saying, kneeling to be at eye level with the little girl who took her hands and held them tight.
"I need you to cut me and feed the blood to Jack," 37 said, with such nonchalance that Mara could only sit there and blink, totally dumbfounded. 37 continued, "My blood is special, it fixes things and people if they eat it or get it in their boo-boos."
Boo-boos… right. The realization that Mara was talking to a literal child settled on her shoulders like a wet blanket. Mara blinked again, suddenly overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. 37 must have seen the faith drain out of Mara's eyes because she frowned and darted away, coming back with one of the gifts she'd given Jack.
A sharp white animal tooth on a string. A forked, bifurcated, branching thing plucked from the mouth of a smaller Zone Mutant brought in for study and experimentation some weeks back. It glinted in the faint overhead lights, glimmering with a sort of cruel opalescence.
37 pressed the tooth into her throat, blood beading from the pinprick of a wound. Mara tried to get up, anticipating what came next, but she was too slow to stop the child from digging the tooth deep into her own neck, drawing it across her throat like a knife.
Mara stopped in her tracks, a wave of warm arterial spray bathing her face as Specimen 37 fell back, hitting the ground with a terrible, horrible thud.
She could only stare, eyes wide, mouth open, the tastes of iron and bile mingling on her tongue and threatening to bring up what was left of her lunch.
The ragged wound in 37's throat grinned up at Mara like a toothless mouth, the girl's lifeblood spilling out of her, seeping into the numerous drains polka-dotting the floor of the stasis chamber.
And then it started to close.
The wound glowed like red hot molten metal and started to close. The sharp and terrible smell of hot iron and cooking meat rolled off of the wound with wisps of sizzling steam.
Edge by edge, the flesh knit back together, slowly at first as if 37's body was figuring out just exactly what to do, then rapidly until the wound was completely gone and the girl was sitting up again, bloody but otherwise unharmed.
"See?" 37 said, pausing to cough up a clot. She was smiling like nothing had happened, her teeth bloody and slick. The ground around the little girl was a dark and sticky mess that Mara couldn't tear her eyes away from.
"Doesn't that… hurt?" Mara said.
37 shook her head, some of her feathers were stuck together with quickly drying gore, but she didn't seem to notice, and if she did notice she certainly didn't care. "Hubie says I've got ex-stem-sive nerve dam-ledge, I can't feel anything."
"Nerve damage, extensive nerve damage," Mara corrected, moving more on autopilot than anything. She picked 37 up off of the ground and tried to wipe the blood off of her face. 37 just squirmed, seeming so utterly human in that moment that Mara was ready to believe that this was all some terrible, horrible dream.
But people don't dream in stasis.
"How do you know your blood can fix Jack like it fixes you?" Mara said.
"Cuz that's what I'm FOR!" 37 cried, the unspoken 'duh' hanging in the air between them. "I'm s'posed to fix stuff, that's why I was born and why Hubie has me and why I get cut open all the time, I'm gonna fix everybody and everything someday! I promised!"
"Promised who?" Mara was back to blinking dumbly and regretting her life choices.
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37 grinned that bloody grin again, a perfect toothy mirror to her once open throat. "My mama!"
"Your… mama?" Mara blinked and 37 nodded, "You… have a mama?" If that freaky undying kid had parents, Mara thought to herself, then there was a nonzero chance that one or both of them was just as (if not more) freaky than she was. She didn't know how to process that sort of information, or if she even wanted to.
"Not anymore, she got blown up when I was little but she still talks to me sometimes." 37 shrugged. Mara blinked, unsure of exactly what to say, and decided not to pry any further.
She wanted to ask how 37's dead mother could still speak to her, but this kid had no pupils and apparently couldn't feel pain or die, and that was enough to unpack for one day.
"How…" Mara paused, trying to sift the right words out of the panicked mess sloshing around in her skull. "How do we help Jack?"
"You just gotta get my blood into him and it'll do the rest." 37 sounded so sure of herself. "Promise!"
Mara's nausea came back in full force. She glanced between the gory little girl in her arms, the puddle of blood on the floor, and what was left of Jack in the tube. This was all too much. She wanted to throw up and be done with it, but something wouldn't let her let this go. Some twisting, twining, slithering THING she couldn't see or sense but she knew it was there the same way people knew they were being watched.
She set 37 down. "OK, tell me what to do."
37 bounced on the balls of her feet, happy to finally be of use. "How do they get food in him?"
Mara pointed at the base of the tube, somewhere around the back near the information panel. "In there, they keep it covered so nobody messes with it." Mara opened the cover, revealing the life support systems.
37 found the input for Jack's feeding tube and pulled it out. She gnawed on her own hand until it bled and sucked up a mouthful of the blood that followed. Mara grimaced, her stomach threatening to finally riot. She grabbed 37's bloody, spitty hand and pulled her aside, shoving the needle-less tip of a feeding syringe into the wound before it could clot or close.
Mara handed the syringe to 37. "Let's use this instead, OK?"
37 just shrugged and stuffed the end of the feeding tube into the tip of the syringe, squeezing the blood into it. A thin red line of potential salvation traced itself through the stasis tube, into Jack's nose, and hopefully his stomach.
Nobody breathed or moved for several heartbeats, even the other creatures in stasis seemed to hold their breath in antici…
…
…
…pation.
Nothing happened.
Jack stayed still and unconscious.
37's face fell, anxiety sinking cold fingers into her guts without mercy. Mara didn't say anything, she couldn't say anything, she just sighed and walked away. 37 watched her go, that cold cold feeling spreading throughout her body until the whole of her was numb and sad and scared all over again.
Specimen 37 twisted the hem of her shirt in her hands, tears welling up in her eyes. She bit her tongue until she tasted iron. She wasn't going to cry, not here, not now.
Mutinous tears rolled down her face and she angrily swiped them away, heat rising from her chest to her ear tips. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't think. Her heart roared in her ears, and drowned out all sense.
Don't cry.
Don't you feckin cry!
Over and over again the words swirled around in her empty skull, her emotions churning like a tide, threatening to drown her.
Go ahead then, throw a tantrum. It's all you know how to do, all you're good for.
37 struggled to swallow a sob, mopping her face with her filthy shirt. Her inner monologue had found a foothold in her self hatred and refused to let go; she could feel her hope crumbling like a sandcastle beneath the waves of her anger and embarrassment.
What makes you think you could save him, or anyone else? You couldn’t even save your own mother.
"Shut up," she whispered, fingers buried in her feathers, nails digging into her scalp. She was bleeding again, she knew that even if she couldn't feel the little crescent cuts she was leaving in her own skin. "Shut. Up."
Her entire body itched and burned. Pin feathers poked their way through the tender skin of her arms and back, blooming into sharp blonde plumage. With each ragged breath, it got worse.
And worse.
And worse.
37 curled into a little feathery ball, her skin glowing, sizzling, steaming. Pin feathers blooming, wilting, blackening. The stasis chamber smelled like smoke and death, the ancient fire suppression system whining to life like an old dog.
Freezing cold water rained down from the overhead sprinklers, the sirens barked and bayed, bathing the room red with violent strobing. 37 did not move from her spot on the ground, even as scientists flooded in, panicked and squawking like headless birds. Even when they tried to remove her from the scene, she stayed balled up and still.
Even when Jack's tube started to shudder, the glass spider-webbing beneath the force of the growing flesh behind it. Even when the glass finally gave, shattering, spilling shards and gel across the floor, followed by a rolling mass of exposed muscle and bone that struggled hard to shape itself into something real and coherent.
Even then.
37 was completely gone.