I raced over to the cafeteria as soon as the girl stabilized—and thank the Angel for that. We’d been able to stop the girl’s hepatic encephalopathy. A mix of lactulose—which Jonan helpfully administered to her via enema—along with an amino acid cocktail of L-ornithine and L-aspartate helped lower her blood ammonia levels back to normal. It stopped her asterixis and kept her seizures at bay.

The bad news: it was little more than a bandage. Having devastated her liver, the virus was now running amok in the girl’s bloodstream. All we could do was wheel her over to the ICU. It took a bit of arguing to make room for her, given how swamped the ICU was with NFP-20 patients, but I managed to sway things in our favor by pointing out that, unlike NFP-20, darkpox was something we knew how to manage.

And then I made a beeline for the cafeteria.

I’d never been afraid of the thought of being hungry before, but now, things were different. Eating was going to make me change; I knew that, now. If only I knew what to expect.

Turning down the hall that led to the nearest cafeteria, I joined the people lined up by the cafeteria doors. The line stretched out longer than usual, due to the social distancing mandate, but also due to the fact that everyone in line worked for the hospital, and so were much more inclined to follow the rules. Several orderlies stood outside the cafeteria doors playing the role of the bouncers. They informed passersby the number of people who could eat was being limited to one per table, out of an abundance of precaution due to the pandemic.

Slowly, the line stepped forward. As I waited, antsy and desperate, I called out to Andalon with my thoughts.

Andalon? Andalon? Please!

But, once again, I got nothing. If anything, the white noise in my head had been growing louder. My head was starting to ache. I felt woozy. Maybe the hunger was interfering with my ability to communicate with her?

Hmm…

My experience with Frank’s ghost had definitely been draining. It was like it ripped breakfast right out of me, and then some. Yes, it might just be rampant speculation on my part, but I think it made sense to assume that the powers Andalon was giving to transformees like me required chemical energy—i.e., food calories—in order to function, just like any other biological process. I didn’t know if that was the right take, but the way everything blurred and twitched before my eyes definitely felt like what having an empty fuel tank might feel like.

Finally, the line advanced to the point where I could step into the cafeteria. I’d removed all my PPE except for the F-99 face mask before stepping in line, and as I walked through the cafeteria doors, I pulled the mask off and tossed it in the waste disposal bin. The thing was absolutely drenched with my saliva. I was positively slobbering.

Then the smell of the food hit me. No, it didn’t just hit me. It punched me in the gut. It was like someone had stuck a vacuum tube down my throat and pulled the insides of my stomach up and out of my mouth.

To my left, the food at the service counter taunted me with its delights: chicken on a vegetable-quinoa toss, dusted with savory herbs and slathered with a sweet berry purée; black beans, carrots, and peas in a white wine sauce; tempura everything.

I moaned.

There was a line.

I couldn’t risk it. My newfound hunger was already scary enough. I did not want to find out what would happen if I had to wait in line even one second longer. I immediately stepped off to the side, cupping my hand to my mouth to keep the drool from spilling out.

I eyed the row of Pick-N-Go refrigerators to the right. They weren’t empty. That was all that mattered.

Praise the sun!

I rushed over to the refrigerators like a lawyer trying to catch a streetlight before it turned. I slapped my hand onto the scanner, ignoring the pain.

Take my money already!

After six grueling seconds, the refrigerator selection screen beeped alive, my name flashing into place at the top. My eyes darted over the available foodstuffs.

I started mashing my fingers onto the screen, selecting one item after another, to the point that I had to manually enter my password to confirm that I wasn’t engaging in identity theft.

I pressed vend.

The machine’s innards slid, spun, and whirred, depositing my selections by the little door near the bottom. As the food piled on, I darted off to the side and grabbed some utensils, along with the biggest tray I could find. The tray’s red plastic was so worn, its edges were almost hairy to the touch—and I couldn’t care less.

A miniature Mt. Aoi of foodstuffs had piled up in the machine’s dispenser. I reached in, pulled the items out one by one, stacked them on the tray, and rushed off to the nearest empty table so quickly, the food’s plastic containers jostled around, threatening to fall. I set the tray down on the table with a thud and pulled up a chair.

For an instant, I hesitated. I recalled what had happened to Kurt. Was that about to happen to me? But then, my whole body stung with pain, and any inhibitions went out the window.

I dug in.

Oh my God.

It was electric. It was the G-spot of myth—G for gastronomic. I ate my first dish almost on instinct: a fish filet sandwich with ketchup and cheese and a side of sweet-potato fries. Halfway through the meal after that—white rice mixed with sweet mild curry, sweet-and-sour pork bit, and droopy steamed broccoli, I realized I’d given up on using my utensils altogether, picking up bits of food with my hands, sucking the sauces and dregs clean off my fingers. I stopped what I was doing and wiped my hands on my napkins, and then tossed the napkin in my mouth.

—Wait, what!?

With my legs, I pushed back against the floor. My chair’s metal legs screeched across the vinyl flooring. I gagged, trying to spit out the napkin, only to stop and realize, in horror, that the napkin had dissolved on my tongue like cotton candy into a mushy goo that tasted almost as sweet. Bits of the goo landed on the tabletop, and spent all of two milliseconds there before I wiped them up with my fingers and swallowed them all over again.

Most eerily of all, I didn’t feel the goo travel all the way down my esophagus. Instead, they dissolved into my throat with a not-unpleasant tingling sensation as my body absorbed them directly.

“Are you okay?”

I turned to see a stranger addressing me. I laughed nervously as I scooted my chair back in. “Yeah, it,” I turned to my meal, “it—uh, the curry was just spicier than what I was expecting, that’s all.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And they shrugged and walked off.

I stared at the other two meals I’d gotten with foreboding. I’d seen Merritt eating her blanket. I guess that meant I could eat non-food too?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.

Maybe if I eat the rest of my normal food, I won’t feel compelled to keep stuffing myself with used napkins.

It was worth a shot.

Still, my arms trembled as I opened the plastic packaging of meal number three. Then, from my coat pocket, my work console rang. I pulled it out, and set it on the tabletop, pulling out the stand from the back and propping it up at an angle.

I answered the call, shoving the tray off to the side, out of view but not out of reach.

“Hey,” Jonan said, casually. He held his console close to his face.

“Do you have any updates?” I asked. I continued eating throughout the conversation, forcing myself to use my utensils and be patient, fighting the urge to just shove it all in my face.

Jonan nodded. “Yeah, I’d thought you’d like to know.”

I sighed. “You’re darn right I do.”

“Right now, the girl seems stable enough,” Jonan said, “but her overall condition is still pretty bad. I’d say it’s a coin toss as to whether she lives or dies. As for the hepatic encephalopathy, the amino acids are keeping her blood ammonia levels down for the moment, but it’s another coin toss as to whether or not she’ll need a new liver printed for her.”

“What will that entail?” I asked.

“It’s a standard procedure,” Jonan explained. “We take a tissue biopsy, revert the cells to a pluripotent state and put them in a nutrient-hormone bath, and then start printing them onto the collagen organ architecture. The girl’s young, so it shouldn’t take more than two or three days to have it ready. I’ve taken the liberty of taking a sample and sending it to the lab. The process is already well on its way.”

“Isn’t that… wasteful?” I asked.

Snorting, Jonan grinned. “It’s just a liver, Dr. Howle. Printing one is little more than a high school science project.”

I took a glug from the bottle of sparkling lemonade I’d gotten along with my meal.

“But what about the cost for them?” I asked. “Oh, and have you found any signs of their chips?”

Despite our best efforts, we hadn’t been able to locate their implant chips during the initial examination. Hand chips were installed in infancy, and any maternity ward worth its feathers had the equipment for doing so right on hand, so, unless our patients were full-blown wackadoodles, they should have had their chips in their hands just like everyone else. Ani maintained there was a possibility the inflammation and hemorrhaging caused by the darkpox was interfering with the scanner, so, we’d decided to wait a bit to see if the scanner might be able to read the patients’ chips once they’d stabilized.

“The swelling should have gone down by now,” I added, “right?”

Immediately, Jonan furrowed his brow, any trace of pleasantries vanished right off his face.

“There are two big elephants in the room,” Jonan said. “The chips are the first.”

“What’s the other one?” I asked, chewing on a savory spoonful of vegetable fried rice.

“Don’t jump ahead,” he said, glancing off to the side as a nurse ran past him.

“Is something going on?” I asked.

“Yes, but this is more important. The two adult males appear to be responding beautifully to the monoclonal antibodies.”

“Thank goodness,” I said. I leaned back into my chair, sighing in relief.

“Meanwhile, on a hunch, Ani went and got a metal detector. And when she was done with it…” Jonan’s voice trailed off.

“Yes?” I asked, pausing my eating.

“They don’t have chips, Dr. Howle.”

While not having a chip wasn’t illegal, it meant that they wouldn’t be entitled to any of the legal protections that came with being chipped. So, though no one would stop them from getting treatment, no one could stop them from being consigned to debt slavery because the charges were beyond their capacity to ever pay them.

It fudging sucked.

Suddenly, my console’s speakers blared out the sound of a door slamming shut. The constant background noise coming from Jonan’s end of the call softened and turned hollow and echoey. Focusing on the edges of the screen, it looked like he’d stepped into a stairwell. Footsteps echoed in the background as Jonan walked into the late afternoon shadow beneath one of the staircases.

In the dimmed light, I noticed the strained, grave expression on Dr. Derric’s face. Though I was still getting to know him, the expression struck me as out-of-character for him. There was nothing smarmy on his face, no sign of the braggart I was gradually learning to tolerate—barely.

“What are you worried about?” I asked. “What’s the other elephant?”

The thought of Jonan being worried was more than enough to get me worried.

“I keep coming back to our mysteriously fashionable darkpox patients,” he said, smiling bitterly. His features tensed. “The boy and his mother were already in the disease’s fulminant stage, the last hill before the crash and burn.”

My eyes narrowed. “Where are you going with this?”

He grimaced. “It’s the math of it. The numbers don’t add up. Darkpox has a three to four week long incubation period. If death occurs, it almost always happens within a week of symptom onset. However, patients become contagious no later than the second week after exposure. If we assume our Jane Doe is near the end of her first week of symptomatic illness, even assuming the shortest possible incubation period—just shy of three weeks—that still leaves us with nearly three weeks where she would have been actively shedding viral particles in her breath, two of which she’d spend walking around in perfect health. And yet…” His voice trailed off.

“Sword strike me down,” I muttered, shaking my head. “You’re right!” My shoulders went slack. I lowered my head, gazing down at the vinyl flooring underfoot. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Well, it’s second nature once you’ve gone through an internship with a Prescott Pharmaceutical think-tank and written a paper on darkpox containment protocols and public health ordinances,” Jonan said.

I rolled my eyes at him, and then took another gulp of my sparkling lemonade. “Is there anything you haven’t done?”

“Come in second place,” he said, with a smirk.

I groaned. “Please just get on with it,” I said. “I’ve had a long day.”

Jonan nodded.

“For nearly eight hundred years, darkpox blisters have been the world’s most recognizable disease symptom. Even with the most optimistic estimates, there should be sufficient spread for a frightful cluster of darkpox cases out near Rebel’s Spark or Emerald Ridge or wherever else these patients came from—and… we’d hear about it. Thing is… we haven’t. Not a peep.” Jonan raised his hands and pressed his thumb and index finger together in sync with the peep.

“According to the medics,” I said, “the surviving eyewitnesses agreed that the carriage carrying our five patients appeared out of nowhere.” I chuckled nervously. “It almost sounds like time travel.”

And, of course, time travel was impossible. Right?

Ordinarily, “time travel is impossible” wasn’t the sort of thing I’d second guess myself over, but—now that I’d let the cat out of the bag—suddenly, I realized it wasn’t as impossible as I would have liked it to be.

Despite my satiated belly, my stomach sank.

Dr. Derric sighed, flattening his eyebrows.

I blinked. “Wait, no…” I said, shaking my head, sitting upright, “don’t tell me…”

Jonan glared at me. “You don’t graduate from Fitchtide Medical School by going off half-cocked when it comes to something like time travel. I know it sounds crazy, but… it’s the simplest explanation, and the things I’ve seen recently have made me more receptive to the idea that reality isn’t what we think it is.”

I wondered if Jonan knew that the transformees possessed psychokinetic abilities. As far as I knew, no one had informed him of that particular detail yet.

“What makes you so willing to use manga plot devices to explain the unexpected?” I asked.

“She really wasn’t exaggerating,” Jonan said, with a chuckle, “you really do read comics.”

My reflexes told me to correct him—the proper term was graphic novel, but I didn’t have the luxury for pettiness. I let Jonan continue.

He gulped and shook his head, his tone turning deadly serious. “Nothing else makes sense from what I’ve seen. Even if we ignore their clothes and the eyewitness testimonies, there’s the matter of the assays. Wherever these people are, they haven’t been drinking fluoridated water—I checked their teeth—and they haven’t been eating iodized salt. All salt is iodized nowadays. I even ran a couple of antigen tests. They haven’t received any of the standard childhood vaccines.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.

“It’s not just illegal, it’s impossible. We’re exposed to them every day whenever we eat food that hasn’t been grown in our own backyards. And the older of the two adult males… he’d broken his arm as a kid, and it healed the old fashioned way. No bio-epoxy. So, either these folks have been living underground along with the mole people, or…” he titled his head, “you see what I mean?” Jonan said.

“Fudge…” I muttered, my voice breaking.

Jonan shuddered, clearing his throat nervously. “So, uh… Dr. Howle… what do we do about this?”

For a moment, I stared in silence, and then shrugged. “Wait for them to wake up, I guess. Hopefully, they’ll be able to give us a rational explanation for all this.”

Closing his eyes, Jonan exhaled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Fuck!” he hissed.

It can’t be time travel. Time travel is impossible, right?

Right?