I texted Heggy about Merritt’s surgery. While it was routine for nurses to prep a patient before going under, there was nothing routine about getting Merritt out of Room 268. You’d need the proper clearances just to get in, then you’d have to administer a stimulant to get Merritt out of the drug-induced sedation she was under. I knew Dr. Marteneiss had tabs on nurses she’d trusted with the clearance for entering 268, so I figured she’d be the best person to take care of the details. Fortunately, Heggy was happy to oblige me.
By the time I stepped out of the elevator and onto the ground floor of Ward E, where the surgery would be taking place, I was about to notify Dr. Nowston about the surgery when Brand sent me a videophone of his own accord, asking for an update on the “status of the battlefield.” As for Merritt’s surgery, Brand invited himself the instant I brought up its rapidly approaching deadline.
“They only recently finished installing new camera equipment,” he’d said. “Gives images of unprecedented resolution at both macroscopic and microscopic scales. It’s pathology on the go!”
I’d told him he could tell me all about it when we got there. I was glad to know I wouldn’t be going in alone.
Brand’s response to that was utterly characteristic of him: “We all need somebody to lean on,” he’d said, with a nod.
Ain’t that the truth.
I wasn’t the first to arrive at the operating theater, but I did make it there before Brand did. Like any of WeElMed’s newer operating rooms, Theater 12 had a second floor viewing area designed for people to watch the proceedings going on in the surgical theater below. The viewing area consisted of a three-hundred-sixty-degree amphitheater surrounding the operating room’s glass dome ceiling, with a cylindrical glass wall enclosing the dome to keep anyone from trying to climb it. The invisible circuitry enmeshed in the cylinder and the dome turned both surfaces into gigantic displays, capable of showing any number of combinations of images. You could even sync your console’s screen with a section of the cylinder through the WeElMed app, provided you’d been given the necessary permissions.
As for the seating, their designer had chosen to meld them together with the floor and stairs into a single stair-seat composite like an amphitheater of old. In place of traditional upholstery, the whole viewing area was covered by fuzzy green wall-to-wall carpeting. Curiously, when you stood on it, the floor had the consistency one would expect from a floor, but as soon as you sat down on it, the consistency changed into something much softer—cushion-like, even. It was most likely some new-fangled polymer.
I spent the final minutes of the countdown standing at the circular walkway at the base of the stair-seats, leaning over the guard-rail with my sweaty blue-gloved hands, making sure to keep my fingers off the buttons that activated the intercom. It was while I was standing at the railing that Brand finally arrived. He spent a couple minutes pointing out the operating theater’s fancy new equipment, exactly like he said he would. Hydraulic robotic arms dangled from the glass dome’s apex like a mechanical bouquet, bearing the new camera technology. Sections of the dome’s underside displayed close-ups of the operating floor as seen by the handful of cameras nestled among the robotic bouquet. Gleaming hardware formed two quarter-circle walls at the center of the room, surrounding the operating table, flanking it like wings.
Merritt was brought into the theater ahead of the surgeons, rolled in by two nurses. They pushed her surgical bed up to the two quarter-circles of hardware. It seemed being in a sedated state had slowed the progress of her transformation, not that she was sedated any more. She didn’t look noticeably different from how she’d looked when I’d seen her last night in Room 268 with the other transformees. There was fear and anticipation in her face, and it played pizzicato with my heartstrings.
And, unfortunately for the nurses, she was not being cooperative with their efforts to move her onto the operating table.
Merritt reared her head. “Please,” she yelled, “go away!” She sounded desperate.
I leaned over the guardrail.
One of Merritt’s arms wasn’t secured, and she flailed it, striking an unseen assailant as she yelled. “I said, leave me alone!”
My grip on the rail tightened.
One of the nurses rushed over and held Merritt’s arm down while the other secured it in place.
“Mr. Genneth!”
Looking down, I saw Andalon standing beside me.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Andalon pointed at the operating theater below. “Look.”
And look, I did. Out of nowhere, two flickering figures appeared in the operating theater. One was a child—a little boy—singing loud, grating nonsense as he jumped up and down on Merritt’s bed, his feet phasing in and out of her body. The other figure was elderly man. He was stubborn and very nearly bald, spending his time standing off to the side and yelling at the boy to stop, which only succeeded in making the ruckus worse.
There wasn’t any need to tell me what they were.
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Merritt’s ghosts.
“Please!” Merritt begged. There were tears in her eyes. “Stop!”
Holy Angel!
Merritt’s synesthesia! I couldn’t begin to imagine the pain and discomfort the ghosts’ were causing her with their ruckus.
“I don’t like seeing Mrs. BokBok upset, Genneth,” Andalon said, “but…” her voice trailed off.
I stiffened. Is there something you can do?
Andalon nodded, pointing at Mrs. Elbock. “I think I can get those mean ghosts to stop, but,” and here, she shook her head, “I can’t keep hiding your ghosts at the same time. It’s too hard.”
So it’s either her or me, then?
For once, it was a no-brainer.
“Help Merritt,” I said. “She doesn’t deserve to suffer like this. I’ll bear her troubles; she doesn’t need to endure this; I’ll do it for her.”
Nodding, Andalon closed her eyes and focused, and the subtlest of electric tingles danced down my back. Instantly, the ghosts in the operating theater vanished at the same time as a couple flickers of my own appeared in the viewing area. Mrs. Elbock yelped in astonishment, her troubles ended. She looked around in awe, immediately calming, and began apologizing to the nurses, who now looked almost as confused as she did, and after that, Merritt didn’t give them the slightest bit of trouble as they transferred her onto the operating table.
I pressed one of the intercom buttons on the guard-rail. “I’m here, Merritt,” I said, “up here. Everything is going to be alright.”
Merritt looked up and found me. She smiled.
“You’re here, my Angel…” She was euphoric. “The answer to my prayers,” she added.
Her words struck a chord in me. An impulse stirred deep within me. For the first time in weeks, I made the Bondsign, and then stared up at the ceiling, facing where I knew the Sun hung up in the sky, out of sight, but not out of mind. My memory and spatial reasoning faculties had developed to the point where I didn’t need to think about where the Sun was at any given moment. I just knew. That knowledge, alone, made me shiver.
Please, I prayed, help her, Holy Angel. Help Merritt. Help my patients, my family. Help Andalon. I bit my lips. “Help me,” I muttered. “And help Andalon,” I looked down at the little girl.
“Genneth?”
I turned to see Brand standing worryingly at his seat on the second row of steps.
Walking toward him, I took a seat of my own several feet away.
“Were you…?”
I nodded and shrugged. “Yeah.” Exhaling, I swallowed hard. “I wish I could be down there with her,” I said, looking over the glass dome. “I need a win.”
“Don’t we all?” Brand said, nodding back, his arms resting on his bent knees. He shook his head. “Brother, this morning was absolutely crazy, wasn’t it?”
“I…” I shuddered. “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to talk about it.”
Brand nodded. “Well, hopefully this procedure will help us better understand what’s going on,” he said, mustering a cautious smile. “If we can understand it, then, maybe, we can beat it.”
If only it were that simple.
I nodded wordlessly.
“It’s about to start,” Brand said, softly clapping his hands together. “I got a good feeling about this.” He pointed at me. “You, me, and that lucky bowtie of yours. The tide’s gonna turn soon,” he said, “I just know it.”
Before I could respond, the doors at the far end of the operating theater opened. The three surgeons who entered were dressed in full-blown plastic hazmat suits, like liquidators at a radiation spill. The bulky, gaudy yellow-green suits tented around their bodies. I saw their faces through the plastic visors of the suits’ helmets, stern and solemn. The first two that entered were new to me: a light-skinned man about my age, clean shaven and with hair the color of hot chocolate. The other was a woman, maybe a little younger than her companion, with a thick-set face and short, straw-colored hair. The third surgeon, of course, was Cassius.
The theater’s sound system was so clear, I could hear the subtle suction of air rushing out as the doors slid shut behind him and the room sealed itself in a negative pressure environment.
The audience in attendance consisted of Brand and myself, as well as a couple folks I could only assume were members of other Wards’ Crisis Management Teams. And, of course, there were my ghosts, and none of them were flickering in the slightest. I just had to ignore everyone who I didn’t already know, and hope that if they were spirits, they’d lose interest and disappear—and, if they weren’t, well… a man can never give too many apologies.
Most of my spectral visitors seemed to disappear after about a minute or so of me giving them the cold shoulder, but I suspected that was mostly because whatever force was keeping their manifestations tethered wasn’t strong enough to sustain their presence for very long.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen if a persistent one like Aicken or Frank popped up.
Andalon, meanwhile, had retreated to the not-here-place.
Dr. Arbond glared at the nurses by Merritt’s side. “Why isn’t she already anesthetized?” he demanded.
One of the nurses bowed in apology. “S-Sorry, Doctor, the patient was in an agitated, delusional state until just a moment ago. It wouldn’t have been safe to put her under.”
Cassius stared at Merritt, then at the nurse. “Well, she ain’t agitated now.”
“One moment,” the other nurse said.
The man pulled a hose out from under Merritt’s bed and placed the translucent plastic breather at its tip onto Mrs. Elbock’s half-rotting face. I heard the valve twist as the nurse bent down and released the flow of anesthetic gas into the hose. The other nurse went to work hooking Merritt up to some of the devices on either side of the bed.
Cassius leaned over Merritt and looked her in the eyes. “Take calm, deep breaths, Merritt—alright? Pick your favorite number bigger than ten, and count backward from it inside your head.”
Mrs. Elbock’s eyes rolled over to me, and then back to Cassius, at whom she nodded. Her moist breaths condensed on the breather’s inner surface. For a moment, Merritt’s eyes fluttered, and then shut as she passed into dreamless non-awareness.
Cassius turned to the nurses. “Thank you. That’ll be all for now.”
The two nurses bowed respectfully and left the room, taking Merritt’s bed with them. The doors hissed twice in close succession as they opened and closed.
Andalon, could you maybe give me some help with my ghosts now?
“I… I’m kinda tired, Mr. Genneth.” Her response was noticeably fainter than usual.
I decided to leave her be. If I pushed her too hard, I’d probably drain my fuel reserves and end up with a nasty case of hunger pangs.
Walking over to the console mounted on the bedside stand, Cassius swept the back of his white gloved hand over the chip-reader. Immediately, the hydraulic arms dangling from the ceiling flexed like an insect stretching its legs, blossoming wide as a svelte, feminine voice filled the room.
“Greetings, Dr. Cassius Arbond,” ALICE said.
In the corner of my eye, I saw the glow coming off doors as the bright red indicator light came on above the entrance.
Merritt’s surgery had officially begun.