CYAN AREA NATURE RESERVE, PROXIMA CITY
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 7:43 P.M.
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Despite being immersed in a gigantic metropolis, with so much vegetation around, the night there gave the impression of being deeper than it was.
Inside the small nature reserve of the Cyan Central Park, Malin inspected Adam’s wounds, who, leaning against a tree, stoically endured an irrepressible urge to faint. The mercenary with whom the poor guy had just engaged in combat was on the ground, not far from them.
Adam was truly bruised. Farewell to his pristine gallantry, at least for a few days. He had bloody eyes, one closer than the other; a couple of cuts on the cheekbones; the one on the right side was large; and it would soon swell enough to reduce his sight a little more. His lips were swollen, his teeth dirty with blood. His hair was a mess full of dust, splinters of trees and leaves. He had half his face covered by a layer of dirt and the other half with blood flowing from a cut on his forehead. And those were just the wounds on his head; those on the rest of the body…
Malin decided to leave those concerns for later. Now she had to address another problem: the men in gray behind her, the Satellite agents.
“What do you want with Mr. White?” she asked them.
“To come with us,” one replied.
“In these conditions, my protégé won’t go anywhere but to a hospital.”
Adam tried to speak, but Malin silenced him with a wink.
“Actually,” said the other man, and withdrew a note from his suit, “you’re also summoned, Miss Viveka.”
Malin looked over her shoulder.
“Well, it’ll have to wait. Now I have a wounded person to attend to.”
The agent put the note back on his suit, pulled out his phone, and took some distance so they wouldn’t hear what he was saying.
From different parts of the forest, six agents, who had apparently been hiding this whole time, showed up.
Adam wondered how many of them had enjoyed watching the beating, and a mixture of rage and helplessness brought tears to his eyes. Bastards! None of them had done anything to stop the giant man.
With bloodshot eyes, he watched as some agents picked up every last piece of the shattered Park Ranger Cyclops from the ground, while others loaded Kitten into a kind of metal stretcher and strapped him down with laser belts. Of course, reducing that orangutan was an easy task now; he had gotten the worst of it. The brute was unconscious; the only effort that those damned made was to move a dead weight, enormous, but dead weight, nonetheless. No one had ever come face to face with the big man, let alone receive one of his punches. They made it look so easy! In a blink of an eye, the agents had already cleaned up the scene of the fight and were disappearing into the trees and the dim light, taking the prisoner with them.
The same man in gray who had gone away to speak on the phone returned.
“In the face of this unexpected setback, we have postponed the summons for the coming week,” he said.
“If you guys had intervened when you had the chance, I wouldn’t be like this, and I’d have gladly gone with you,” Adam said. Even though his head was spinning, and his jaw hurt like hell, he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut.
“We had a specific task, sir, and we have fulfilled it,” the agent replied. He took a tiny notebook and a pen out of his suit, made some notes, then ripped the little sheet off and passed it on to Malin.
Adam frowned.
“Is this son of a bitch giving us a ticket?”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Malin put the note in her pocket without even reading it.
“There will be serious consequences if you decide to ignore the summons,” one agent said.
“You know what we mean, Miss Viveka,” added the other, and turning around, they disappeared among the bushes and the surrounding darkness, just as they had presented themselves.
Minutes later, an ambulance from the emergency service parked on the park’s sidewalk. Malin, who had come out of the nature reserve to wait for them, led them to Adam. The night had fallen, and the lighting in that sector was so scarce, the paramedics needed the help of their medical flashlights to enter the area.
To justify his injuries, Adam told them thugs had assaulted him and then ran away. He didn’t go into details to avoid stepping on his own lie; the pain he was in was terrible, and he couldn’t think of a good story properly.
He feared the paramedics would make a negative comment on his appearance like, ‘Oh, man! Your face will never be the same,’ or something like that; but none of them said anything because they were professionals and had probably seen dozens of wounded like this, or because his condition wasn’t so serious.
Finally, exhaustion took over him. His eyes began to close, and the passage of time was slipping away from his perception. He had the vague image of himself lying on a stretcher and being taken into an ambulance, and then, in the dark, inside the vehicle, and the small red lights of the medical equipment around him. And during all this, the image of Malin by his side.
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ORLOWSKI HOSPITAL
10:05 P.M.
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Crossing her arms in a lonely hospital hallway, Malin waited for the doctors to finish treating her partner.
She went around in circles with a shudder in her stomach and a thousand worries prowling her head like flies over a corpse: The Satellites, the summons, and Adam’s condition. The poor guy had courageously endured such trashing, but to see him in those conditions…
Did the fear of what the Satellites might worry her so much it had sensitized her more than it should? Or was it the memory of Juzo, which was still too present? Seeing Adam in those conditions was like seeing Juzo and…
The paramedics left the room, and behind them, a doctor with abundant black hair and gray mustaches, very thin and with baggy scrubs, came out. The man presented himself as the doctor in charge of the night shift.
“Your…” he said and stopped, not knowing what relationship she had with the wounded. Malin didn’t clarify it. “Well, I must tell you, he was very lucky. Some people got hospitalized due to a beating like that; while he isn’t only conscious, he even had the luxury of rejecting the wheelchair we offered him.
“The patient can walk, although I would recommend him a few days of rest. If he faints or vomits, please visit a hospital immediately. Don’t let him stop taking the antibiotics I prescribed, one every twelve hours, during…” While talking, the doctor was nodding without taking his eyes from Malin’s, as if he were asking her if she got what he was saying or not, perhaps because he noted she was kind of absent. “…Cooling patches and chamomile tea could help the swelling,” he said in a moment. Malin did hear that part and would remember it later. “Do you understand, miss?”
Malin nodded, and the doctor stepped away so she could enter to see the patient.
Sitting on the examination couch, Adam finished zipping off his battered tracksuit jacket. He moved his arms gently; his muscles ached as if he had soaked them in acid. He had a mark under his left eye that had quickly taken a violet hue, and a pink one on his right cheekbone, which was partially covered with a patch. Another patch was covering the already stitched up cut on his forehead. The punches in the ribs, hips, and legs were now covered by the clothes and they weren’t visible to the unaided eye, but there they were, and they hurt.
Fortunately, and to his surprise, Adam had received no serious injuries or fractures whatsoever.
“When will the bruises on my face wear off?” had been his first question to the doctor. He’d just come out of something that could have cost him his physical integrity permanently—and his greatest fear was the bruises on his face? Really?
“About fifteen to twenty days from now,” the doctor with mustaches had responded, showing him an X-ray of his skull. “It helped you not to have received cuts in your facial bones. The only thing damaged was your skin and a thin layer of muscle. The truth is you’ve been a very lucky guy. If I were you, I’d stay away from parks at night.”
But Adam was too sore to be grateful to have come out with only scratches. He had a constant ringing in his ears and slight dizziness that prompted him to close his eyes and lie down right there. Meanwhile, his mind went from Kitten to the mysterious men in gray, and from them to the message that the millionaire playboy Lisandro Carinae had texted him shortly before the attack—the message that implied that he and Malin shared a relationship—and then returned to the pain that gritted him.
Hell! He couldn’t think straight when even breathing caused horrible pains under his ribs.
And his face… It was a mess! And his smile, spoiled! He had several loose teeth and couldn’t stop touching them with the tip of his tongue. The subtle swing he perceived in the canine tooth and on the front one was horrible. He had to go to the dentist as soon as possible. That damn giant had really damaged him!