The white walls in Yizhi make everything seem cold. Medics sporting gas masks flow in and out in a constant stream, all giving Mei and me a wide berth, squeezed onto a bench in the corner of the room.
Mei’s angry reserve from this morning seems to have sucked her dry, her head lolling sleepily against the wall as she draws crosses down her leg with one finger. Cale looks pathetically small under her blankets in the center of the room, dwarfed by the large hospital bed. Like a child.
I feel like an unwilling spectator at a fight, waiting for the bloody show to start. I can’t just sit and watch while Cale’s heart monitor beeps slower and slower. But pacing the short length of the room isn’t helping. Why are they keeping us down here? It could be weeks before she wakes up.
I catch myself rubbing the gore-tooth necklace between my fingers. The smooth surface is stained ivory and no longer sharp, as though it has been many years since it was taken from the gore’s mouth. As my fingers explore the wider base, they stop at a small ridge I didn’t notice before.
Restlessly walking back to the door, I hold the tooth tight in my hand, as if squeezing it might somehow get me out of here. A masked Yizhi squeezes by me to shift a tube in Cale’s arm, connecting it to a bag of clear fluids hanging up above the bed.
I remember what it felt like to be Asleep. The terror of not being able to move, not even twitch. Voices all around you saying that you might as well be dead. That you could be already. I tried to tell them. I tried to reach for the doctor, to shake some sense into the hand that was constantly feeling for my pulse. But nothing worked, nothing moved. My body was a prison.
I shrug the feeling off, looking back at the tooth. I almost drop it in surprise. It’s glowing.
I can barely tell in the brightly lit room, but there is definitely a light inside of the thing. When I pull along the ridge at the top, a line appears and the tooth comes apart in two pieces, something falling out and rattling on the floor.
The medic by Cale’s bed looks around for the source of the sound, but I bend down to pick up the fallen object before she sees, pretending to stretch. It’s black, about the size of my thumbnail. I hold it in my fist, flinching when the back of my hand begins to glow.
Slipping into the bathroom attached to the room, I turn the light off and sit on the edge of the low sink with my fist balled around the object. The entire back of my hand glows orange, black characters spelled out in the faint light. It says, Where are you? I can’t find you.
I unclench my hand and the characters disappear. When I clench it again, a set of character radicals appears along the side of my hand, a purple circle of light pulsing below my pinkie knuckle, as if it is asking me to write my own message. Cale mentioned Zhuanjia was experimenting with some new communication device. I press one radical and it appears in the space below, a small box blinking for me to write out the rest of the strokes for my desired character. I type the words In Yizhi with Mei and Cale slowly, not used to putting characters together this way.
Leave. Now, he responds.
I flip the light back on and return to the room, now empty of medics. Mei jerks awake as I walk by, expression hard as her eyes follow me. The guard sitting outside looks up when I open the door. Her hand is on her gun.
I go back into the bathroom and bring up the set of radicals, writing out, Not an option.
The reply comes almost instantly. I’m coming.
Fitting the thing back into the tooth, I make myself go out of the bathroom, switching places with Mei as she jumps up from the bench, hands restlessly touching everything on the walls, the equipment crammed into the room, then ducking down behind Cale’s bed.
“Mei?”
Something rips. Suddenly, she’s up, eyes wide with something I can’t identify. Fear? Her chest is heaving and her hands are hidden behind her back. “Mei? What are you doing?”
If I didn’t know better, I would think . . .
She runs at me, a long piece of wire stretched between her hands, and it’s around my neck before I can yell. The force of her running knocks me over the edge of the bench and onto the floor, Mei straddling my stomach. I manage to get a hand under the wire before she pulls it tight, but she’s much stronger than I am, and the wire is starting to cut across my palm, my windpipe, air choking out of me as she pulls. Her breaths come in shuddering gasps, face twisted with panic.
Three gas-masked Yizhi burst into the room. Two pull her off me, trying to contain her flailing limbs as she kicks and hits. Mei catches the third medic in the stomach with her foot, knocking a long syringe out of her hand. I roll over onto my side and grab it, flinging the wire away from me. The two holding Mei manage to get her facedown on the floor, one holding her arms, the other her legs. I jab the syringe into her exposed hip. She immediately goes limp.
“What in the name of Yuan’s bloody ax is going on?” I yell. The nurses don’t answer, impassive behind those masks. “She isn’t infected! How could she—”
Something jabs the side of my own leg, and everything goes gray, spinning into black.
CHAPTER 32
I WAKE TO AN ENDLESS white blur. My arms and legs won’t move at all, heavy, as if I’ve been buried alive and the earth is pressing down against me. For a moment, my mind panics, racing through all the memories I have of being Asleep, trapped inside my body but awake, listening. Helpless.
As I struggle against my lifeless arms and legs, my lungs start to contract, giving me less and less air. Is this how I’m going die? Gasping for air in my brain while my lungs refuse to listen?
But my eyes are open. I can look around me, even catch a glimpse of my nose. I can’t be Asleep. No one falls Asleep twice. A calm settles over me as the thought sinks in. My fingers start to twitch and my toes tingle. My neck seems to have strength and I lift my head up. I’m not lost. My body is here, strapped to a pink mat, my necklace pulling at my throat. The numb heaviness weighing my body down must be the last of some kind of sedation wearing off.
The whiteness around me is familiar, the nylon cords coiled around my arms and legs something I’ve faced before, but I can’t place it. A light over my face comes on and a soothing female voice purrs, “Please hold your position. Two minutes, twenty seconds remaining.” I’m in the levels machine again.
A door slams as I twist against the restraints. The tube starts to hum, vibrations throbbing through me. The end of the tube pops open and my mat moves out, inch by inch, until my muscles clench with impatience. When my head finally emerges, it’s Sole who is standing over me.
She’s rattled, fingers shaking as she fumbles with the restraints. There’s a shiny silver table pushed up next to the tube, bright lights focused in hard circles on the reflective surface, pooling at the end around a drain. A tray of sharp-looking instruments is arranged next to it, a clear mask sitting on top, connected to a tall silver canister by a long tube.
Sole’s hand shoots forward, an offer to help me sit up. I take it, shivering as the cool, sterile air floods through the paper hospital gown that seems to be all I’m wearing. My feet are unsteady when they hit the floor, and I have to lean against Sole to stay up. She still hasn’t said anything.
“What is going on?” I ask, fear thrilling through me as we move toward the metal table, my eyes catching on a particularly lethal-looking scalpel. Was it Sole all along? From that first frozen smile to now, leading me toward an operating table?
She doesn’t stop at the table, dragging me toward the door. “No questions right now. Just move.”
The door opens to a loud siren echoing around an empty office, the telescreen flashing red and black with the word FIRE racing up and down the room.
“Should we be running?” I ask.
She keeps dragging and pushing me along toward the door that takes us out into the main Yizhi hallway. “Howl set off the fire alarm upstairs so I could get you out. If you try to run right now, you’ll just fall over. They pumped enough tranq into you to drop someone twice your weight.”