“That’s great,” said Pearl. “Let’s hope we can cure these two as quickly.”
Gidri and Ihsan were being kept in a secured upper wing of the hospital, with police guards and a small, carefully vetted staff. Potash nodded to them as we walked by, and I wondered if they were the same ones who’d worked with him as well. How much had their lives changed, just by being on call in the ER the day we killed Mary Gardner?
I checked the dummy account I’d set up and found more than thirty messages. Not bad for about five hours. Most of them would be random people off the street, asking about the flyers or yelling at me for causing trouble; at least one of them was guaranteed to be from Pancho’s Pizza itself, demanding to know who I was so they could sue me for libel. I’d have to read each one carefully, trying to see whatever clues The Hunter had left so I could figure out which one was him. If he’d written me at all.
“In here,” said Pearl, and he tapped a container on the wall beside the locked door. “We advise masks, because whatever those guys have you definitely don’t want to catch it.”
We strapped on paper masks—they didn’t seem like they’d do much good, but whatever—and pulled on nylon gloves. There was a whole custodian’s rig outside the door as well, including a bucket of water, a mop, and an army of bottled cleaning chemicals. I wondered how often they cleaned this hallway, just out of paranoia. Pearl checked our masks and then led us inside. Gidri and Ihsan were laying side by side on parallel beds, hooked up to what looked like every machine the hospital could fit into the room. The root of Pearl’s worry was instantly obvious, and I realized that the word “degraded” was both surprisingly correct and woefully inadequate. Ihsan, the big man, looked like he had leprosy; his skin was pocked and splitting and sliding off, almost like it wasn’t connected to his body at all. Gruesome as he was, Gidri was even more shocking—his formerly supermodel-worthy face had wrinkled and bloated and sagged, his limbs twisted, his bones curled like old paper in a fire. He looked not injured but deformed, so hideously I could barely imagine—even having seen him before—how his body had ever looked normal.
Potash looked at the screens as if trying to make sense of the various numbers and charts and blinking alerts, but Pearl waved him away. “Don’t bother,” he said. “None of it makes sense. Not a single one of the readings have any bearing on what we think might be happening—except for the handful that do, which only make us more confused. Their heart rates are wrong, but not in the way their conditions suggest that they should be wrong; the same goes for their temperature, their white cell count, their oxygen saturation—pretty much anything you care to name. We’ve biopsied their tissue and found all sorts of problems, just not the ones we expected, and none of our treatments create the kind of response we’re hoping for. We even took a sample of this one’s bone tissue”—he pointed at Gidri—“and it started shriveling under the microscope. I didn’t even know bones could shrivel. You told me to take care of them, but without some specialists in here to help figure out what’s wrong with them, they’re going to die in a matter of days. At the most.”
Diana touched one of Gidri’s limbs; I expected it to move when she did, like a floppy foam noodle, but it was rigid.
Potash looked at me. “You’re the expert.”
Sure, the one guy who recognizes my skills is the guy who thinks I’m a psychopath. I suppose he’s not wrong, but it still hurts.
Fortunately, I knew exactly what was wrong. “They’re malnourished.”
“We’ve got them on the best IV supplements in the hospital,” said Pearl.
“These two are nourished by a very specific set of things,” I said. “Things you don’t have, and which we are really unwilling to provide.”
Pearly looked at me intently. “If there’s something we can do to save them—”
“Can you give us a minute?” asked Diana.
“I need to know whatever it is you’re not telling me,” said Pearl.
“Just give us a minute,” said Potash. “We’ll fill you in after we discuss it.”
He shrugged and let himself out. When the door locked Diana looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “You think they need to feed on somebody?”
I nodded. “Whatever they need—skin, maybe, or beauty—Gidri looks like the kind of Withered that steals youth and beauty from people—they can’t get it while comatose. The Withered eat food, as far as I can tell, and they support their bodies with the same basic physical materials that the rest of us do. They don’t want to starve to death any more than you do. But their human shape is sustained by other things, and they can’t get those things like this, and no amount of food or vitamins is going to make up for that.”