She looked aghast, but before she could protest, he took the lie he’d started, and ran with it.
“That pill I told you about … I already took it. It’s like a switch, whether on or off depends on what state the body’s in.” He met her gaze, held it, and sent up a silent prayer that she didn’t know half as much about hypothetical adrenal compounds as she did about circuits. “If I don’t do this soon, Angie”—he winced for good measure—“the compound will kill me.”
She paled.
He held his breath.
His phone vibrated again.
“How long?” she asked at last.
He took a step toward her, letting one of his legs nearly buckle under some imaginary strain. He caught himself on the edge of a table with a grimace, and found her gaze as the buzzing in his pocket stopped.
“Minutes.”
*
“THIS is mad,” whispered Angie over and over as she helped bind Victor’s legs to the table. He worried that even now, with the machines around them humming to life and her busy winding the rubber strap around his ankles, she might back out, so he doubled up in fake pain, curled in on himself.
“Victor,” she said urgently. “Victor, are you okay?” There was pain and panic in her voice and he had to fight the urge to stop, to soothe her, and promise it would be okay.
Instead he nodded, and said through gritted teeth, “Hurry.”
She rushed to finish the knots, showed him the rubber-coated bars on the table where he could put his hands. Her halo of red hair had always looked electrified, but tonight it rose around her cheeks. Victor thought it made her look haunting. Beautiful. The first day they met, she’d looked like this. It had been hot for September; her face was flushed, and her hair had a life of its own. He’d looked up from his textbook and saw her, standing at the entrance to LIDS, clutching a folder to her front as her eyes wandered over the room in an appraising way—lost but unconcerned. And then they landed on Victor at his table with his book, and her face lit up. Not full-wattage light, but a steady glow as she crossed the room, and slid without preamble into the seat across from him. They didn’t even talk, that first day. Just passed the same hour in the same space. Angie had later referred to the two of them as concordant frequencies.
“Victor.” Her voice saying his name drew him back to the cold table in the lab.
“I want you to know,” she said as she began to fix sensors to his chest, “that I will never, ever forgive you for this.”
He shivered under her touch. “I know.”
His coat and shirt were cast off on a chair, the contents of his pockets set on top. Amid the keys and a wallet and a pre-med lab badge, sat his phone, the ringer turned off. It blinked angrily at him, flashing first blue and then red and then blue again, and so on, signaling it had both voice mail and texts waiting.
Victor smiled grimly. Too late, Eli. It’s my turn.
Angie was standing by a machine chewing the nails off one of her hands. The other rested on a set of dials. The machine itself was whirring and whining and blinking. A language Victor didn’t know, which scared him.
Her eyes caught on something, and she took hold of it, crossing back to him. It was a strip of rubber.
“You know what to do,” said Victor, surprised by the calm in his voice. Everything beneath his skin was trembling. “Start at the low setting, and go up.”
“Turn off, turn on,” she whispered, before holding the rubber above his mouth. “Bite down on this.”
Victor took a last deep breath, and forced his mouth to open. The strap was between his teeth, his fingers testing their grip on the small table bars. He could do this. Eli held himself under. Victor could, too.
Angie was back at the machine. Their eyes met, and for an instant everything else vanished—the lab and the humming machines and the existence of EO and Eli and the years since Victor and Angie had shared a milkshake—and he was just happy to have her looking at him. Seeing him.
And then she closed her eyes, and turned the dial a single click, and the only thing Victor could think of was the pain.
*
VICTOR fell back against the table in a cold sweat.
He couldn’t breathe.
He gasped, expecting a pause, a moment to recover. Expecting Angie to change her mind, to stop, to give up.
But Angie turned the dial up.
The need to be sick was overcome by the need to scream and he bit into the rubber strap until he thought his teeth would crack but a moan still escaped, and he thought Angie must have heard, and she’d turn the machine off now, but the dial went up again.
And again.
And again.
Victor thought he would black out but before he could, the dial turned up and the spasm of pain brought him back to his body and the table and the room and he couldn’t escape.
The pain kept him there.
The pain tied him down as it shot through every nerve in every limb.
He tried to spit out the strap but he couldn’t open his mouth. His jaw was locked.