I ignore him and continue towards the main desk on this floor concocting a quick plan to ditch my extra shadow.
The nurse manning the desk glances up when she hears my guard and me coming. Her face lights with surprise—I’m now that recognizable—before falling back into a careful mask.
“Do you need anything, my queen?” She doesn’t demand to know why I’m out of bed, nor does she rush to get me back in my room.
Whatever operation was performed on me, she seems to feel I’m in good enough health to walk around.
“Can I speak with you in private?”
The nurse nods, her brow wrinkling. My guard still stands behind me, and I shoot him a look.
“I’ve been commanded to not let you out of my sight if you leave your room,” he explains.
I turn back to the nurse and lean in close. “I need to use the bathroom and I’d like to not be shadowed like a prisoner.”
The nurse’s gaze moves from me to the guard.
“Is there anyway you can make sure he stays out here?” I whisper.
The nurse mulls this over, then finally nods. “I think that’ll be just fine,” she says, her voice low. “Need anything else?”
“Just directions to the bathroom.”
“Down the hall and to your left.” The nurse nods in the appropriate direction.
Perfect. I’ll be out of the guard and the nurse’s line of sight.
“Thanks,” I say, flashing her a genuine smile.
I push away from the counter. My guard is now looking at me suspiciously. I brush past him. When he begins to follow me, the nurse clears her throat. “Sir, sir—yes you,” I hear from behind me.
I don’t wait to listen to the rest. I move down the corridor and turn left, just so that it looks like I’m going to the bathroom. At the end of this hall is a stairwell, and right before it, a storage closet hangs slightly open. I stop by it and peek in. Medical supplies and a spare pair of scrubs rest on the shelves. I grab the scrubs and change into them quickly, just in case whoever left the door open is about to come back.
As I unfold the soft material, a keycard slips out. I pick it up and glance at the face of the male nurse whom these scrubs belong to. On it is a barcode, probably to allow him access into restricted areas.
The whole thing could not have gone better had I planned it.
I finish changing and palm the keycard. Slipping out of the closet, I enter the stairwell and take it down. It takes me ten minutes to locate where the research labs are, and I’m sure I only have minutes before the guard sounds the alarm that I’m missing.
I enter the lowest basement of the hospital. My first glimpses of this subterranean floor aren’t promising. Paint peels from the walls and the exposed metal pipes I see. It smells like mildew and rot down here—not exactly the ideal atmosphere for cutting edge medical research.
Despite my misgivings, I begin to scrutinize the hall. The floor is abandoned.
A shiver races down my back. An epidemic preceded the king’s war, culling the Eastern Hemisphere’s population to little over a third of what it once was. I’d never noticed what exactly that looked like until this moment, when I stood in one of their understaffed hospitals.
I go for the first door I see. Locked. Damn. I place my head next to it; I can hear lugging noises on the other side. It must be a boiler room. The next door I come to is the morgue. I wrinkle my nose at the thought. As curious as I am to see if any of the research occurring in these hospitals has landed test subjects in here, I decide against it. Who knows if victims of biological warfare are in there? It would be a damn shame to survive cancer only to die of a virus.
The next door is unmarked. I try the handle. Just like the boiler room, this one is locked. Next to the handle, however, is a scanner. I lift the plastic card in my hand and hold it in front of the device. It beeps and a light flashes green next to it. I try the handle again and the door opens.
I slip into the room and flip on the lights. Whoever normally works here is gone for the time being. I glance around, almost afraid to touch anything. The counters are covered with racks of vials, strange machines, and data readouts.
I don’t know where to start or what I’m looking for. I never thought my problem would be making sense of the research I came across. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m in the right place.
I begin moving, my eyes scanning the papers strewn across the counters. I see numbers and percentages, but nothing that I recognize. Moving further into the room, I scan the counters, the machines, the spines of books that are sitting out.
I want to scream. Nothing here corroborates the Resistance’s sparse findings.
I’m about to leave when the title of a document catches my eye: “Recent Medical Advances in Memory Recall and Suppression.” It looks like an article from a medical journal, and the publication date printed below it is from a month ago. Recent. I read the abstract at the top of the page, which summarizes the content of the article.
There are more scientific terms than normal jargon, but from what I read, the topic seems to have to do with repressing long term and short term memories as well as reversing memory loss.
Those dazed technicians the Resistance had reported on when I’d been back in the WUN… they’d been in the king’s research labs. Could their predicament be related to this?
The very non-scientific wheels of my mind whir. Why would anyone want to repress a person’s memories? The answer is so simple that I’m embarrassed I asked the question in the first place.
Control.
The last things I read are the news articles someone’s taped to the wall. They all have to do with biological warfare. Some discuss the pathogens involved, and some go over the cures the king doled out once a region fell.