“What?” he asked, and his voice faded from a strange echo to something that sounded halfway normal – given his situation on the floor.
Now that she was standing, he could see that the girl did indeed wear hospital scrubs, white and too thin for the weather outside. She held her hands clasped together in front of her; her hair fell in two thick curtains on either side of her narrow, freckled face.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah. Um. Yeah.” He got laboriously to his feet, wincing, cursing internally. He grabbed for a handhold that wasn’t there, felt his core muscles crunch and strain.
The girl stepped in close, too close. “Oh,” she said. “You’re hurt.” And before he could react, she reached out and laid a hand on his bad arm.
In Iraq, when the IED went off, he hadn’t felt any pain. That was one of the things that had always struck him as odd: he hadn’t felt his body break. Instead, he’d felt the rush of heat, and he’d felt the force of the blast, a surge of energy. He imagined that was what it felt like to be hit by a truck: that tremendous shove moving through his skin and bones.
When the girl touched his arm, he first felt the heat, and then the force. A whip-crack of electricity that shot up his arm, burst like ordnance in the depths of his shoulder, and showered through his nervous system, bright chasing sparks.
He knew that he pitched forward, that he gasped, but these were helpless physical reactions, and nothing conscious. The sparks bloomed inside his head, in his eyes, clouding all thought and vision and fear. It must have been only moments, but it seemed to take hours for the starbursts to unfold. In their wake, a pleasant heat stole through him; filled him head to toe, even all the numb parts of him where doctors had harvested tissue and left him disfigured.
For the first time since the explosion, he felt present in the left side of his body. Like a whole man, and not a partial one dragging around a dead half.
The acute sensations faded, leaving him warm and in less pain than he could remember. His vision cleared, and when he blinked away the last flashes, he saw that the girl stood in front of him, her hand still on his arm, her pupils wide black pools, no sign of the bright green irises he’d seen before. Her skin shone, pale like the moon.
Rooster shuddered. “Hey.” He reached to cover her small hand with his own.
She gasped and jerked away from him, staggering back, swaying like she might fall.
Rooster stood up and caught her by the elbows. “You okay? Hey, don’t pass out.”
And then it hit him: he’d stood up from the floor without any of his usual grunting, swearing, and grabbing for handholds. His bum knee had held; his muscles had worked; his re-stitched tendons and ligaments hadn’t brought tears to his eyes.
A different kind of panic flooded his system. “What was that?” he asked. “What did you do?”
She tipped her head back, exposing her throat, the movement slow, almost like she was drugged. She blinked, and her pupils began to recede. “I…I…” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp in his arms.
Rooster caught her, and marveled that he had the strength to do so.
*
Ashley stood in her pajamas and silk robe, one hand propped on her hip, the fingertips of the other massaging a spot of tension between her brows. She breathed a sigh that Rooster knew well. “Explain it to me again, but make it make sense this time. Why is there a little girl on my couch?”
Rooster could deliver a sitrep that would make any gunny proud, so he knew Ashley – like him – wasn’t so much misunderstanding him as she was dumbfounded. The whole thing sounded ludicrous.
“She knocked on the window,” he said. “Woke me up. Said she ran away from the Institute – you know, where I went today? And that she didn’t want to go back. She touched my arm…” He curled his left hand into a fist and felt it flex almost normally, the pain a faint echo in the joints. His breath hitched in his chest, and for once it had nothing to do with discomfort. “Something happened.”
For the first time since he’d carried the girl up here – he’d carried her, holy shit – Ashley looked away from her unconscious form and turned a sharp look on Rooster. “What do you mean ‘something happened’?” Her gaze moved down his body, sharp and assessing, down to where his weight was distributed evenly between both feet. Her eyes widened. “Shit. You’re–”
“Yeah. Something happened.”
She cocked a single brow. “Did this chick pop you with a steroid shot or something?”
“What? No. Come on, she’s just a kid.” A very small one, who breathed shallowly, like a little unconscious rabbit. She was probably cold. Ashely kept extra blankets in the closet down the hall–
“Roger.” Oh, she’d been trying to get his attention.
“What?”
“We need to call the police.”
“Yeah.”
But she’d touched him, and the pain had gone away. She had run away from that awful, brightly-lit place with the smiling staff who’d been too cowardly to outright reject him to his face when they had no intention of helping him.
The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood up on end because something was wrong. Just as he had the day of the IED, he felt the low vibrations of danger.
“Ash, something’s not right.”
“No shit,” she said with a snort, but then sighed. Shook her head. “Yeah. Okay. I know what you mean.” She contemplated the girl, lips pursed, arms folded. “Who is she?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Well.” She squared her shoulders, and again Rooster felt like the Corps has missed out on the perfect recruit when she’d decided to go for her law degree instead of joining her then-boyfriend, now-husband in the Marines. “Let’s find out.”
She leaned in and laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. Frowned.
“What?”
“She’s cold.”
“Well, yeah, she was outside in nothing but those.” He gestured toward her thin, short-sleeved scrubs.
“No, she–” Ashley started, and the rest of her sentence turned into a bitten-off curse when the girl’s eyes flipped open. No slow fluttering back to awareness; no, they snapped wide like one of those dolls you tipped back and forth.
Ashley stepped back and took a deep breath. “Okay. Um. Okay. Hi,” she said to the girl, who was currently sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the couch, red hair falling around her face. “Can you hear me?”
The girl looked up, and Rooster watched the awareness return to her eyes, the blankness fading to confusion, to fear, to panic. Her mouth opened and she sucked in a breath through it, rattling on the exhale. A shiver stole over her, jacking her thin shoulders up around her ears.
Ashley softened. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, sinking to her haunches in front of the couch. “You’re safe here.” She lifted both hands and then froze, palms suspended over the girl’s knees. Something happened, Rooster had said, and he saw now that Ash was afraid to touch the girl. She did, though, after a moment’s hesitation, resting her hands on the small, bony kneecaps. “My name’s Ashley.” Even softer now, the maternal voice she used with Desiree. “And that’s Rooster. Can you tell us your name?”
“I…” She breathed rapidly through her mouth, quick breaths that ruffled her hair. Like a frightened animal. “I don’t…”
“It’s okay,” Ashley said. “Take your time.”
The girl swallowed with an audible gulp. “I don’t have a name. They call me LC-5.”
Ashley sat back, brows scaling her forehead, but didn’t break contact with the girl. “Who is ‘they’?”
Something cold and ugly turned over in Rooster’s gut. He crouched down beside Ashley, and the girl glanced at him; he suppressed a sudden, protective urge to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ears. “Hey, kid. Who called you that?” He felt Ashley staring at him, but he stayed fixed on the girl, noting the way her lower lip trembled.
She said, “Doctor Talbot. And Doctor Fowler. And all the nurses. Everyone.”
He and Ashley traded a look.
“Are they doctors at the Institute?” Ashley asked, voice going careful.
The girl nodded.