224.9.2 | 8:42 a.m.
“What were you thinking?” Leavitt asked. He guided Thomas across the room to the empty bed. “We need to follow medical protocols, honor our safety zones, take the utmost care. Aren’t you aware of these things?”
Thomas almost laughed at the question. “Uh, no,” he replied, not trying to be sarcastic. He wasn’t even ten years old—of course he didn’t know those things!
“That boy has been through a surgery. He’s fragile. There are germs. Surely you know about germs?” Leavitt spoke with an eerie calm. “Viruses like the Flare?”
“I’m immune,” Thomas said. “Aren’t we all immune?”
“Most of you—” Leavitt broke off, sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Never mind. Just…please don’t go through that curtain again. Is that understood?”
Thomas nodded.
“Now. I need to start prepping you.” Leavitt held his hands out and looked around the room as if getting his bearings. “The surgeon will be here in half an hour.”
A bubble of panic had been growing for some time in the pit of Thomas’s stomach. “So that kid…Minho…he was telling the truth? You’re going to do something crazy to my head?”
“Not something crazy,” Leavitt said, the strain of forced patience clear in his voice. He opened a drawer and pulled out a linen gown. “Something vital. And again, Minho was just having a reaction to the medicine we gave him—it happens only rarely. We’ll take care with your dosage, I promise.” He paused, turned toward Thomas. “Listen, you know the stakes. You know that you’re immune to the Flare. You also know that the human race is in serious trouble. Am I right? Do you know all this?”
Thomas had only one answer for that. “Yeah.”
“Then you understand why it’s so important that you cooperate.” Leavitt tossed him the hospital gown. “We’re studying the killzones of the immune so we can find a cure. You are immune. And all we’re doing today is placing a small instrument in your head that will help us understand what makes you different. I promise you’ll recover quickly, and you’ll be glad that we can monitor your vitals more efficiently. You won’t have to get your arm pricked quite so much!” He made this last statement with forced cheerfulness. “Now, that’s not all so bad, is it?”
Thomas kind of shrugged and nodded at the same time. The man made it sound so reasonable to cut open a kid’s brain. He looked down, turning the gown in his hands.
“There’s a bathroom right over there.” Leavitt pointed to a door in the corner. “Why don’t you get dressed, then get in bed. I give you my word that everything will be just fine. You’ll be knocked out, won’t feel a thing. Maybe a headache for a couple of days. And we have pills for that. Okay?”
“Okay.” Thomas took a step toward the bathroom, when he heard a girl scream out in the hallway. He looked at Leavitt, who met his eyes. For a long moment they stood like that, waiting to see who’d act first. Thomas did.
He was at the door in an instant. He threw it open and practically jumped into the hall, feeling Leavitt right on his tail. Just a few dozen feet away, a familiar scene played out in front of him. Two nurses—a man and a woman—were dragging a girl with brown hair down the hallway, and she was kicking and screaming the whole way. It was her. The girl from room 31K. Teresa.
There was no sense in what Thomas did next. He ran after her. The anguish on her face and the fear in her eyes had finally burst that bubble of panic swelling inside him.
“Let her go!” he yelled at the same time that Leavitt shouted at him to come back.
The nurses turned to look at Thomas and stopped, curiosity crossing their faces, maybe even a hint of amusement. That just angered him all the more. He picked up speed, already realizing that the entire thing was a lost cause. At least he would show Teresa that he tried.
At the last second he jumped, arms outstretched, as if he’d become a superhero, ready to take down the two—
One of the nurses swung a forearm in defense, connecting with the side of Thomas’s head. Sharp pain ignited along his cheek and ear as his world turned upside down and he landed hard on the ground; his nose banged into the wall just hard enough to stun him. He rolled over and looked up. Both nurses stared down at him as if to ask What’s wrong with you? Even Teresa had stopped struggling, though her face expressed something completely different: Awe. Wonder. Could that be almost a smile?
Thomas suddenly felt on top of the world.
Leavitt appeared, looming over him, a syringe in his hand. “I thought we’d come to an understanding, son. I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this.” He knelt down and stuck the needle in Thomas’s neck, compressed the syringe with his thumb.
Before he passed out, Thomas looked at Teresa again, their eyes meeting for just a few precious seconds. The world had already started to blur when they dragged her away, but he clearly heard what she called out to him.
“Someday we’ll be bigger.”
He had crazy dreams.
Flying through the air with some kind of machine strapped to his back, watching the world below him, scorched and ruined and lifeless. He saw small figures running across the sand, and then they grew, getting closer to him. He saw wings, then hideous faces, then arms outstretched, monsters reaching for him.
Luckily that one ended before he got ripped apart. The next one was much more pleasant.
Thomas, his mom, his dad. A picnic. By a river. He didn’t know if it was a memory or a wish, but he enjoyed it all the same. It created an ache in his chest that he thought might linger for a very long time.
At some point he dreamed about Teresa. The mysterious girl who lived so close—literally next door—and yet only one sentence had ever been spoken between them.
Someday we’ll be bigger.
He clung to those words. Saw her say them over and over in his dreams. There was something so tough about them, so…rebellious. He liked her for saying them. In his dream, he and Teresa were both sitting in the same room—his room, he on the bed, she in a chair. They weren’t talking, just…there. Together. He wanted a friend so desperately that he wished the surgery would go on forever, leave him in this dream.
But then Teresa started saying his name, over and over, only it wasn’t her voice. On some level, he knew what was happening, and his heart melted in sadness. The harder he tried to hold on to the counterfeit moment, the more quickly it faded. Soon there was only darkness and the repeated sound of his name.
Time to wake up.
He opened his eyes and blinked at the bright lights of the hospital room. A woman stared down at him. Dr. Paige.
“Doct—” he started, but she shushed him.
“Don’t say a word.” She smiled then, and everything seemed okay. Dr. Paige wouldn’t have done anything bad to him. No way. “You’re still under a heavy dose of drugs. You’ll be woozy. Just lie there and relax, enjoy the medicine.” She laughed, a thing that didn’t happen very often.
Thomas did feel floaty, peaceful. The whole incident with Teresa seemed almost funny now. He could only imagine what those nurses had thought at seeing this little kid charging down the hallway, leaping into the air like Superman. At least he’d shown Teresa that he cared. That he was brave. He sighed happily.
“Wow,” Dr. Paige said, looking over from the monitor she’d been studying. “I’d say you’re taking my advice to heart.”
“What did you do to me?” Thomas mumbled, each word slurred.
“Oh, now you’re ignoring my advice. I said not to speak.”
“What…did you do?” he asked again.
Dr. Paige turned to face him, then sat down on the bed. The shifting of the mattress hurt something somewhere on his body. But it was a dull, distant ache.
“I think the Psych told you what we were going to do, right?” she asked. “Dr. Leavitt?” She looked around as if to make sure he hadn’t come back into the room. He wasn’t there.
Thomas nodded. “But…”
“I know. It sounds horrible. Putting something inside you.” She smiled again. “But you’ve learned to trust me a little, haven’t you?”
Thomas nodded again.
“It’ll be so much better for you, for everyone, in the long run. We can measure your killzone activity so much faster and more efficiently now. Plus, you won’t have to come to the lab quite as often to extract data. It’ll all be instantaneous, real-time. Trust me, you’ll be glad we did it.”
Thomas didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have, even if he could speak normally. What she said made sense. Mostly. He just wondered why Minho and Teresa had freaked out so much. Maybe their surgeries hadn’t gone as smoothly.
Dr. Paige stood up from the bed, patted Thomas’s arm. “All right, young man. Time for you to let those drugs pull you back to sleep. You’ll be doing a lot of that in the next couple of days. Enjoy the rest.” She started to walk away, but then turned around and came back. She leaned down and whispered something into Thomas’s ear, but his eyes were already closed and he was fading fast. He caught the words surprise and special.
Then he heard footsteps and the soft thump of the door as it shut behind her.
