Reed pursed his lips. “You know what? I totally see it, kid.”
Sofia turned to whisper-yell at her brother, and Minnie patted my shoulder gently. “Kids, right? So silly.”
“Well, if we’re speaking scientifically,” Doctor B couldn’t look me in the eye, “larger implants would mean larger output, right?”
“… Give me a mirror.” I turned to Leo, the demand urgent.
He leaned back, crossed his ankle over his knee, and clasped his hands in his lap. “No can do, Sweetheart.” His necked bobbed as he swallowed. “Genius. Kind-hearted-woman. Badass on a bike. All of the adjectives for someone who definitely does not look like a fantasy creature.”
His face turned bright red.
“Yeah, no, not suspicious at all. Did you want to borrow a Thesaurus? It might help next time you wanna butter her up,” Reed quipped.
“Why?”
Leo’s knee began to bounce. “Because you’re happy,I’mhappy, and I wanna sit in it for a minute. Let me soak this in, maybe take a smoke break, and then we can talk about it?—”
“—if I do not have a mirror in my hand withinsixty seconds, you’re going to need to pump me with more morphine, because I swear to God, if the VIA made me look like a?—”
Three phones set on camera mode were in front of me before I could finish my sentence. I wasn’t sure whose I’d grabbed, but I hoped they had insurance, because the device slipped from my grip the moment I saw myself.
“Definitely a dragon,” Matias cackled.
My eye was twitching; I was sure of it. “You’re right, kiddo. By the way,whereis my surgeon again?”
FIFTEEN
LEO
Hospitals smelled of death.
There was no getting around it — cleaning supplies, and despair. It was the signature smell of ‘get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here’, and I wasbathedin it. Alex had been transferred to the hospital she worked at with the doctor whose name I couldn’t pronounce. Apparently, she usually worked in a designated section for critical patients but bounced around to the ER, and some hospice locations. Luckily, Alex had been placed in a pretty cushy wing meant for recovery, and was constantly attended to by staff and rehabilitators.
The wordrehabilitationhad made me want to crawl out of my skin until Doctor B explained it was strictly to help Alex navigate her new equipment. My upgrades could be painful, but never like this. They usually meant more tubes, needles, or a different concoction of coolant that the techs had cooked up. She basically had brain surgery, and Dahlia was breathing down my neck for updates.
“The longer we hold on to this, the more chance of our information getting cold. Splinter could move locations, change captains, who knows?—”
“—and you want me to do what? Rip her out of bed and tell her, ‘Suck it up, buttercup. We’re heading to Connecticut’? Did you even read the report? She needs time toheal.” I hoped she could hear my seething through the phone.
Three cigarette butts had been added to the ashtray beside me, a stupidly large distance from the actual hospital entrance, and I kept glancing up at the massive building beside me. Was Alex’s room on the left, or the right? The place was a damn maze, and I’d been outside for an hour arguing.
“I understand that, but what I am asking is for a timeframe. You told me that this would take four days at most, and it’s beeneight.That is over two weeks since we got our intel,threesince those Splinter members were originally captured. We’re sitting on our biggest lead in four years, and if we let it slip, there is a very likely chance that people will die.” Dahlia’s tone was cold, curt, and entirely too clinical for me to handle after dealing with doctors for hours on end.
My temper spiked, and I heard the plastic of my phone case sizzle beneath my touch. “Wait for her to recover so we can do thisright,or find someone else. I’m not sending her on a botched mission like we did with Hopper.That’show people end up dead.”
I ended the call before she could respond, and my thumb cracked the screen from the heat I was putting off.
“Damnit.” Part of me wanted to throw it, crush the damned thing into the ground, and burn everything around me.
But I looked up, and a head of black hair was peeking out of a window, four stories up.Alex.She was watching me; it wasn’t surprising, she’d been cooped up for too long. I lit another cigarette, pulling hard to take in as much as I could, before crushing it into the ashtray and dumping my phone in the garbage beneath it. The VIA could pay for another one if they wanted to reach me so badly.
By the time I made it back up to her room, she was in bed again, and the bandages that had covered her head before were gone.
“They took them off?” I asked, settling into a chair beside her.
The cushion had a dent from how often I was there.
She nodded, her hands fidgeting. “Yeah, cleaned them up and everything. Everything is healing well, and I’ve been passing my tests. I should be out of here soon enough.”
