I stand. Too fast—my vision swimming for half a second before it clears. I lock my knees and follow her out.
The hallway is the same as before. Clean, bright, empty. Our footsteps echo. She doesn’t look back to see if I’m keeping up, just walks like she expects me to follow, and I do, because what else am I going to do?
We pass the room where she asked me questions. Keep going. Through a door I didn’t notice before, into a corridor that’s colder, brighter, lined with doors that all look the same.
She stops at one of them. Opens it.
“Inside.”
The examination room is white and chrome and cold enough that I feel it through the thin gray fabric they gave me. There’s a table in the center, padded, with paper stretched across it. Cabinets along one wall. A counter with instruments I don’t look at too closely.
A man is standing by the counter, writing something on a clipboard. He doesn’t look up when I enter.
“Sit,” he says.
I sit on the edge of the table. The paper crinkles under me.
The woman leaves. The door clicks shut. Just me and the physician now, and he still hasn’t looked at my face.
“Name?”
“Nova.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-six.”
He writes it down. Flips a page.
“Hold out your hands.”
I do. Palms up. He takes my left wrist without asking, turns it over, studies the inside where the mark should be. His fingers are cold and dry and clinical. He holds it for three seconds, maybe four, then drops it and takes the right one.
Same examination. Same nothing to find.
He makes a note.
“Lift your pant legs.”
I bend down and roll the fabric up to my knees. He glances at the skin there—inside of the ankles, backs of the calves—and nods once.
“Stand and turn around. Lift your shirt.”
I turn. Pull the gray fabric up to my shoulder blades. The air is cold on my bare skin. I stare at the wall and count my breaths while his eyes move across my back, looking for something that isn’t there.
“Down.”
I drop the shirt. Turn back around.
He’s writing again. Hasn’t said a word about what he found or didn’t find. Hasn’t looked at me once except to examine skin.
“No visible mark,” he says to the clipboard. “Confirmed.”
That’s it.
He opens the door. The woman is waiting in the hallway.
“She’s done,” he says, and walksaway.
