She slams the back hatch shut, nearly catching my fingers.
I climb into the passenger seat. My hands are still stained dark. I look in the side mirror and see a man I don't recognize. My hair is a jagged, inch-long mess. My face is gaunt. My eyes are hollowed out by a trauma I can't yet name.
The woman puts the vehicle in gear and screams away from the farmstead.
“Who are you?” I ask as we hit the main road.
“A ghost,” she says. “Like him. I was a trainer at the Kennel before it was 'liquidated.' I taught Alexei how to map a body. I didn't think he'd ever use the knowledge to keep someone alive.”
She looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“You’re the Petrenko. The one he broke the world for.”
“He didn't break it,” I say. “He just stopped following the map.”
She gives a short, dry bark of a laugh. “In our world, that’s the same thing.”
We drive for twenty minutes, heading deeper into the rural sprawl. We turn into a farm that looks like a dozen others—a rusted silo, a sagging barn. But the doors of the barn open automatically as we approach, revealing a high-tech interior.
Clean rooms. White tile. Surgical lights.
We carry him inside. The woman—K-7—becomes a blur of motion. She strips off her jacket, revealing scrub-like clothing beneath. She scrubs in at a stainless steel sink, her hands moving with a rhythmic, hypnotic precision.
“Wait outside,” she orders.
“No.”
She stops, turning to look at me. Her eyes are the color of flint. “You are a distraction. You are covered in filth. You will stay in the sterilization foyer or I will sedate you myself.”
I look at the glass door. I look at Alexei, pale and hooked to a ventilator.
“I’m staying,” I say. “But I’ll stay behind the glass.”
She nods once.
I watch through the window as she works. I watch the scalpel.
The instrument of my unmaking.
I see it catch the overhead light, a silver needle that opens Alexei’s skin. She’s removing the debris, repairing the vessel, stitching the muscle with a thread so fine it’s almost invisible.
The irony is a weight in my chest. Everything has reversed. The Monster is the patient. The Prince is the witness. The room designed for pain has become a room for preservation.
I sit on a plastic chair in the foyer, my elbows on my knees. I count the beeps of the monitor.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine.
The rhythm is the only thing keeping the world from spinning off its axis. I think about my father. I think about the funeral. I think about Dmitri, who is probably sitting in my chair right now, drinking my wine, thinking he won.
He didn't win. He just inherited a corpse.
I am the one who is alive. I am the one who is free, even if freedom smells like antiseptic and blood.
The surgery lasts two hours. I don't move. I don't eat the protein bar the woman tossed me. I just watch the rise and fall of the chest under the blue surgical drape.
When K-7 finally emerges, she looks tired. The granite of her face has developed cracks.
“He’s stable,” she says, peeling off her gloves. “He lost a significant amount of blood, and the infection from the previous IV site complicates the recovery. But he’s a Kennel graduate. His systems are designed to survive trauma that would kill a normal man.”
