Apart from Jasper, Sloane is the newest addition. She may not need help breathing on her own.
That fragment of hope is all I have.
I drop my gaze to Sloane and carefully pull off the two strips of tape holding the tube in place. Even more gently, I pull on the tube.
It’s long, so much longer than I thought it’d be. A gag pushes up my throat, but I shove it back down.
The tube jerks free of Sloane’s mouth.
She bucks once, and I hold my breath until my lungs burn.
Sloane’s body shudders again.
The seconds stretch like honey, and I know I’ve done it, killed her before the lab gets the chance. Two long minutes.
The girl in the bed jolts upward, awake. Alive.
Sloane—the real, tangible Sloane—grabs her chest. It takes me too long to realize she’s going for the sensors, tearing them from her chest. She tosses them aside and falls against the back of the chamber. Her gaze slides to me.
“Sloane,” I say.
And she smiles.
Thirty-Nine
There’s no time to savorthe fact that I’ve essentially brought someone back from the brink of death. Every second pushes me further toward unraveling. The throb in my hand pulses strong and steady with my heartbeat, and I’m sluggish.
While no alarms went off in the room when I woke Sloane, I have no way of knowing whether that means anything. For all I know, Holden has some special app on his phone alerting him to any changes, announcing what I did. He could be on his way to finish us all off.
I help Sloane out of the vat. She’s as unsteady as a foal, unable to carry much of her own weight. She ends up clinging to the exterior of her chamber as I move to Aisha’s tube.
I haven’t gone over to see if Jasper and Finn are inside the other vats.
I crack the lid of Aisha’s chamber. Let it hiss and rise, revealing another half-dead girl inside.
Aisha. Smarter than even she knows, curious and kind and mature for her age. A little form on this mattress, hooked up to machines, adrift.
I dislodge the same lines from Aisha. She’s smaller than Sloane; I don’t know how so many needles and tubes could be pushed into such a small person. Looking at them, at the collecting pile growing next to Aisha, makes me dizzy.
Her vitals jump a bit more than Sloane’s after the last line is removed, this one from her neck.
But as quickly as they speed up, they start to drop, fast, lower than when I found her.
“What’s happening?” Sloane murmurs, words slurring.
“I don’t know,” I say, and hurry for the intubation tube. I’m still cautious, but a bit more desperate. If she wakes up with this thing in her mouth, she could panic. Panic and fight me and draw even more attention to this room.
Once the tube is out, she doesn’t twitch and jerk awake like Sloane did. She doesn’t move at all.
Seconds pass. A few more and Sloane whispers, “Why isn’t she waking up?”
Then Aisha does, all at once, with less fervor than Sloane. Her eyes snap open, immediately inquisitive. She pushes up slowly. For a moment, she does nothing but inspect all four of her limbs, pressing her fingers into her knees, her elbows.
She sees Sloane first. They move, both off-balance and weak, reaching for each other. Sloane catches Aisha as her feet hit the floor, and her knees buckle. The girls grip each other as Aisha’s small frame trembles with the strength of her sobs.
This is extensive, extended care. To keep them like this for so long, to keep them in some state of health to keep on with theseextractions. Nutrition, bedsore prevention, and clearly joint exercises, seeing as Aisha and Sloane have some level of mobility.
Aisha and Sloane end their reunion quickly. Aisha addresses me, all business, despite the fact she’s wavering as she tries to stand.
