The panel near the glass tells me his heart rate is much slower than Sloane’s, Aisha’s, and Jasper’s.
He really is dying.
Aisha has an arm wrapped around Jasper, holding him steady, but Sloane joins me at the vat.
A muscle clicks in her jaw as she clenches it tight.
“Open it,” Sloane says.
When I was in the hospital, the doctors and nurses’ ability to compartmentalize shocked me. To see so many broken, dying beings every day, to witness so many goodbyes and last moments. To let it all slip over your skin like water and deal with the task at hand. Staying calm amid chaos.
I get it now. Someone in the room has to hold it together.
I begin pulling out tubes and Sloane monitors the vitals, both of us without emotion—at least externally.
“His heart rate is still falling,” Sloane says as I near the last lines poking out of Finn. “Jo, I think you should stop.”
She may be right. But Finn will die on this table, either by my hand or not. In a morbid way, I think it’d be better to go surrounded by people who love him.
“Not an option,” I say.
“Jo—”
“Not an option,” I say again, and pull the last IV from his neck. Blood spills from the puncture, red dripping onto the white bed beneath him.
Maybe getting the other three out safely makes me cocky. But I pull the intubation tube out, tossing it aside.
And Finn flatlines, the previously silent heart monitor letting out a long, continuous shriek.
Forty
The lights in the roomgo from dim to unyieldingly bright. An alarm, like those school fire alarms, starts up. It’s loud down here, but my house is far enough it likely doesn’t carry. The next closest neighbor is certainly oblivious.
Whatever safeguards Holden has in place have been tripped. He’ll know something is going on; he’ll come to find out what it is.
With the drugs still swirling through all of our systems, Cecily strapped to a bed in the other room, and a locked door with a code I don’t know, I can see where this will all end: all of us stuffed into those chambers and sucked dry.
“No, no, no,” I say, looking around the room, unsure what to do first. I can barely think with the screeching alarm.
“What’s happening?” Jasper asks.
“Stay back,” I tell Jasper. To Sloane and Aisha, I say, “Help me lift him out.”
Sloane, usually the steadiest of the ghostly trio at home, falters.Her lips part, but no words come out. Eventually, she squeaks out, “Are you sure that’s—”
“Now, Sloane,” I say. “Or he’s dead.”
She grits her teeth.
“On three,” I say. Sloane nods. “One, two, three.”
The three of us lift, heaving Finn out of the chamber and lowering him onto the floor. He’s lighter than he should be, and we barely manage to not drop him. Aisha and Sloane are wobblier than I am, but not by much. We’re all standing on borrowed time.
The shrill alarm continues around us. After only a few seconds, the lights go dark everywhere but the chambers, like someone cut the power. The alarm stops.
The younger kids are looking at me. Aisha and Jasper, hanging off each other, barely on their feet. Both blinking in a daze. And Sloane, on her knees at my side.
“He’s not breathing,” Sloane says, bending down to press her head to Finn’s chest. She comes back up with a panicked expression. “He’s not breathing.”
