Cassian unlocks the door without argument. Talon tries to sit up.
“You stay,” Cassian tells him.
“Like hell I will,” Talon mutters.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, nearly topples, and catches himself on the rail. He looks like he could vomit or pass out at any second, but the stubborn set of his mouth says there is no version of this where he lies there while death wanders through the building.
We step into the hallway.
At the far end, just past the bend where the research wing curves toward the older part of the clinic, a faint glow pulses once against the corner like moonlight catching metal in an otherwise dark room.
“There,” I say.
We move. Cassian takes the front this time and I follow at his back with one hand closed loosely around Talon’s elbow to keep him from drifting into the wall. He’s trembling under my grip but keeps pace.
As we round the corner the Reaper comes back into view, standing further down the hall now, half-faded against the doorway of another room. The placard on the door reads Experimental Suite 4.
“Huh,” I mutter.
“Let me guess,” Talon says weakly. “This is where your fun colleagues hang out?”
“Let’s find out. This wing listed four experimental suites and this one wasn’t in the official directory.”
Cassian makes a quiet, derisive sound.
“Let’s go.”
We follow the Grim Reaper inside.
The Reaper stands inside the room with its scythe lowered at a diagonal, the tip hovering at the level of someone lying on a bed.
I feel the hairs on my arms rise.
The main circle of light falls over a central table where a man lies restrained with leather straps across his wrists, ankles, and chest. Tubing snakes from his arms, his neck, his nose. An endotracheal tube protrudes from between his teeth, taped sloppily to one cheek. His skin is waxy, mottled with dusky patches across his chest and limbs.
“What the hell…?” Talon murmurs.
The monitor above his head is on but not alarming. Someone has silenced the indicators. The waveform representing his heart rhythm is a chaotic mess, somewhere between agonal and non-functional. Blood pressure reads as a string of question marks. Oxygen saturation blinks at him in the sixties.
Someone turned off the safeguards. Disabled the machine’s ability to panic on his behalf.
I move to his side immediately, hands already checking pupil response, chest movement, pulse. The Reaper doesn’t acknowledge me at all.
The man’s pulse is rapid and threadlike, barely there. His breathing is shallow and entirely dependent on a ventilator set to a cruelly low volume. His fingertips are blue. When I press my thumb into his sternum the skin doesn’t pink back up. Capillary refill is all but absent.
“Now we know where the Reaper was headed,” Cassian says. “How long has he been like this?”
“Too long,” I answer. “Whatever they were doing, they kept him balanced on the edge and then let him fall.”
I scan the equipment. Beside the bed sits a drip stand with several unlabelled bags, no pharmacy stickers, no documented dosages. Either black market product or something someone is paying to have tested by means that don’t agree with ethical conduct. One bag is nearly empty, crusted at the port with dried residue that looks almost black.
On the counter I see vials. Sedatives. Neuromuscular blockers. Compounds I recognize only from journals discussing experimental metabolic modifiers.
Harrow’s obsession, and Keene’s neuromuscular knack.
“We gotta do something, man,” Talon says. “Unhook him from this shit and get him out of here.”
“By the time anyone arrived, he’d be gone,” I say quietly. “He’s dying.”
