“That doesnotmake me feel better!”
It was one thing to think that there was apossibilitythat there was a tracker inside her. It was another thing entirely to actuallyknowthat there was. Garnet suddenly felt violated. Like something horrific had happened to her. She didn’t know what it was or where it was, but she knew she needed it out, like,now.
“I think if I make a cut there, I can get it with some forceps,” Goldie was saying to Alred and Tanin, pointing at the screen.
“If you don’t tell me where it is, I’m getting up and going over there to find out.”
“No!” Goldie frowned at her. “I might lose it. I need you to stay still. And calm your heart rate down. You’re going to have a heart attack.”
Garnet opened her mouth to, again, demand to know the location, but before she could do more than take a breath, Goldie was already speaking-
“The tracker is about the size of a grain of rice, and it’s under your right arm. My issue is that there’s some important stuff there I don’t want to hit, but it’s not directly under the skin. So, if I go digging, I’ll have to be careful. Can you lift your right arm up over your head? Yeah, like that. Oh, yeah, that changes the whole position of the anatomy. Okay…”
Goldie started mumbling to herself, pointing at the display. Garnet said nothing as she waited, now hyper aware of her armpit in a way she’d never been before. She reached up with her left hand, intending to touch around and see if she could feel it, but Goldie chastised her, forcing her to drop it back down again.
“Doesn’t this machine have a function to remove foreign bodies?” Tanin asked, frowning at the mediring. “It’s one of the few things on this ship I didn’t get for cheap, so it should still be fully functional.”
“Yeah, and it is,” Goldie agreed. “And you’d normally be right, but the material the tracker is made of that makes it practically invisible to the mediring also makes it resistant to the mediring moving it. I could probably get her flesh to move it up for me instead-”
“Gross,” Garnet grumbled.
“-but I don’t know how to do that yet. But I did figure out how to close lacerations. So, we’re just going to cut it out the human way.”
“You better have numbing meds,” Garnet snapped at her sister, earning an evil laugh. Like Goldie mightnothave numbing meds.
But of course she did. It wasn’t a syringe and needle setup like she would have expected. Instead, Goldie loaded a medicine into an injector, like a mini-epi pen, and pressed it to the skin of her armpit before hitting a button. Garnet barely felt whatever was inside get injected, but the warmth followed by numbness in the area was trippy because of how fast it worked.
Then, Goldie broke out the scalpel.
Garnet quickly averted her gaze. Twins definitely didn’t share everything. Goldie was not a violent person, but she didn’t mind the sight of blood, even her own. In contrast, Garnet was always ready to throw down, but blood skeeved her out, and the sight of her own made her dizzy. She very deliberately did not look as Goldie worked. She didn’t even feel the pressure she normally would if something was numb. At least, not in the direct area. She could feel the skin tuggingaroundthe area that was Goldie working in.
Garnet tried to think about anything else. If she thought about the fact that a knife was literally cutting into her armpit right now, blood oozing up, medical tweezers digging around-
Ugh, she was going to hurl.
“Got it,” Goldie declared approximately an eternity later.
Garnet whipped her head around, ignoring the blood on her armpit entirely, to look at the tiny thing Goldie was holding up in her gloved fingers. It was nothing. Not only was it the size of a grain of rice, it looked like one as well. An oblong, white oval with just a bit of her blood on it shining in the light like it was made of plastic.
It was nauseating but relieving. She was glad it was out of her, but the idea that someone had shoved that into her in the first place made her want to scream.
Tanin took the thing from her sister, uncaring about her blood that stained his bare hands, as Goldie removed her gloves and returned to the console. The process to fix the hole Goldie made was shorter than the scan to find the device in the first place.
While that was happening, Tanin and Alred were muttering over the little thing. Alred had him take it to a machine in the corner where it was scanned again, directly this time.
“I thought it couldn’t be picked up on scan,” Garnet said as she sat up, gently touching her underarm, but there was no sign she had been cut at all.
“Not on mediring scan,” Alred said brightly. “But scans that we can’t subject fragile bioforms to? Oh, yes. Those can find it easily. I’m just learning about it before we destroy it.”
“Okay. My turn!” Goldie announced excitedly, coming around to the scanner table, numbing injector already in hand. “Garnet, take the scalpel!”
“Wait, what?!”
Garnet didn’t know why she was surprised. Obviously, Goldie couldn’t go digging around in her own armpit for the tracker embedded in her. She was able to set up the machine to autoscan, now that she had performed the initial steps on Garnet. And since the machine knew what and where to look, her scan didn’t even take half the time.
The problem was that Garnet absolutely could not cut her sister open. It didn’t matter how well Goldie explained it or if she showed her pictures or pointed right where to go or that she even prepped the area herself with the numbing meds. To just go deliberately cutting into her own flesh and blood like that was repulsive.
“You literally beat a guy’s face in!” Goldie yelled at her, annoyed, gesturing to her exposed, numbed armpit.
