“Ma’am, you’re in the wrong wing.” A hand tries to pry my fingers from the edge of the stretcher, but I hold on like I’m in a wind tunnel.
The division between the aboveground and belowground wings is glaring. The wing the nurse points to is dim, dingy, with faded grays, low ceilings, and peeling beige paint. No crisp white sheets, no soft beeping monitors—just a long, tired hallway that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since the pre-Burn era.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, my voice low, solid.
The nurse’s eyes flicker with uncertainty. I wonder how many below-grounders have ever simply said no. “I… It’s not up to me,” she stammers.
“Of course not, Marlene,” I say, reading her badge with a pointed smile. “But you can always turn the other way and go about your rounds.”
She hesitates. I can almost hear the wheels turning in her head—calculating risk, protocol, fallout.
“It’s much easier,” I continue smoothly, “to let a concerned wife sit quietly by her husband’s side than to deal with the aftermath of a very public story about a hospital’s lack of compassion for the Iku family.”
The name hits its mark. I watch it land.
Her eyes flick toward the hallway, as if imagining reporters already gathering there, microphones poised.
Marlene exhales, looks me over one more time like the world had just then gone to shit and lets out a weary, defeated sound. “Fine,” she mutters, almost to herself. Not worth the trouble. Not this kind of trouble.
She turns on her heel and walks away.
I stay.
By the time I reach the room, Ben’s already been moved—transferred from stretcher to hospital bed, a tangle of wires and quiet machines now encircling him. The lights are low, the antiseptic hush of the room broken only by the soft rhythmic pulse of a monitor.
The doctor is waiting, arms folded, eyes narrowing in quiet assessment. I know that look. The silent calculus of whether to object, to assert authority.
I draw a breath, ready to start this fight all over again.
“Before you start,” the doctor begins, “I was at the charity ball.” The doctor barely raises his head, shifting through a hologram projection of Ben’s body thinly sliced into organ groups. “I know who you are.”
“Ah, the toaster,” I say, remembering his meanness. “So glad to see you under happier circumstances.”
“I think the Ikus were forward-thinking in getting their son a skin bride, what with all the unrest he’s causing with the minefolk.” He looks at Ben’s charts again. “Your people are clannish. They’ll like seeing one of their kind at the top.”
“I won’t be on top of anything if he’s dead, so can we focus on what’s happening here?”
Ben lies feverish in the hospital bed, a mess of tubes and wires snaking out from his arms and stomach, pumping fluids in and out of him. He has never looked more like a machine than he does now, more parts than a person.
“He’s detoxing from the dampeners,” the doctor explains, offering neither hope nor despair. “Since he cut them off so rapidly, we can’t reintroduce them without risking a shock to his system. We’ve got to let the detox run its course.”
The doctor’s monotone is maddening, like being given a weather report when your house is on fire. He flips through Ben’s holo chart with the kind of detached indifference that makes me want to scream.
“The next weeks will be crucial,” he continues as if reciting from a script. “The first week is the worst—touch and go. The fevers, the hallucinations, the mood swings… He could be dangerous during this time, and you should be prepared for that.”
“Dangerous?” My voice catches. “What do you mean, ‘dangerous’?”
“Aggressive, eating his way through your ration reserves,” the doctor replies. “Fucking anything with a hole. Give him space. If he recovers from the hedonism, and I must stressif, he’ll be lethargic, hypersensitive to stimuli, and weak. Many patients in this stage simply lose their will to live after the hormonal rush of hedonism.”
Okay, my mind is all over the place right now. Ben is going to be broken down, taken apart piece by piece, and if he survives, he’ll be a different person—raw, vulnerable, stripped of everything that made him Ben. It’s terrifying to think about.
Or will he come out of this moreBenthan he’s ever been?
Chapter16
Skin to Skin
The first time I ever see Ben’s grandfather, he’s waiting for us at the door, a towering figure silhouetted against the cold marble of the entryway. It takes an army of orderlies to haul Ben’s stretcher up that ridiculous marble staircase, each step echoing with the clatter of metal and whispered curses. And yet, his grandfather doesn’t follow his grandson’s body up the steps, doesn’t even glance at the pallor of his face or the slackness of his limbs. Instead, he rounds on me, his gaze sharp, cutting.
