“Good.” Dane dragged Wade to the door and pushed him through it. “The painkillers are about to disappear. Then we’ll see how it went. We know it cured her, but what were the other consequences? That is about to be judged.”
If I’d been capable of feeling anxiety in that moment, I was sure I’d be swimming in it.
“Saved me?” I let Corbin take my hand. “Did you almost lose me?”
“The nanos seem to have objected to you not being an infant. They had to be messed with. There were some problems. The doctors? They were great.”
That was good to know. They’d taken great care of me. Of course, when the first round of pain hit me, I couldn’t think of that at all. I shut my eyes. It didn’t help. “Why does it hurt?”
“We redid your system. Forced it. Made you healthy, but in the process, we may have also changed you all the way down to your cells. We’ll see.” Dane patted my shoulder. “If you start to notice anything other than the pain, please let me know.”
I laughed. It wasn’t funny, but sometimes laughter is the only thing I could do. I discovered that fact in that second. “Like what?”
“Like if you can suddenly hear Corbin’s heart. I want to know that.”
I tried to see if I could. Only, I couldn’t do anything but breathe. I’d have to figure out if I could hear his heart later. It was enough that in that moment I could hold his hand. Being there for me was exactly what I needed. In the pain, I wasn’t alone. Thank goodness.
10 Lub-Dub, Lub-Dub
Blaze massaged the muscles in my lower back, and I moaned with relief. I was constantly tense, and it led to a forever feeling of being in pain. That would pass, we hoped. No one really knew what was going to happen with me. I wasn’t sick—the zero in my arm held steady, so much so that Wade wanted to take the device out soon—but I wasn’t right yet. The question was, would I ever be. My father had just left The Farm to go get my mother and bring her here. I’d almost gotten used to having him around, but I didn’t notice his absence either. I’d gone my whole life without him, although I appreciated he was trying now.
“And you can’t hear it?” Kellan stood across from where I sat on the couch, mostly braced in Blaze’s lap. They’d taken to constantly rubbing my sore spots, and I was forever grateful. “My heartbeat?”
That was another thing that they kept checking. Had I developed any particularly impressive new talents? The answer seemed to be no. Wade was hugely relieved about this because it meant he hadn’t messed up when he’d done the procedure, but even though they didn’t say it, I was pretty sure it disappointed the Super Soldiers. As for Trenton, he seemed to be mostly concerned with the fact that I was still, a week later, in pain.
I shook my head. “Sorry, no heartbeat. Does it still beat for me, Kellan?”
Okay, that was silly to say, but he liked it when I did that. His cheeks heated up red for brief seconds and that gave me never-ending amounts of joy. Teasing Kellan into happiness seemed to be partially my job. We still didn’t know if I could zap people or open up and take emotion yet. No one was asking me to try, but we would before Wade took out the indicator in my arm.
For now, there was just Blaze, his strong hands, and Kellan’s questioning stare. Blaze found a particularly sore spot, and I jumped.
“Easy.” His voice was barely a whisper in my ear. “It’s good for you.”
I nodded. Well, we thought it was. The whole no-one-really-knew-what-they-were-doing-with-me problem continued to rage. Amber had come and checked me out a few times, as had all the other doctors regularly. They had a lot of collective confusion. I was trying not to focus on it. No one wanted their doctors to be so unknowing.
Corbin strode into the room, setting down the equipment he carried on the table. He’d been working on Artemis, a lot. Although we had no plans to go anywhere anytime soon, it seemed like my guys had taken the attitude that they’d broken Artemis and it was, therefore, their collective responsibility to fix her.
“How’s it going?” I smiled at him, and he grinned back at me.
“Should be done soon. It would be fixed, but Tommy Sandler had thoughts on how to make her stronger, and so we had to undo and redo. He’s smart, good at what he does. Kind of a pain in the ass but driven. It’s complicated. Should we be upgrading her when she’s really probably going to be retired and never put out to space again?”
My heart clenched. Was it really time to put that ship to bed? How did that even work? I was making rapid progress in how much I understood, or at least functioned with, technology, but that didn’t mean I understood the ins and outs of everything. How did they judge when her time was up?
“Would they retire her here?” I reached forward and took a sip of the water. That was another thing. I was supposed to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I’d drunk so much liquid at this point I was pretty sure I might float away in a river called Sienna.
Corbin shook his head. “There’s talk about giving her back to Melissa on Mars Station. She was her ship on the other side of the galaxy. There are legends about it, or so I heard. No one ever told us those kinds of stories.”
I had to pee. All the liquid made that happen, a lot. I turned in Blaze’s lap. “Give me a second. Bathroom break.”
“Yep.” He let go of me. “Are you hungry? Kellan could make another grilled cheese.”
The red rose in Kellan’s cheeks again. “That’s not funny. I didn’t mean to burn it. I will get better at it.”
Blaze shook his head. “I just thought there was nothing you could fail at. Except, apparently, toasting cheese and butter on bread.”
I left them to their back and forth. It had become comforting. If they were knocking at each other gently, it meant they were all okay. When one of them went quiet, that was a different deal altogether. Something was wrong.
Using the bathroom fast, I did start to think about that grilled cheese. Maybe I would make it for them. Surely my muscles could handle that much use. I could get back and forth to the shower, back and forth to the bathroom. I could handle standing at the stove. I sighed. Being weak really made me appreciate the things I used to just do without much thought.
Did I need a nap?
I shuffled out of the bathroom and abruptly stopped. Standing in the room was Canyon and Ari. They stared at me. Something about them didn’t look right.
Maybe it was the fact that Ari’s hair was short and Canyon’s longer. I’d just seen both of them in the last week. How was that possible?
Time travel. Yes, they were somehow involved in that. The secret that somehow everyone knew about because you couldn’t keep secrets around Super Soldiers.
“What’s wrong?”
Canyon held the door handle and turned away from me to hold the door. “I’ve got it, but they’ll be through very fast.”
Ari strode toward me. “Sienna, all is not well. We aren’t able to keep Evander out of here very long. They figure out that black hole again and again. They have to be stopped. And I’m afraid it has to be you.”
“Me?” They had to be kidding. “I’m not capable of stopping anyone from doing anything.” I pointed to the door. “Go talk to them.”