“Ah.” Frank nodded and tapped his nose with understanding. “Noted.” Marching to the door, he ripped off his sodden lab coat. “Let’s go. I’ve had enough of talking.”
“Go where?” I asked, guiding Rook toward the door.
“To test every inch of both of you.” Frank raked his hands through his grey, wet hair. “Somewhere inside you is a way to keep you alive, and I won’t fucking stop until I find it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS BLURRED INTO A relentless cycle of needles, machines, and cold clinical experiments.
It started with a full-body X-ray and CT scans.
Frank wanted me to go first, but...just in case any of his little tests interfered with our tampered DNA, Lucien flatly refused.
Hewent first—lying perfectly still while the machine whirred—imaging every bone, joint, and hidden secret deep with him.
We all gathered around the images as Frank hung them against the light panel. He called in a specialist radiographer to decipher what everything meant and his face aged another ten years as the results showed hundreds of hairline fractures throughout Lucien’s body—his entire skeleton riddled with faint threads where the fire had broken and mended him.
My heart squeezed with despair as the evidence of his death was so clear to see.
Unfortunately, my scans were worse.
The frost had crystallised, appearing on the scans like tiny snowflakes on every inch of me. Every rib, every femur—even my fingerbones had steadily transformed into icicles that acted as snowy scaffolding keeping me alive...for now.
Frank had to sit down. Dillon looked green. Whisper snarled. And I merely let Lucien drag me into his arms, sharing the angry fire inside him, doing our best to keep our powers content so they didn’t overtake us and destroy the lab.
His grief flowed down the bond constantly. His fear of losing me. His rage at my pain.
We were both as helpless as the other and every look we shared was full of goodbyes and denial.
Once Frank could stand again, he arranged a blood draw every six hours for three days, hoping to see a correlation or pattern. Each sample came out blacker than the last. To begin with, he ran it through every analyser in the lab—searching for that little silver-and-gold flash from the first day, but...our cells just kept collapsing.
No matter what test or trial he did...nothing helped.
By day four of blood tests and X-rays, he gave up and moved on to MRIs.
Once again, Lucien went first (after testing the vitalsync core would be safe), and the bond throbbed with claustrophobia as the loud tube thumped around him. Frank kept us in there until every inch was mapped, making our brains ache and teeth throb.
Every test he did infuriated the ice until it took all my strength to keep it from surging. Lucien’s fire turned violent and we went from finding relief in each other’s company to constantly needing to touch.
If we stopped holding hands even for a moment, the power broke through our feeble control and destroyed a computer or something equally as valuable.
The MRI scan made my skull feel as if it’d been chiselled apart, but...the bone marrow aspiration was the worst. Funny that we’d killed the scientists at Roy Swift’s place for threatening to do this, yet now...we willingly submitted.
The thick needle grinding into my hip while Lucien squeezed my hand was fuckingawful. His own procedure left him pale and shaking. We didn’t say a word as Frank studied our marrow under every microscope Snowflake Corp owned.
The hours blurred into one as he mumbled about ‘accelerated telomere shortening’ and ‘epigenetic cascade failure.’ His horror steadily climbed as Lucien and I visibly deteriorated.
By the end of the fifth day, Frank covered our scalps with EEG wires, monitoring us while we slept, touched, and slipped into the dreamscape to heal.
Unfortunately, tripping into the source no longer offered the healing it once did. When we returned, the tests showed only a tiny improvement. Cellular death was still happening and the pleasure we’d found in the dreamscape only bought us a few hours instead ofa few days.
Frank worked tirelessly, even as we died right before his eyes.
He ran full metabolic panels, endocrine workups, even experimental resonance scans to try and measure our connection on the quantum level.
We went from actively participating in the experiments to falling into exhausted heaps on the mattress that’d been placed in the corner, barely able to move from the pain.
Even our bond didn’t help.
