“Sure, but you press the button and this one always comes.”
“Just lucky, I guess!” My voice is high and loud. I feel the windowfor resuscitation slipping away. “Sorry, Carl, this poor pooch needs our help!”
To my relief, he steps back, hands up in apology. “Sure thing, sorry! Just occurred to me how strange it was that the—”
The doors close and we don’t attempt to stop them. Annie falls back against the wall. “Oh, my God. This is hell. We are inhell.”
The back panel opens. Annie and I steer the gurney down the hall, and we each swipe our security passes, scan our retinas, do every goddamn tiny security maneuver, and mentally I am screaming my face off about how unnecessary this all is. Isn’t one retinal scan plenty? They never do this much inMission: Impossible.
I linger back at the final door as Annie slips through, but I’m able to catch a glimpse inside. Sure enough, Michelle is at the BioNEX security desk and beside her, to my overwhelming relief, is her enormous fifty-ounce Stanley mug. Purple with a sticker of a giant Stanley stuck to the side that says,ALL OF THIS IS IN ME. Fuck, I hope so, Michelle.
The door swings heavily closed, and I pray to whatever dead scientist is listening that Michelle is still religious about hydration and really needs to pee. She’s great, but sharper than Carl, and would absolutely check under the blanket.
Ten thundering heartbeats later, the door swings open and Annie rushes me inside. “Come on, come on, she’s a fast pee-er.”
She helps me move Luca through and then watches the desk until Michelle returns before joining me in the dark BioNEX corridor, where we begin to sprint. The hallway always seems long, but tonight it’s nearly comically so.
“I’ve had this nightmare before,” I say, gasping for breath as the gurney rolls over the concrete.
“Luca dying?”
“No, like, running somewhere and not actually making any forward progress.”
Annie’s laugh is shrill and bounces off every wall, but then she stumbles beside me. She holds me back with a hand on my upper arm. “Fuck, Emery.”
“What?”
“Robert Pattinson.”
“What about him?” I ask. “Come on, keep pushing.”
“He’ll see us coming in.”
“Which is fine, right? We work here.”
“He registers temperature, though,” she says. “He tracks lab activity by heat maps. And we are not actually bringing in a Great Dane.”
Awareness lands. “Fuck.”
Luca’s core temperature is currently too low to register; Robert Pattinson will register two bodies going in. But if we’re successful, three people will eventually be moving around the lab. RPattz the AI wonder might register Reanimated Luca as a human intruder. And Leonard could see the data log and register that a human subject was placed in the BioVIVE.
We exchange a nervous look.
“What choice do we have?” I ask, and immediately answer my own question: “None. We have no choice.” I glance at my wrist. “And we’re running out of time to get him in the pod.”
With a harsh exhale, Annie pushes hard, steering us to the right and down the short hallway, through a final set of security doors to the automatic entrance to my lab, where the disembodied voice of Robert Pattinson genteelly acknowledges our arrival. “Good evening, Dr. Martín. Good evening, Dr. Rodriguez.”
“Not now, Rob,” I say, relieved when the doors slide to a close behind us.
As expected, the lab is blissfully empty, and once inside, we break into action. Annie moves to cold storage to grab A-positive blood—Luca’s blood type—while I move to the BioVIVE pod, setting theparameters. When she doesn’t appear at my side, I turn to see her still standing by the walk-in refrigerator with bags of blood in her hands.
“Annie, what are you waiting for?”
She’s gone pale. “We can still call an ambulance, Em. It’s not too late.”
I gape at her. “The compound is the only thing keeping him here. We’re running out of time!”
“We can stop. Give him a transfusion. The compound is holding his pulse at 20 bpm. It’ll hold until they get here.”
