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“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sorry at all, but if they thought I was going to start attacking people, they’d move me back to my cell. “You surprised me. I’m so sorry. ”
I tried to sound contrite, which wasn’t something I was naturally talented in, but it came across genuine as far as I could tell. They didn’t know me well enough to understand how rarely I was remorseful about violence.
The female nurse didn’t look too forgiving, even though I hadn’t touched her, but the male nurse said, “I shouldn’t have gotten so close. ”
Was he…apologizing to me? I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just stared at him.
“The Doctor will join us shortly, but he requested we take a few notes before he arrives. Do you mind?” he asked.
Would it matter if I did?
“What kind of notes?”
“He wants to see what progress you’ve made after yesterday’s procedures. ” The male nurse was holding a clipboard and pen.
I imagined stabbing him in the throat with that pen. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing big. ” He was treating me like I was a nervous patient he was trying to soothe instead of a walking, talking experiment. “Blood pressure, heart rate, and um…we need to check for scarring?” His gaze drifted to the front of my shirt.
“No scarring. ” This wasn’t entirely true, but they wouldn’t see the kind of scars one would expect to find on a human.
“We need to check,” the woman said.
I stood up and pulled my shirt off, bracing my hands on my hips and glaring at her defiantly. In spite of the thin pink lines on my chest—which the female nurse was noting on her clipboard—I said, “No. Scarring. ” I turned to the male nurse who was blushing furiously—I was starting to think he must be new—and asked, “Is that enough, or do you need to touch?”
“Th-that’s enough,” he stammered. “Thank you. ”
I tugged the shirt back over my head and plopped onto the bed, holding my left arm out to them. “Do whatever you came to do. ”
They set about checking my temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and a half dozen other bizarrely normal things, as if I were a human patient recovering from surgery in a real hospital.
“What do you get out of this?” I broke the silence when it became too much for me to just listen to them work. “What does he tell you about us that lets you justify your actions to yourselves?” I stared right at the new guy, who fumbled while writing something on his clipboard. He couldn’t look at me.
“He tells us not to listen to you for starters,” the woman informed me.
“Because he doesn’t want you to figure out we’re real. We’re people. ”
“You’re not a person. ” She took the blood pressure cuff off my arm and rattled off the numbers to her partner. I continued to watch him instead of her, his fingers trembling on the pen.
“He thinks I’m a person,” I observed.
“He doesn’t know any better yet. But if you talk to him like you talked to Geoff yesterday, he’d come to the conclusion pretty quickly. Why don’t you tell us about how our families are disposable?”
I shifted my attention to her, noting the way she fixated on the bridge of my nose. She’d been here a long time if she was willing to stare that close to my eyes.
“You’ll all get what’s coming to you,” I whispered. The male nurse’s pen clattered to the floor.
I could go for it. My strength was still up from the previous night’s feeding, enough I felt confident I might be able to take these two out. My gaze was transfixed on the pen, wondering how quickly I could kill them both and get through the door. How fast would security come down on me?
How long would it take before the collar blew?
The fucking collar.
I swore internally as loud as I could. Instead of going for the pen, I sat perfectly still and looked at the nurse again. “You dropped your pen. ”
He scooped it up, and I asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three. ”
