* * * * *

The wait was shorter than anticipated—only one week.

One short week that felt like a hundred years—because Bella did not spend that week with Edward. That week, she stayed far from the lab, not wanting to see Edward restrained. Not wanting to see the wires snaking from his flesh as he was poked and prodded and monitored and tested.

She wanted to remember him talking softly to himself in the library stacks. She wanted to remember him standing on a cliff with the sun at his back. She did not want to watch him experience the side-effects that Dr. Jenks anticipated as his blood transported the serum throughout his body.

"Most of the animals became very aggressive while their circulatory system did its job," Dr. Jenks had said. "The border collies, in particular, exhibited symptoms not unlike rabies for a period of three days. All indications pointed to the fact that they were in excruciating pain. They lashed out at anyone who came close."

At his words, Bella's mind produced a single, still frame of Edward frothing at the mouth, his green irises usurped by white as his eyes rolled back into his head.

That week, the halls of the psychology department were nearly devoid of Dr. Jenks' staff; everyone was working overtime shifts at the lab in silent vigil to see if the sweat and blood they had poured into this project was going to pay off at last. To see if the sleepless nights they'd spent, the quiet hurt on the faces of their wives and husbands and children and parents, to see if these things were going to be worth it after all.

Each day of that week, Bella called Dr. Jenks for an update.

"No change," he would inform her tightly. "I'll let you know as soon as there are any new developments."

Each day of that week, Bella could hardly eat. She could hardly sleep. She didn't have the emotional energy to return Jacob's calls.

Then—one week to the day when the oversized needle had first invaded Edward's skin—the wait was over. Bella was sitting in another incomprehensible lecture when her cell phone buzzed with a call from a J. Jenks. Without hesitation, she slung her bag over her shoulder and walked straight out of the classroom without even a backward glance at the startled gazes of her professor and peers.

"Hello?" she answered breathlessly when she was scarcely out in the hall.

"Bella!" Dr. Jenks said, his voice feverish and distorted above the pandemonium on his end of the line. For a second, she thought she was hearing screams of terror. She imagined that Dr. Jenks and his team had inadvertently created their own Frankenstein, a green-eyed monster that had come to life and was now destroying them all.

"Dr. Jenks," she responded, fighting to keep the panic from her voice so as to not unnecessarily alarm the students drifting nearby. She clamped a hand over her exposed ear desperately in an effort to hear him.

"Bella!" he repeated. "It worked! You need to get down here!"

Behind him, she could hear a babble of excited voices and a pop like that of a champagne cork. Excitement bubbled up through her body, a tidal wave of emotion that she had repressed over the last weeks and months but that now threatened to consume her.

"I'll be there as soon as I can." Her voice was even, but her heart rate was anything but.

The trip out to the Seattle fringe was maddening. She stood stiffly at the bus stop, tapping her foot impatiently in tandem with her racing heart. She sat on the edge of her seat in the front row of the bus, urging it forward like a whip on a steed. When it arrived, she flung herself down the bus steps, narrowly squeezing through the still-opening doors.

One of the technicians—whose name tag proclaimed her to be Jane—was waiting for her in the lab reception area. Jane escorted Bella silently through the maze of hallways, walking briskly as though eager to return to a party. As they walked, Bella tried to think of a question to ask, any question, but her thoughts were too jumbled, her emotions too tangled and excited and scared and oh dear Lord she was going to see Edward.

A new Edward.

With a small smile, Jane swiped her access card and gestured that Bella go ahead.

Bella stepped through the door to the lab, and time seemed to slow. The normally empty, sterile lab was an explosion of color, movement, and sound. The normally dignified, reserved lab techs had thrown off their white lab coats, had discarded the glasses perched on their noses, had holstered the pencils stuck behind their ears.

They had donned pointed party hats, were blowing on expandable kazoos, and were squirting silly string. It was complete and utter mania. The mania of a team who had pulled together for long, fruitless years. The mania of a team who had finally achieved success, had finally reached that lofty pinnacle that had only ever been the stuff of science fiction, of fantasy, of dreams. The mania of a team who was about to change the world.

Bella could feel a smile break across her face, and she began to push forward through the throng of people, many of whom she had never seen, making her way toward the nexus of the activity.

The sea of gyrating humans at last parted for her, and she stepped forward to see what all the fuss was about.

Her smile faltered when what she saw was Mary sitting at a computer console—alone. Mary looked up as she approached, a sickly sweet smile on her face.

"Hi Bella. I'm Mary Alice Brandon," she said. "I would like you to call me Alice, not Mary. I don't like the name Mary."

Then Mary/Alice went back to playing her little game.

Bella's vision contracted until Mary's prim, smiling face was all that she could see. Her eyes shifted to the left, to the right, but they did not find what she was looking for. They did not find a pair of startlingly green eyes. They did not find a mess of dull, tangled hair. They did not find an awkward smile, awkward limbs, an awkwardly upturned foot.

Instead, they found Dr. Jenks, standing nearby in a cluster of his peers, laughing and clinking his champagne flute so forcefully against other glasses that the bubbling liquid spilled over the edge of the crystal, forever lost to the floor.

She stared at him, and he finally sensed the weight of her stare despite the chaos. He sensed her at last, and his gaze shifted to meet hers. When their eyes locked, he stopped mid-sentence, his mouth ajar.

Heads craned to look in her direction, and the room grew quiet.

In the silence, Bella asked, "Is Edward…?" The question dangled, unfinished. Dr. Jenks' eyes cooled, and he waved her away from the people crowded around Alice like cars at a drive-in movie.

"Edward is still…under observation." Dr. Jenks said, and Bella nearly flinched at the mental image of wires and needles. "He's in his room. Come."

As they walked, Dr. Jenks told her that Mary was well on her way to tripling her score in the game. He told her that she had woken up this morning and had started talking and laughing and had not bitten anyone. Her brain seemed to be undergoing an exponential transformation.

Bella did not respond; she merely followed Dr. Jenks blindly down the familiar hallways to a heavy white door. She waited as he swiped his badge for admittance and swung the door ponderously open.

Bella had half expected to see Edward lying limply on a bed surrounded by those snaking wires and whirring machines and white-coated leeches.

Instead, when she peered around Dr. Jenks' broad shoulders, she saw Edward sitting on the floor in the middle of an austere room, one knee pulled up to his chest. The thick restraints fastened to his Spartan bed hung limply, thick vines suffering from lack of water. The gray light cast by a small, barred window shone faintly on his face, and Bella saw that he was staring intently at the colored blocks on the ground before him, as if willing them to coalesce into a glittering tower of Babel. Yet he seemed to lack the energy to start stacking the blocks.

When Bella stepped into the room, he raised his head.

"Miss Bella," he whispered, and his face sparked weakly, a failing light bulb only sporadically illuminating the darkness. The smile that Bella had grown to know and love was only a pale shadow of its former radiance. Edward looked drained and more gaunt than normal. His appearance sent a network of cracks through Bella's cemented heart.

"Hi, Edward. How are you?" She was proud that her voice didn't shake.

"Not so good," he mumbled, the first time he'd ever answered that question in anything but the affirmative.

"What's wrong?" She looked frantically to Dr. Jenks for her answer, her eyes shining with fear, but the good doctor merely smiled sadly and waved her attention back to Edward.

Edward sighed, the final gust of air from a deflated balloon. "Mary is too smart for me now. She doesn't want to play with me."

And Mary or Alice (whoever she was) wasn't the only one. Not two rooms away, an entire team of people who had doted on Edward over the last several weeks were now rejoicing around their little miracle, the long-shot on whom the treatment hadn't even been expected to work. While the sure thing, the horse upon which everyone had placed the biggest bets, was sitting in an empty room alone, forgotten like a former prize stallion put out to pasture.

He couldn't even understand why he had been left behind.

The miraculous treatment had worked—just not on Edward.

* * * * *