-25-

The Sterile Unknown

"Beginning descent. Might get a little bumpy. Nothing to worry about." The intercom scares me after riding so long with only the hum of engines. The sky is dark now except for the stars glittering brighter than they do from the ground. Can we stay up here just a while longer? Clove was relaxed next to me. Now she sits up and bristles again.

"That was too fast. I'm not ready for this."

"As long as I'm here you don't have to be afraid."

The hovercraft angles down and we slip beneath the clouds. The sprawl of teeming lights that appears below looks too mystical to be the Capitol, but we're dropping fast toward it. The radio buzzes once more, but this time it's not our pilot's voice.

"Inbound craft, your vector is unauthorized. Identify and state purpose."

"Shit." We can hear Declan's response. "Ground, this is commuter shuttle Javelin requesting permission to land directly at Salus Medical Complex, over."

"Negative. Those pads are for emergency flights only. Proceed to the airstrip at coordinates –"

"I am an emergency flight. Carrying a sick girl needing a doctor soon as possible. Repeating request. Over."

"Stand by."

Silence.

"They won't let us land?" Clove whispers.

"They have to."

"What if they don't?"
"They will."

More silence. Finally: "Permission granted, Javelin. Forwarding your call sign to air traffic at Salus. Over and out."

I let out a long breath.

"How do you like that?" Declan says. "Didn't even have to drop your name."

"Thanks for that."

The medical center is huge and stark even from the air as we circle around to the landing pads, each with an illuminated H glowing in its center. We touch down, and out the window I can already see a group of hospital staff coming across the pad to meet us. A few have unnatural skin colors that churn up very unwelcome memories. Declan opens the doors and helps us out with our bags.

"This is where I have to leave you," he says. "I'll tell Abernathy we made it. He'll get the word to your families."

Something occurs to me. "I can't pay you for this right now. I only brought what I had on me."

"It was my pleasure, and you have enough to deal with."

"Oh…" Beside me Clove is insisting she can walk on her own as the nurses try to coax her onto a stretcher.

"I better go. Thank you! Thank you." I hope I see him again to better express my gratitude, but I have a fight to prevent right now. "She doesn't need that –"

"Miss, it's just procedure."

"I said I can walk!" Clove smacks the nurse's hand away, and I grab her arm.

"Don't do this. You have to try to cooperate if they're going to help you."

"What is your emergency?" demands the perturbed nurse.

"It's her head," I reply. "She's having pain and seizures."

"On the gurney," the nurse snaps at her. "Now."

"Please just sit down," I beg. "I am right beside you."

She slams herself down and shoves her bag into my arms. I follow them across the landing pad and through the doors into the bright white, antiseptic unknown.

"The results are strange. I've never seen a case quite like this."

"Guess I'm one of a kind." Clove is dark and rigid. Tense as a board long before her surgeon joined us in his office. There's nothing I can do or say now – not after a full day of blood tests and brain scans at the hands of nurses and technicians, Clove all along staying nearly silent and giving up no information about herself or her past or her injury.

"That you are, without a doubt."

Dr. Ishida's gently pointed ears are all that give him away as a Capitol native. Not a black hair stands out of place. His smile is clever, his eyes sharp, his smooth voice a relief from others' high, lilting accents. It's not enough to earn Clove's trust, but he might gain mine. He hasn't mentioned my significance once. He exudes calm.

He reminds me just a bit of Cinna.

"Let me show you what I mean," he continues, dimming the lights in the room and touching a few buttons on a projector. Half of a brain floats before us, magnified to several times its size. It's detailed enough to be a solid object, all hills and valleys and smooth undulations.

"That's my head?" Clove wrinkles her nose.

"The left hemisphere of it, where our problem lies. Starting here, and extending up to here." He points out an area around the center of the image. "Do you see how it is sunken? Just a fraction from the rest of the surfaces?"

"No."

"I can. I think." What do I know? Could just be my imagination.

"Very hard to catch in a visual inspection. But. What we have here is a three-dimensional image, and it tells a different story." He slowly turns a dial, and the hologram moves through the layers of Clove's brain. I still see nothing wrong. I can barely pick out the 'fluctuations of density' he claims are obvious.

"Now," he says, "I will overlay the results of the electrical tracers. This was the purpose of the emotional and sensory stimuli we gave you earlier, which I understand was particularly unpopular, hm?

"Just show me."

"We will see now what areas of your brain are active. You should see illumination in all major regions." He taps the air and slides his fingers over the hologram. Tiny blue lines race all over the virtual brain, and now I see. Now I understand. I know Clove does too, from the way she goes so still. There is no blue in the area Dr. Ishida focused on. A swath of her brain just above her left ear is dark.

Dark.

"What you see," Dr. Ishida says as gently as he can, "is dead tissue in the outer layers of your temporal and parietal lobes, straining the surrounding healthy tissue and causing the damage to spread outward and inward. Normally I would diagnose ischemia, an unnoticed stroke, even parasitic or fungal infection; but you have no other symptoms to support those explanations. I could consider blunt trauma, but your skull would be shattered."

She stares at the hologram. "Kat," she whispers, "I feel sick."

He glances at each of our stony faces. "About now, I'd expect you to be baffled, to ask, 'Then if none of those, what is it?' Instead, you look like something has dawned on you. I have the impression suddenly that you know something I do not."

"Am I going to die?"

"I cannot say," he replies. "That depends on whether you are willing to share with me enough information that we may get to the bottom of this mystery and determine an appropriate course of treatment."

She looks at me. I look at her. I know she blames me for being here at all, but I don't care. She knows I don't care. She knows I won't let her walk away out of fear. Not this time. "You better stay with me," she warns. "Every damn day I'm here. Don't leave me alone. Don't trust them. You stay. With me."

"I will. I promise I will."

She stares at me a moment longer as if to make sure I'm not already lying to her. "Okay." She steels herself and turns hard eyes on Dr. Ishida. "Let's talk."

Our room is small, but it will do. Most of it houses the adjustable bed surrounded by machines and sensors. There's a bathroom, and a little extension for me that I won't use because there's a tiny sofa closer to Clove that I can sleep on. Neither of us wants to turn on the television even for the sake of background noise. Gold sunset light streams through the open blinds, and in the broken beams I absurdly notice that no dust floats in the air. Everything here is filtered. Sterile.

The food is no exception.

"You should eat," I tell her when she makes it clear she doesn't intend to touch her dinner.

"I'm not hungry."

She never is anymore, and it shows around her eyes now.

We were right to come here. I was right. I have to keep reminding myself. Otherwise I'll die of guilt every time she looks away from me, mumbles a reply, fixes her mouth in a hard line. I know what she's going through. I've had my clothes taken from me in exchange for disposable gowns, had strangers fill me with needles, wires, sensors. Worse, they now know who she is and exactly why she's here. I'm on edge too. One of her knives lies hidden in my pocket. This is how it will be while Dr. Ishida consults with his team. He didn't give a time estimate.

At least now Clove has real medication for her pain that doesn't leave her disoriented and lethargic. That's the only concession.

I unfold myself from the sofa and sit gingerly on the side of her bed. "I know you're angry with me. I'm sorry."

"I'm not angry. Not after seeing what's wrong with me. I want it fixed. I want to be myself again. And all this…" She looks around at the technological chaos monitoring her every heartbeat. "I don't want you to see me like this. So fucking helpless. Pathetic. But I can't do it without you because I'm too damn scared, and – I just want. To go. Home!"

"We will." I take her hand. "I don't think you're helpless or pathetic or a coward. You came here, and you'll beat this, just like everything else."

"Tsh."

"That's what we do." I lean closer. "We survive." Her lips part, and I kiss her. Delicate at first, then deeper. I feel fingers slide into my hair; tears that aren't mine wet my cheeks. My heart pounds.

When we part, glistening green eyes pierce me. "I better live through this," she grits. "I want more of that."

Even now she makes me laugh. "You will. And you'll have it."