If Sabitsuki had thought then that she was a little in danger of going crazy, the Parade convinced her she was in danger all the way.
"Doctor and Nurse didn't come in today," Oreko whispered to her.
"It's only morning," Sabitsuki said. "…I think."
"I feel really bad, though," Oreko said. The orange-blonde hair that had once floated around her head was falling out more every day. Her white arms were so thin; she'd stopped eating a few days ago. "I feel all twisty and sloshy inside…" She pulled herself to a sitting position. "I think I'm gonna barf."
"Maybe I should go get Doctor," Sabitsuki said nervously, sliding to the edge of her bed.
"Can you walk?"
Sabitsuki thought of the girl whose legs had snapped. She hesitated.
And then Oreko vomited, violently, spewing dark red sludge all down her front and her white hospital sheets. Sabitsuki started, covered her own mouth with her hand, and watched in horror as Oreko convulsed and rejected an endless stream of foul-smelling blood and bile and chunks of her own guts, dribbling down the sides of her mouth and trickling from even her nose. Sabitsuki helped force her head over the side of the bed and tried to wipe Oreko's mouth, but she gently pushed her away.
"I'm going to go get Doctor," Sabitsuki said. Oreko couldn't even respond. "I'm going to see if I can find him. Please, please don't die!"
Oreko nodded, though Sabitsuki wasn't even sure if she had heard her. And Sabitsuki careened out into the hallway, Oreko's rusting guts still on her hands.
She hadn't actually been in the hallway for a very long time. Maybe not even since she'd come here, and she could barely remember that. The hallway was wide, and white, and long; and she knew that was normal for hospitals; but she knew that hospitals didn't normally look like this.
Hospitals were supposed to be clean.
Hospitals weren't supposed to have dead children on the floor.
Hospitals weren't supposed to let their patients wander in the halls.
And all around her, in the hallway she'd stepped into, were children. Rotting ones, all with the same rusty disease as her and Oreko and everyone else. Black- or white-haired, children with no hair or no noses or eyes or arms or legs; they left their blood smeared on the walls. Most were oddly quiet, and as calm as if nothing were wrong, but she heard a few giggle, and she was afraid of them.
It's true, she thought, it is a Morg.
Heart hammering, she backed into her room, but Oreko retched behind her. For a moment, she wavered, wishing to dash bravely down the hallway for her friend but wanting nothing more than to just hide and cry; she clutched the sides of her smock, wiped her hands off, crouched with her hands over her head. Oreko's vomit hit the floor again. She hastened back out.
"Doctor?" she said, very quietly, not wanting to provoke anyone.
A child with no eyes turned around. Sabitsuki froze. It sniffed the air.
Doctor stumbled out of a door down the hall. He looked flustered, and didn't heed Sabitsuki until she called to him. After a moment, he located her.
"24?" he said. "I didn't think we had—"
Sabitsuki didn't know what he was talking about; she didn't care, and she barely heard him. "Doctor, number 23 is throwing up a whole lot. Come see. She's gonna die." Hot tears started to well up in her eyes again.
Around them, the children were advancing at a snail's pace, impeded by their tiny weak limbs. Sabitsuki clung to Doctor.
"You shouldn't have said anything," Doctor hissed. "One on one, these brats are nothing. But there's at least a hundred right here."
"Number 23…she's dying…"
"I know, I know," he whispered irritably. "In case you didn't notice, 24, everyone is dying. There's nothing we can do about it."
"But—"
"Shhh!" He grabbed her shoulder, very hard. The children who giggled were tripping over bodies, feeling their way past their calmer fellows, impeded occasionally by each other. All trying to seek out the source of the alien noise, the sounds of voices that hadn't been there before.
When Sabitsuki tried to hide under Doctor's coat, he pried her away.
"I've got to go," he said, glancing around at the giggling children closing in.
"But Doctor!"
"Shush! If you stay quiet and move slowly, they won't notice you. You look just like them." He started backing away from her, carefully.
"What if they get me," Sabitsuki said in a very small voice.
"You're dying anyway."
Doctor took off down the hallway at a sprint, his blood-stained white coat flying out behind him; he was headed for the emergency exit. As he ran, he pushed fragile children away, and they toppled without any resistance, didn't even get up. Sabitsuki knew he wouldn't come back, probably not ever, and as she watched him duck out the door, aloneness crept into her and wouldn't leave, just kept getting heavier. Doctor hadn't done much, but at least he had been a grown-up. Now it really was a Children's Hospital, and all the children were nutcases with mush for brains except her and Oreko. Maybe even Oreko soon.
Sabitsuki stood still for long enough that the children forgot about her. Even though every rotting bone in her body wanted to move a little faster, she tiptoed at an agonizing rate through the crowd, her bare feet getting coated in disintegrating viscera, her shoulders shaking—if she couldn't get Doctor to help…Well, maybe she could find Nurse. She hadn't seen Nurse in a long time. With all of these kids wandering in the halls, she must have been busy.
And Doctor and Nurse weren't the only people at this hospital, right? She had never seen anyone else, but hospitals needed lots of Nurses and lots of Doctors. Someone could help Oreko somewhere. Sabitsuki looked straight ahead and just kept going.
Then she slipped.
A dismembered arm lay across her path. Her blood-slickened foot hit it unevenly, and slid back, and Sabitsuki fell with a cry.
Every face turned.
The giggles got louder.
For a moment, she couldn't figure out how to move, thought her arms were too weak to push herself up, but then she figured it out, and Sabitsuki picked herself up and ran, feet skidding on the tile floor, hands reaching out for IV drips and medical carts and anything she could steady herself with, trying not to bump into any of the children—once or twice or three times, she had to pry their limp, slippery hands off of her, but they never grabbed her all at once, so she was able to keep escaping. She reached the emergency exit but didn't go out it, even when she was nearly trapped, because someone had to help Oreko somehow before she died, or at least someone had to know that she was dying. Sabitsuki ran for the stairs; but someone had just come down them and she bumped into them. She didn't get a chance to say sorry, because she was cut off.
"Functioning or effectively non-sentient?" said the woman she had bumped into; Sabitsuki opened her mouth to say she didn't know what any of that meant, but another woman answered for her.
"Functioning, I believe. Look at the pupils."
"Functioning and in rather good condition," the first woman said, looking down at Sabitsuki. "She's barely gone Second Stage."
Sabitsuki looked up at the woman, and received a shock; at first she thought the woman was a giant bug, or maybe a pig. But there was just a strange mask on her face. The other woman had one too. They were dressed exactly the same, blue dresses and white aprons, like maids, and their clothes were bloodstained, like everything else Sabitsuki had seen for as long as she could remember. Especially those of the woman in front, because she had a chainsaw. It looked like it had been used. On people.
The woman in front spoke to Sabitsuki. "Where is the doctor in charge of this hospital?"
Sabitsuki was paralyzed by shyness.
The woman kneeled down to get on Sabitsuki's eye level, leaning on her chainsaw. "We need to know where the doctor went, honey. You are functioning, aren't you?"
Sabitsuki nodded woodenly. The woman patiently waited for her to speak.
"He left," Sabitsuki finally managed to say. "He went out the emergency exit."
The woman looked at her companion and she left without a word. The saw changed hands and as the second woman walked out of sight, Sabitsuki heard it being fired up. She covered her ears.
"What're you going to do with the doctor?" Sabitsuki said timidly as the first woman took her hand and started leading her down the hall, back the way she had come.
"We need to talk to him. About how he's been running this place." She spoke without caring whether the children heard.
"I'm scared," Sabitsuki said as she and the woman walked, very slowly, back through the children; already more of them had collapsed, and a lot more were walking more sluggishly. Although the woman's voice was soothing, between her bug-pig mask and the chainsaw she'd had, she was far from comforting. All the same, she was in charge now. She was Doctor's boss. "My friend number 23 is throwing up a lot, can you help her?"
"Number 23? Yes, that's what We came for. And you're 24, aren't you?"
"Yes. How'd you know…ma'am."
A rotting kid tried to make a grab for Sabitsuki and the woman hoisted her up into her arms to protect her, easy as breathing. "We've been watching you, honey. Ever since you came to the hospital, and even for a while before that. We're very interested in your sickness."
In Sabitsuki's mind We was capitalized because she thought that We sounded like very important people.
"Oh yeah," she said, "Doctor told me that this disease is like little red demons and Nurse said it was like plants."
The woman tilted her expressionless head. "I suppose those analogies are accurate to an extent. We like to think of it as being like rust."
"Rust?" The word sounded heavy and important to Sabitsuki.
The woman put a hand on the door of Sabitsuki's room. "Rust corrodes and decays and makes things easily breakable."
"Like legs," Sabitsuki said.
"And minds." The woman pushed the door open.
Oreko, inside, was supported by clean pillows. Two more masked women in blue were with her; one was changing her vomit-y sheets. The other had a strange jumble of orange machinery, and was sticking bits of it into Oreko's arms and legs. Oreko was watching all of it from under barely opened lids. She didn't seem concerned.
"I see you've located her," Sabitsuki's woman said. "I have 24."
The one sticking tubes and wires into Oreko nodded. The other one didn't stop working, but spoke. "And the doctor?"
"Deserted. He is being pursued."
Sabitsuki worriedly watched the women. The one who had been fixing sheets finished with that and helped the other one stick things into Oreko's skin. She supposed they were helping somehow, but they were alien. They weren't Doctor and Nurse, even if Doctor had left them all to wander around the hallways and die. Nurse had probably left too, but Sabitsuki didn't actually know. She asked her woman.
"The nurse contracted your illness," the woman said. "She died some weeks ago."
"But I thought it was a kids' disease," Sabitsuki mumbled.
The woman laid Sabitsuki down on the bed numbered 24. "She was young."
Oreko piped up weakly. "Are you young?"
All the women stopped working on Oreko for a moment, surprised. Then they laughed.
"Not young enough to get this disease, honey," Sabitsuki's woman said.
They went back to their work of perforating Oreko, and they finished. The wires and tubes started to buzz and whir and make breathing noises.
"What is it?" Sabitsuki asked.
"It's a life support system," one of them said. "It's going to keep your friend alive."
"Do I get one?" It didn't look comfortable, but if it kept people alive, that was useful.
"You don't need one…yet."
"So why does only 23 get one and not all the kids out in the hall?"
"My, you're full of questions," Sabitsuki's woman said.
"That's called the Scientific Method," Oreko interjected, her voice a little muffled by all the machinery on her face and neck.
Sabitsuki's woman made a little noise like she might have been smiling under her mask, and another woman answered. "23 has displayed excellent resistance to the disease thus far. Up until recently, she's been in a consistent state of First Stage, which is very uncommon. She and yourself, 24, are the only patients with this characteristic who remain alive now. We want to find out why you two have such a strong resistance to the disease, so we can make a cure for any children that get sick in the future."
Oreko's bright black eyes darted to Sabitsuki's, and she smiled warmly.
"As 23 is in Second Stage now, her body can still be preserved by artificial means, at least for the time being. However, the disease has progressed to the brains of the children in the hall. There's no point in keeping them alive. In addition, they are dangerous."
"Yup," Sabitsuki agreed.
"Instead," the woman continued patiently, "they will be terminated."
"Terminated means 'died'," Oreko explained.
Sabitsuki heard, or thought she heard, the buzz of the chainsaw down the hallway and felt a little queasy. I wonder if being terminated with a chainsaw hurts.
"So then, 23's going to be ok?" Sabitsuki asked.
The women looked at each other. "She can be expected to survive for a while longer than she would have otherwise," one said. Sabitsuki had lost track of which one was hers now.
"Just a while longer?" Oreko asked.
"However, there is no known method to prevent the spread of Rust. If it doesn't subside on its own, all we can do is keep her comfortable."
Keep her comfortable. Sabitsuki remembered a long time ago Doctor and Nurse had said that, but then everybody started dying and they had had to turn the hospital into a Morg instead.
"Go to sleep if you can," the woman said. "In the morning, you're being moved."
"Okay," Sabitsuki said, glad to go anywhere the women could take her.
"Where?" Oreko said.
"To a place that's…cleaner."
One of the women stood by Sabitsuki's bed, and one stood by Oreko's bed, and the other one left, turning off the lights as she went; the machinery attached to Oreko whirred and glowed and made breathig noises in the dark.
"This thing is so cool," Oreko said after a while.
Sabitsuki was too worried about it to agree. "I guess."
"And it's orange too. I'm pretty lucky, I think."
"Yeah, you are." All of Oreko's robot designs were orange. Sabitsuki had always thought of her as orange girl before she had gotten up the courage to learn her name, but by now she had forgotten it because no one used it.
"When I grow up, I want to make cool machines like this and help all the sick kids in the world. I also still want to make the robot spiders too."
"I hope you do," she said. She meant I hope you grow up as well as I hope you make cool machines, because even though Oreko seemed cheerful, the woman had said that if Rust didn't subside on its own…Oreko was talkative again, she had a life support machine, but just an hour or two ago, she had been throwing up her guts, so Sabitsuki was still worried.
"What do you want to do when you grow up?" Oreko asked.
"I dunno. Maybe a music guy."
"A music guy?"
"You know, like the guy that plays music at parties and on the radio. I would get to listen to music all day, and I could show everybody the music I liked."
"Sounds cool. You'd get to spin the round black things and make ripping noises!"
"Or maybe I could just be your assistant and help you build your robots."
"You could be both. Maybe my robots can play music while they help society…"
"Sounds good to me."
Soon after that, they fell asleep. The whir of Oreko's machine was comforting.