And in the morning, when they were still half-asleep, they got moved to another building that Sabitsuki barely got to see. Really her new room looked exactly like her old one, except it was clean and much smaller.
"What about the other girl?" Sabitsuki said, because Oreko was no longer a 23.
"She's in the room next door," the woman said.
"Can we visit each other though?"
"The other girl is unable to visit. She is immobile."
"Then I'll just visit her."
The woman agreed to that, and every day from then on she got to spend an hour with Oreko. Many days passed, and Sabitsuki was sometimes in crutches, sometimes in a wheelchair, sometimes fine again like the disease couldn't decide what to do with her. As time went on her legs got weaker, and she got dizzier, but for a reason she didn't know her legs never snapped in half, though sometimes they felt like they would.
Oreko started off as cheerful as always. She had managed to get a huge pile of books on machines and chemistry and spiders and sea life and everything else she liked and she was always reading them. When she was strong enough to sit up for a while, she would draw all of her machine ideas in black and orange crayon (especially orange crayon; Sabitsuki wondered how many she went through). But her strength for that slowly disappeared. She and Sabitsuki tried to have interesting conversations to keep Oreko entertained, but there was nothing interesting to talk about in the tiny white room and nothing they wanted to think about in their past or future. Eventually, Oreko did nothing but lie there and touch Sabitsuki with her tiny hand to show that she was still listening, even though she had run out of energy to talk.
One day, when Sabitsuki came to sit by Oreko, there were already some women in there.
They had machinery—Oreko's suit was getting updated again. This happened occasionally, and Sabitsuki wasn't usually bothered by it.
But this time was different. Oreko was forced into a sitting position even though that was supposed to be too dangerous for her now. A woman was pushing her head back, and another was coming with some sort of giant orange ball with a hole in the bottom just big enough for a head. All of Oreko's face and neck machinery was detached. She was only moving her eyes, but they didn't move much. They did look at Sabitsuki.
Sabituki tugged on the dress of the nearest woman, who was watching with her hands folded in front of her. She tugged again. "What's going on?
The woman put a hand on Sabitsuki's shoulder, telling her, be quiet.
As Sabitsuki watched, the women lowered the ball over Oreko's head, fastened it to her neck and shoulders with tubes and wires. With just one look, Sabitsuki knew it would never come off.
Rust did not subside on its own. Not in Oreko, and not in Sabitsuki. Sabitsuki threw up more and more, never a lot at once, never her guts, but little bits of blood and slime. Big moist red sores showed up everywhere on her body. She felt dizzy and queasy all the time and sometimes even like she wanted to bite someone; but the women in the masks still marveled at how subdued her illness was, how it refused to advance.
Oreko got worse, and Sabitsuki wasn't able to sit by her anymore. Her body was mostly machines by then anyway: organs and limbs got replaced or amputated as they deteriorated. But the monitor by her bed still said that she was alive.
She died one afternoon, after so long in the hospital that Sabitsuki couldn't remember how long since they'd arrived. What was left of her was carried out very carefully, by a parade of women, right past Sabitsuki's door. Later Sabitsuki would learn that Oreko's remains were preserved for research purposes, and that had she died, the same would have happened to her.
But Sabitsuki didn't die: she got worse and worse until she saw everything through a red fog and her skin came off her face in blobs, but she stayed alive, if barely. And then she did something no one else had done. She got better.
The women were amazed (quietly). They took samples of Sabitsuki's blood and hair and skin from everywhere on her body. They tested her for every symptom, everything. They kept her in the hospital for another year. Then another. And then, one day, they told her she could leave.
Of course she wanted to, but of course she was afraid. She didn't know a world where people were healthy, where people wore proper clothes, where they wandered free and were able to do what they liked.
She couldn't wander as free as them; the women told Sabitsuki that they would always be watching her, even when she thought they had left her alone. That was fine with her.
When Sabitsuki stepped into the world, she took two things with her: Oreko's memory, and the dormant disease.