When school starts, the teachers ask them what they want to become. There are a few among the future soldiers, space colonists and actors that, like herself, want to become doctors. Some of those say their parents are doctors too. Angela doesn't like them very much because they hold it over the rest of them as if they had a leg to stand on! Unfortunately, Uncle made her promise to not tell anyone about his clinic, so she keeps quiet. Besides, even if they're being annoying about it, one of them still invites the rest to his house to play doctor in a game that has them pull little plastic organs from a plastic patient. It's fun, but the next day Angela sneaks out some of Uncle's tools and suggests they catch a frog or maybe a bird to make their game more realistic. The girls shudder at the prospect of touching a frog, but the boys' enthusiasm pulls them along regardless, and before long, the group of knee-scraped children (with the exception of herself, since she wears long sleeves even through the worst of the summer heat) huddle around Angela and her captured dove.
Some of them get a little sick. The others almost bounce with excitement. All are enthralled as Angela starts picking the bird apart without a hint of squeamishness, bickering about which organ to next remove. They get shouted at when their host's mom finds them, but it only slightly dampens Angela's good mood. Having friends again is fun, even when half of them decide they'd rather be soldiers, firefighters, policemen, and singers by the next week.
It's after one of their excursions, while Uncle is showing her how to bandage her sprained ankle in his lab, that she first sees the tank. It sits unassumingly on a cabinet, just a plastic tube with wires submerged in the fluorescent red goo inside - reminiscent of the stream of light from the Medigewehr.
"What's that?" she asks, pointing at the container. She knows what all other Uncle's machines do by now, so seeing something new naturally captures her interest.
"That, Angela, is the future of medicine."
He doesn't elaborate, and she doesn't ask further in spite of her burning curiosity. She knows by now that Uncle not talking about his projects means there isn't yet much to tell. He's always so eager to talk about his work, otherwise. The tank remains in the lab for almost a year, and mostly fades from Angela's memory as just another of Uncle's many projects.
One night, as she's tossing and turning in her bed, her chest still aching from a week-old injection, her door suddenly flies open to reveal Uncle's figure standing in the frame, his face concealed by the dark of her room.
"Already awake, I see. Perfect! Come, there's science to be done!"
Angela only takes a moment to calm her stuttering heart before following in the man's footsteps. It happens, sometimes, that Uncle will need her in the dead of night and wake her up for whatever it is he needs her for. Usually a test of some sort.
She rubs at her chest, trying to ease the wariness bubbling within. Doing science hurts.
Like all the other times, Angela dutifully climbs atop the operating table and waits, watching as her uncle dashes around the room. He assembles his tools next to the tank with the future of medicine: a power saw, scapleps, towels, tubes, blood packs, some three-pronged piece of metal, a camera, a notepad, Uncle's phone (with which he turns the volume on the radio up), a few small and few big metal syringes, which he soon fills with the glowing contents of the tank.
"Oh, don't be a baby Angela, it'll only hurt a little bit." Uncle says when he sees her shaking like a leaf. She grips the edge of the table till her knuckles go white and closes her eyes.
Uncle helps her undress, ties her down to the table so that she doesn't hurt herself, after which he gives her an injection with some of the glowing stuff from the tank, and a leather belt with cloth tied around it to bite on.
Angela used to think she's gotten used to the sound over the many times she's seen him use it on his patients, but when she hears the high-pitched whirring just under her chin, it's as if all her thoughts just vanish, leaving her thrashing uncontrollably in her restraints.
Contrary to Uncle's assurances, it does, in fact, hurt more than a little bit even with the anesthesia. It hurts a whole lot. More than anything Angela has ever felt before, actually. The pain is phenomenal, beyond anything she could compare it to. She screams into her gag and bites deep into the leather between her teeth. She's wailing and thrashing and crying and dying. Then, blessedly, it's finally too much, and she stops feeling anything at all.
(...)
She wakes up with a start and jumps off the table to flee underneath it, where at least some measure of safety can be found. It's only when she finds a moment to calm in the dark of her hiding spot that Angela notices she's no longer in the lab, but in her own room, under her own bed, and that the pain she's feeling is entirely in her memory rather than her chest.
No. No, that's not true. It's faint and entirely overshadowed by the pain in her mind, but every beat of her heart sends a dull pang through her chest. Not truly painful, not easily ignored either. Everything else, though? Every deep-seated ache she's grown used to beyond paying it attention is gone. It still takes her a few minutes before she finds the courage to emerge from beneath her bed, and take off her pyjamas to inspect her chest.
Nothing. No gaping wound. No stitches. No scar. Not even a fading scrape to show for what her memory insists has happened.
When she cautiously leaves her room for the kitchen, she only finds a note saying Uncle will be gone for the day, as is often the case, and that there's a sandwich in the fridge. It stirs a ravenous hunger in her, stronger than anything she'd felt even in the camps. And yet, even the thought of eating makes her nauseous in her restless state. Angela stares at the plate feeling like she's going to vomit if she so much as takes a bite, squirming in her chair all the while. Eventually, she puts the sandwich away again, and, fighting against the shadow of her dream, heads to the lab to dismiss it as one.
The saw and scalpels still lie on the tray by the operating table, dirty as they always are without her to clean them. The towels are red, the syringes in the sink, the metal piece has vanished and the tank with the red fluid stands empty.
She runs back under her bed, where she spends the rest of the day clutching at her aching chest.
Uncle finds her still hiding when he comes back in the evening, and simply tells her they'll be doing some testing the next day before heading to sleep. Much as the prospect of going back to the lab makes her feel ill, the way he just goes on about their business as if nothing has happened does make her feel like there's a semblance of normality still in her life, and come morning, having slept under the bed, she finds herself trembling on the lab table once more.
They start with stinging the tip of her finger with a needle. A pang, a drop of... something on the tip of the needle, and then nothing. Not even when she squeezes her finger to draw out more of the not-blood. Then, Uncle cuts her finger with a scalpel, it hurts, and Angela almost makes a break for it as fresh memories flood her mind before the heat comes and she sees the cut fade into nothingness just seconds after it is made. They continue in this fashion, switching to bigger blades, bigger cuts, and deeper stabs, that all vanish in the searing heat from within her. Only the new ones do that, though. The silvery patterns on her skin remain just as they were. Uncle gives her shots that make blood boil in her veins, makes her breathe in a gas that makes her chest burn from the inside as if she spilled lemon juice on a fresh wound. It's all so warm, almost unbearably so, and her strange, new blood sometimes glows red. She will only notice she never falls sick anymore years later.
Uncle calls the trials a success and gives Angela a lollipop for being such a great patient, then largely seems to forget about the whole ordeal aside from writing her a doctor's note for PE a week later. It's upsetting to learn she simply can't keep up with her friends when running, or playing dodgeball, or skipping on a jumping rope, or doing anything else without her chest growing more and more pained until she can't breathe anymore. It's worse to learn every air raid alarm causes the same with no way to stop it until the danger is over. It leaves her sitting on the sidelines more often than not, but Uncle tells her there's nothing to be done, so Angela does her best to be a good girl and behave. After all, she wouldn't want her own patients in the future to complain about things well out of her hands, either.
It takes months before the nightmares pass from regular occurrence into rarity. Before she stops catching herself thinking about nothing at all for minutes on end in the middle of class, or doing homework, or eating, or playing. It takes months before she learns to consistently keep her meals down. She never manages to get rid of the apprehension taking root in her chest whenever she enters Uncle's lab. Or the illness taking hold of her stomach when he puts on his music.
She's eleven when men in suits take her to the police station straight from her school headmaster's office. The officers they leave her with are nice and soft-spoken and even order her a pizza, and through it all Angela can't relax even a little bit. The last time the police took her, they brought with them the news of her parents' deaths. Her anxiousness proves warranted when they tell her she won't be going back to her house. That her uncle is a bad man. That he's been charged with conducting medical research on unwilling participants. That he's not a real doctor. That he's now on the run but he'll soon be caught. They show her photos of missing persons, allegedly experimented on by Uncle, and Angela recognises many a face from the lab where she was helping Uncle treat them.
They ask her if she's seen any of them, to which Angela answers no. The men exchange a look before asking if she's absolutely sure - all they get are repeated denials. They don't believe her, Angela can tell, but before they can do anything about it, one of the men who took her from her school comes in and starts raising hell over questioning a minor without the presence of a child services' official - him, apparently. He all but chases the officers out, and Angela isn't questioned again for months, by which time she's figured out she needn't say a thing because she's little and the law just doesn't work when there's no adult to take the fall for her lack of cooperation.
Even her case worker seems put off by her stubborn refusal to help the police in any way, but she's not going to risk saying anything she could incriminate herself by. The only way Angela knows how to do that is by saying nothing at all. If anyone knew what she's been doing with her uncle, they might not understand that she just wanted to help. And she still wants to help. She still wants to be a doctor.
She's not going to let Uncle ruin that for her.