I feel like shit.
After every breakfast, Claire comes in to examine me, tinker with my meds, and make cryptic remarks like, You better start feeling better. The window of opportunity is closing. Or snide ones like, I’m starting to think the whole very-big-rock idea was the right way to go. She seems to resent that I’ve reacted badly to her pumping me full of forty thousand alien mechanisms.
“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she told me once. “The procedure is irreversible.”
“There is one thing.”
“What? Oh. Sure. Ringer the irreplaceable.” She pulled the kill switch device from her lab coat pocket and held it up. “Got you keyed in. I’ll push the button. Go ahead. Tell me to push the button.” Smirking.
“Push the button.”
She laughed softly. “It’s amazing. Whenever I start wondering what he sees in you, you say something like that.”
“Who? Vosch?”
Her smile faded. Her eyes went shark-eyed blank. “We will terminate the upgrade if you can’t adjust.”
Terminate the upgrade.
She peeled the bandages away from my knuckles. No scabs, no bruises, no scars. As if it hadn’t happened. As if I’d never pounded my fist into the wall until the skin split down to the bone. I thought of Vosch appearing in my room completely healed, days after I smashed his nose and gave him two black eyes. And Sullivan, who told the story of Evan Walker torn apart by shrapnel and yet, somehow, hours later, able to infiltrate and take out an entire military installation by himself.
First they took Marika and made her Ringer. Now they’ve taken Ringer and “upgraded” her into someone completely different. Someone like them.
Or something.
There is no day or night anymore, only a constant sterile glow.
59
“WHAT HAVE THEY done to me?” I ask Razor one day when he carts in another inedible meal. I don’t expect an answer, but he’s expecting me to ask the q
uestion. It must strike him as weird that I haven’t.
He shrugs, avoiding my gaze. “Let’s see what’s on the menu today. Oooh. Meat loaf! Lucky duck.”
“I’m going to vomit.”
His eyes widen. “Really?” He looks around for the plastic upchuck container, desperate.
“Please, take the tray away. I can’t.”
He frowns. “They’ll pull the plug on you if you don’t get your shit together.”
“They could have done this to anyone,” I say. “Why did they do it to me?”
“Maybe you’re special.”
I shake my head and answer as if he were serious. “No. I think it’s because someone else is. Do you play chess?”
Startled: “Play what?”
“Maybe we could play. When I’m feeling better.”
“I’m more of a baseball guy.”
“Really? I would have guessed swimming. Or tennis.”
He cocks his head. His eyebrows come together. “You must be feeling bad. Making conversation like you’re halfway human.”