Under the Knife(32)

“Yes.”

Sebastian tapped an app icon on his phone called Fruit Punch Drunk. The app looked like a game, and you could even play it: The object was to punch flying clusters of fruit before they hit you in the face. But buried within it, accessible with a combination inputted by hitting various types of fruit in a specific order, was its real purpose: to monitor the electronic signals going back and forth between Finney’s control tablet and the device in Wu’s head.

Sebastian had no control over Wu’s device, or the inputs to it; only Finney did. Sebastian was but a spectator. He hated this. And even more frustrating was that Finney could lock him out, at any time—which was what he’d done earlier, when Wu was first waking up. Sebastian hated being kept in the dark. He was used to keeping others in the dark.

Now the inputs and outputs flowed across his screen as a series of colored graphs and figures, representing the electronic interactions between Finney and the device since he’d implanted it in Wu’s skull a few hours ago. Sebastian chewed on the inside of his cheek as he studied the data.

“That’s some pretty high signal strength there, boss.”

“Nothing outside of our prior experience.”

“But more than what we’d anticipated.”

A LOT more.

“No. I disagree. She’s requiring one, perhaps two standard deviations above the mean to maintain her directives.”

Two standard deviations: that was a lot—a goddamn large amount of juice pumping into her brain. About as much as what the most resilient test subjects had been able to tolerate.

Right before they’d started to go insane.

“But right here, around 0700—the way you cranked it up so quickly to get her to respond to the commands. Don’t you find that concerning?”

Because I sure as hell do.

A slight pause.

“No. Simply an … irregularity, Sebastian. One for which I quickly and effectively compensated. Nothing more.”

Finney always talked like this, even in casual conversation. Formal. Deliberate. He liked ten-dollar words, and sentences that didn’t end in prepositions. To Sebastian it made Finney sound like a robot. Pure analytics. No emotion.

“Okay. If you say so, boss.”





RITA


She was walking toward pre-op. The first operations of the day were scheduled to start soon, and the corridor hummed with activity. Nurses, doctors, and patients on gurneys crowded the hallway, heading in various directions, a blur of motion, and she weaved determinedly through it.

The left side of her head still hurt, but the pain was tolerable now; the throbbing had faded to a distant drumbeat. Her head felt clearer, as if she’d just awoken from a brief power nap, and while her stomach burned with acidy lumps of anxiety, her nausea had diminished.

Her phone buzzed. Without breaking stride, she fished it out of the back pocket of her scrubs and glanced at the screen (Incoming call: home) before lifting it to her right ear.

“Hi, Darcy,” she said sheepishly. “Sorry. I, uh, forgot to call you back. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know you must be, like, super busy this morning.”

“Yeah, I really am, kiddo,” Rita said, preoccupied because she needed to operate on Mrs. Sanchez. Up ahead, she could see the automatic double doors leading into pre-op. “Is anything wrong? Everything okay?”

“I … think so. It’s just … when I woke up this morning, I felt kind of, I dunno—weird, Ree.”

“Uh-huh.” Rita had almost reached the double doors.

“I don’t know how to describe it.”’

“Uh-huh.”

“Ask her about her head,” Finney said.

Rita almost dropped the phone.

She stopped a few feet short of the doors. Her chest tightened, as if someone were sitting on it, and she struggled to pull air into her lungs.

“What did you say?” Rita whispered.

Darcy: “What?”

Finney: “Ask your sister about her head, Dr. Wu.”

Rita’s fingers tightened around the phone—

(Darcy how could HE know about Darcy?)

—and she heard herself say, very slowly, “Darcy. Is, uh, is your … head okay?”

“Well, no, actually. I woke up with a horrible headache this morning.” She hesitated. “How did you know about that, Ree?”

Oh God.

Finney murmured, “Ask her where her head hurts, Dr. Wu.”

Rita wiped the gathering sweat from her forehead. “Where, kiddo? Where does your head hurt?”

“My left. All over. Shit, even my left ear hurts. But, whatever. That’s not the weirdest part, Ree.”

“What do you mean?” Rita’s tight grip on the phone—

(Oh God, Finney what did Finney do to my little sister?)

—tightened.

“The weirdest part, the reason I called you, is—”

“Rita!” a man called out from behind her. Startled, Rita jerked her head away from the phone.

“Rita,” he said again. She’d recognized that unmistakable baritone the instant she’d heard it, and knew who it was before she’d spun around to face its owner, making a beeline straight toward her from down the hallway.

“Dr. Montgomery,” Finney said conversationally. “Of course. I’ve been expecting his involvement. I’m sure it didn’t take long for him to hear about this morning’s excitement.”