ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE: Dawn II

145

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Alden lay in a bed so perfectly molded to his body that moving seemed like it would be ungrateful. The healer had told him to pick any room he wanted in the hospital, and the one he’d chosen for himself was completely quiet and very dark except for a nightlight with a friendly pinkish-orange glow.

This was the second time he’d woken. The first had been when the small oval drone assigned to him had started gently chirping to let him know it was time for him to take some potions. Even though he was sure it had only been minutes since his eyes closed, he’d obediently rolled over and accepted its offerings. After downing the drinkable ones, spraying the sprayable ones, and saying “pierce” to every injector, he’d tucked himself right back in and fallen asleep again so quickly that he probably wouldn’t have argued if someone had tried to convince him he’d dreamed the whole interruption.

Now he was fully rested, but he had an urge to close his eyes again and pretend that he wasn’t.

The clean, peaceful room separated him from whatever reality was like out there right now.

They hadn’t sent anyone to poke at him, and nobody had come to deliver bad news. There was no blood here, very little pain, no burdens too heavy to bear.

And instead of trying to kill him, the water ran harmlessly from the bathroom tap like water was supposed to.

His only companion was a small snake who’d been upgraded to a square plastic tub with holes poked in the lid. While the Brute doctor was bandaging Alden up after his shower last night, he had asked her if they had anything that snakes could live in, and he had gotten this. Plus a shallow lid he’d filled with water.

The snake was mostly hiding in its bento cave in the corner rather than exploring the larger container. Alden understood.

Here in his own hiding spot there wasn’t even a window to expose him to the outside world. A fake one could be created along the wall to his left; he knew because it had been active when he first entered the room. But he’d turned it off with a simple verbal request and now the wall stood there, solid and comforting in its plainness.

I should want to get up and find out what’s happened.

To Zeridee, to Anesidora, to Earth, to everyone.

He didn’t.

This reminds me of something.

He pursued the feeling because doing so gave him another excuse not to leave the bed.

Yeah. There it is.

When he’d been a child in the House of Healing, after his parents’ deaths, there had been a stretch of time like this. An hour when he’d started to suspect the terrible truth—why aren’t they here with me when I’m hurt, and why won’t anyone answer my questions with answers that make sense?—but he didn’t actually know yet. Until you knew for sure, there was a chance that everything was what you wanted it to be.

This moment was like that. Like the room was protecting him from whatever came next.

How bad do I really think it all is then?

Logically, the world was still out there. Moving along. If Earth evac had gone forward while he slept, he was reasonably sure somebody would have woken him.

So it was less terrible than that at least.

Maybe it’s not even very bad.

He didn’t believe that. He just had this sick fear in his gut that something he cared about would be broken. Something would have been taken.

He had never known of tragedy to leave him out when it came to things like this.

Zeridee. I’ve lost my sense of her. Does that mean…?

Or something will have gone wrong back in Chicago. Or someone will have noticed my auriad—a doctor here, Esh-erdi, a drone I didn’t see while I was breaking into that house.

After catastrophizing in that vein for a while, the bed didn’t feel nearly as comfortable.

With a sigh, he rolled out and let his feet—one bare, one squishbooted—hit the cold tile floor. He went about every chore he could find for himself slowly.

Taking stock of his injuries occupied several minutes. The left hand had been doused in ointment and re-covered with the exact same kind of grabby-sucky bandage as before. He’d been told it would need more attention when he woke up.

The foot in the squishboot would probably be staying in the squishboot for a couple of days. It was a dynamic gel cast very similar, in appearance at least, to the one he’d seen Stuart wearing at LeafSong. Neato healing footwear. It held everything in place, and Alden could put weight on it without feeling like he was putting much weight on it. Though that did make walking odd, like he had an appendage that wouldn’t give him the right feedback even as he did all of the usual things with it.

The shoulder was doing a lot better already, and everything else was just a mess of scrapes and bruises. He’d gotten one look at the side of his face that had been dragged across pavement and rooftop, and he was really glad that they’d covered it with bandaging. He looked like he’d made enemies with a cheese grater.

What was the point of letting Rrorro rid you of a lifetime’s worth of damage if you were just going to beat yourself up like this?

Finally, Alden tried to make his first attempt to interact with the world by bringing up his interface. The first thing he noticed was the time. “No wonder I feel rested.”

Discounting the interruption from his little pharmaceutical friend, Alden had slept for fifteen hours. His internal clock was hopelessly off now. It felt like morning, but it was just after 11:30 PM on Saturday night.

There were a ton of notifications. One of them said communications were back up and running for all Avowed.

“System, place a voice call to Aunt Connie.” He was sure she’d want to hear from him even if the hour was late, and he wanted to know what had happened with her, since she was one of the two people with whom he’d chosen to share his early priority for apocalypse salvation.

 

[Calls to and from Matadero are limited to authorized individuals.]

 

Alden read the words.

Oh…well, that kind of makes sense.

There was nothing of interest, in his opinion, for him to tell people about the facility. But the policy for Avowed working on Matadero had always been secrecy and silence.

“Can you at least notify her that I’m alive and not allowed to call her yet?”

After getting a confirmation that that was possible, he considered his situation.

I’m literally in the cube right now. I’m not supposed to be here.

B-ranks couldn’t even join the battlegroups that fought here. And almost exactly twenty-four hours ago, Alden had been nervous about seeing the place from a distance, from a boat, with friends. Upon his arrival, he’d been so relieved to be alive and in the company of competent adults that he hadn’t let the location weigh on him.

Now that he’d slept an entire day of his life away in this place and had serious thoughts about establishing this room as his personal hermit hideaway, it seemed kind of silly to be scared of it. He was here. Chaos wasn’t. So…it was just a bigass building.

With comfy beds. And surprisingly inattentive medical personnel, considering how long he’d been left to his own devices. Unless they’d come to check on him while he slept, and he hadn’t even noticed?

It suited him fine.

Even the clothes were all right. The stuff he’d come in with had been confiscated and probably declared a biohazard since it had been steeped in blood and city soup. In exchange, they’d given him drawstring patient pants with short wide legs that went easily over the boot and a gown that tied at the side. The dirty sandals he’d stuffed in his bag earlier were still with him, but he’d rather just walk around on the hospital sock they’d given him for his uninjured foot.

No complaints from me if socks with grippy bottoms are the most exciting thing they’ve got going on here at Matadero.

As he swiped the “no calling out” notice away, a new thought occurred to him: They’re not going to make me get a tattoo before I leave, are they?

Haoyu had said both of his parents had secrecy contracts about the facility and what happened during the fights, but they actually did work while they were here. Alden should be exempt. He was only visiting.

Visiting a massive hospital you didn’t know existed.

“Man…Tiny Snake, they’re absolutely going to tattoo me before I leave. They might do you, too. The ink is going to clash with your scales.”

If the existence of the hospital wasn’t a tatt-worthy secret, then things like the layout of the building probably were. Alden couldn’t pinpoint their precise location in the cube, since he hadn’t been paying that much attention to the hallways as they transported him from the helipad here. But he could definitely narrow it down to a quadrant. He didn’t know where Artonan secrecy ended and human secrecy began when it came to this place, but no involved party was going to be less paranoid about keeping it all hush-hush in the wake of an attack.

At least there should be some other people around to get inked with me, right?

They had mentioned other patients possibly coming in. The helicopter pilot Aulia had donated to the knights had said she was going back for more.

Guess I’ll find out how many neighbors I have when I finally open the door.

He stared at it. His stomach gurgled.

“It is weird that nobody’s fed me.”

Healing treatments generally meant you needed more meals, not less.

“Is there a cafeteria here or something?” he asked his ovoid potion dealer. “Do you have food in you, too?”

The window-wall answered him instead of the drone. It brightened, and a map of the nearby area appeared, with arrows directing him toward a “Butcher’s Canteen”…which was proof humans had had a hand in naming things around here in Alden’s opinion.

There was even a room service option.

That’s surprising. He would have assumed the Matadero fighters had something more like a community kitchen. Room service implied a dedicated cook, didn’t it?

He toyed with the idea of selecting the feature, but on the off-chance that room service wasn’t just another drone bringing you stuff, he didn’t want to inconvenience an actual person who was probably engaged in more important business than carrying a meal to a teenager with two useable feet.

Or one usable foot and a usable magic cast. Same thing.

They’ve got to be busy with something or they’d be in here dealing with me.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The last thing he had to consider before braving an exit was his auriad. It was currently clinging to a private and uninjured part of his body that nobody should want to examine, stick a bandage on, or inject a potion into. Not his favorite place to wear it, and that tendency it had to move when he was feeling nervous or wanting to cast spells would be more awkward than comforting in this location.

But it was comfortable, hidden, and still easily accessible if he really wanted to access it. The other option he’d come up with was swallowing it. He hoped he never needed to go that far.

Finally, he stepped out into the hall and looked around.

It was long, white, brightly lit…and empty. The faint surprise Alden felt at the sight of the pristine floor and lines of closed doors identical to his own made him realize he really had been expecting something else.

Shouting nurses, screaming patients—something awful.

Obviously, this is better.

No chaos clawing at him, no ocean trying to drown him. Matadero at midnight was a peaceful place.

Feels wrong, like it can’t possibly be real, but here we are.

He decided he would go find the healer, or whoever else might be awake and know things, and ask about Zeridee. She would be fine. She had to be. He might have just lost targeting on her because he was drugged. Or because she was having serious magic used on her. He didn’t want to try re-targeting now, because what if it messed up whatever the healer was doing somehow?

It didn’t seem likely, but it also didn’t seem necessary to try it.

And after Alden learned for sure that she was fine, he’d offer to help the hospital staff. Maybe they needed a person pickler. Or an organ pickler.

It would be a way to help that wasn’t too difficult. He could just sit somewhere comfortable with something in his lap, watching television or reading a book.

While the elevator carried him down a floor to what he was thinking of as the central hub of the hospital complex, he wondered if it would be all right to eat something while you held a wounded person in a hospital setting.

It might be unprofessional. Even if it wouldn’t hurt the patient, other people might be weird about it. Like, ‘Why are you eating a mushroom burger over the body of my dying husband?’

They should give me a privacy curtain or something.

If not, I’ll just have to explain. Ma’am or Sir, your choices are me saving your loved one with a mushroom burger or me taking a dinner break and not saving them at all.

Then the elevator doors opened, and Alden came face to face not with anyone in need of help but with even more emptiness.

He walked around for several minutes, sure people had to be somewhere. The occasional squeak of his own squishboot against the floor was the only sound.

There were a few—very few—signs that other patients might have been here. In the room with the showers that delivered potion sprays, one of the doors was cracked open on a stall he hadn’t used himself. And there was a yellow medical cart in the room where they’d given him his boot and bandaged his scratches and scrapes. It hadn’t been there when he’d left.

I guess there were only three staff members here. They could have brought in more doctors, but it’s obvious they didn’t.

Alden adjusted his expectations some more. Zeridee was in critical condition, an alien, and “the relative of a friend” of a knight. Sending her to a packed Anesidoran ER that was equipped primarily for humans wouldn’t have been great for anyone. That didn’t mean Demon Cube Hospital was open for business or would be opening for business…it meant it was open for select cases.

Maybe a red halo or two? Artonans. Me.

“Did other people even get rooms? Did they all go back to the island? Have I just been left alone on Matadero?”

He had slept for a long time, but surely that wasn’t a thing that could actually happen to a person?

He headed down a floor and found a section of the facility that looked a little more like a traditional House of Healing.