PG 13 - language, adult content.*emphasis*
[thoughts]~~~~
Malcom Ali sat and glowered. The two guards - probably the grumpiest, most ornery security grunts in the whole hospital - glowered back.
[Never try to make small talk with a stressed nurse,] he decided. At least he wasn’t alone. Apart from the guards at the door, the latent woman was there too. She had taken the couch next to his, turned away, and now seemed fast asleep. Just about everyone who could be moved out had been; by now the hospital was mostly quiet. So he sat - a little annoyed, a lot anxious - and waited. The others might be able to leave, he knew, but he’d blown his chance at freedom. *And* his arm hurt.
He was a little surprised when the doors into the waiting area slid open and an attendant - a different one than he’d had, thanks be to Allah - wheeled in a groggy private Bell. There was an IV of blood going into her, and she looked three shades of terrible.
Ali waited until the attendant had left before he scooted over. “Hey,” he whispered. “Are you okay?”
She blinked at him, then made a wobbly grin. “It worked. They got her started again.”
“You still had the antibodies.”
Bell kept up her grin, even as her eyes lost focus again. “Told ‘em to drain me an’ give it to everyone. Now I’ve got new stuff goin’ in.”
She was quiet for almost a minute, slowly blinking at nothing. “Hope it works, ‘cause that’s just too much pain t’have it if don’t.”
Ali had to agree; it was definitely painful.
~~~~
More hours had passed. Then, in a different room, the door whooshed open. Another Ranger - one Zack Allan knew well by now - came in. Deveax did not look nearly as ‘rage-barely-withheld’ angry as the last time he’d seen her; she looked almost amused. She smelled of soap, too - all clean and calm. The typical Ranger outfit, nothing fancy, not even the concealing all-weather cloak. She carried nothing in her hands.
She spoke with Zack for a minute, confirming with words and her own eyes that he was rested, cleaned up, and could think clearly. Then Deveax led him back to the observation room, though this time the sight was far less stressing. The theatre had been tidied; there was no swarm of medical personnel or puddles of crimson life. Machines still worked, and Lyta was still on the table, but now covered for warmth. The sole attendant was at the edge of the room and seemed to have no interest in going anywhere near the patient.
“If she is stabilised, why not move her to recovery?”
“They’re afraid to go near her ... this is what I wanted to show you. To ask you about.” Deveax spoke into a communicator, ordering the lights to be gradually dimmed. As the brightness faded, something *else* became visible. In the near-total darkness, the pair could see a roiling thing - a large mass of thick tentacles with no center - glowing slightly, whitish reddish, surrounding and bubbling through all of Lyta’s body. All the hairs on Zack’s head, neck, and elsewhere stood on end; a horrible creepy sensation came over him as he looked at it. It was strange and different and frightening, yet almost beautiful. Next to the two humans was a monitor screen; a camera was recording the same view, all along the spectrum, not just visible light - but all it showed was the body. Deveax called the lights to fade back up.
The monster was again invisible.
“The monitors on her body, sensors, cameras, nothing picks it up,” Deveax explained. “Just eyes. That’s what’s keeping her alive, allowing everything to be repaired. The others who were injected are healing, but slower, and without that - thing.” She was silent for a moment. “I can’t quite figure what it is.”
Zack said that he had no idea.
Wary of what was hidden before them, “Maybe Lyta had the stuff in her already, an old dose because of the old spinal injury, this boosted it?”
“Others just had one shot - to test it as much as to heal ... this could be a sign of the multiple injections. Plus a possible older dose. She did say it works exponentially - after the initial surge of healing, the power dwindles. But what the hell was the thing we saw? The others don’t have that.”
Though the sudden idea pained him to even be considered, “Maybe what we think of as ‘Lyta’ is some puppet or just a physical front, that’s happened before, but not for a long time.” Zack could remember what the Vorlon looked like when they drove it off the station, “...but it didn’t look like this. Well vaguely ... that was more like a squid. And the walls aren’t shaking and there isn’t that horrible screeching sound. Maybe it’s some other form of alien? Maybe it’s a hallucination, some mental booby-trap left over to keep her safe if she got hurt?”
“Now that I can believe - a protective prank,” Deveax said. “We’re trying to get the two crew who witnessed the original donor into a protected area to question them again ... the report said something like this. But we can’t leak it to the media.”
“What’ll you tell them if they find out she was dead for a while?”
“Mention the serum stuff, and hope they don’t guinea pig the affected crew to death. Give the girl who had the right-timed dose a medal. Make like it’s a mystery anyway and still put in an effort to solve it... ‘Pick a card, any card, voila!’ Could have been the fact Bell’s was an older injury that was festering, a different sort of medicine for her.”
Zack shrugged. Lyta had kept many secrets. But now that she had started to mend, they no longer worried him so much. They hadn’t really bothered him before - just the fact that she’d been there had been considered good in his mind.
“We will try to research it, of course, at least until Lyta’s well enough to tell us to stop. But the antibodies weren’t working on her until Newton brought that thing in. We can check with Ecathe, hopefully, whenever he wakes up and is coherent. If he does wake up... He was saying something about ‘her’; we have no idea which her or what about her. The doses worked almost instantly on the rest...”
There was another pause until Zack broke in, “It matches the typical colour of the vortex, doesn’t it. Do you think this is the key she mentioned? A hitchhiker who wants her to live so it can be carried back home? Some organic trigger program? A backup, maybe? Tucked away in someone who seemed to have nothing to do with the teeps, even tried to murder a few of them?”
Deveax, “Only seemed - you were there for some of the meetings.”
“True. How is Newton doing?”
“Pissed off, but calm now. She has too much at stake to purposely endanger the team. We might even be able to keep her ass off the media’s banquet table. I didn’t explain to her about the serum. First I need to find out how it works, why it didn’t work on Lyta until she showed up. We’re not about to let her out any time soon,” Deveax said. “We haven’t even been able to move the most-damaged people away from the hospital. The other teeps have been secured, and hopefully will survive in Cryo until Lyta’s strong enough for them to one by one link to the Music memories. If we can do that, the rest will live.”
Again, there was silence for a minute.
Deveax slowly asked, “Have you ever seen her, before now, when it was dark? When the lights were off or down very low?”
“... No,” he said after thinking through his memories. [Did I just not see this before; was it with her all along?]
~~~~
(link to part 11)