Free Wounds - Book 2 by Ilsa J. Bick

the top drawer of his wooden desk—an antique with an ornately carved lip—and fished around until he found what he was looking for. The spectacles case was very plain and quite old. Some sort of extinct hardwood with a geometric inlay of diamond shapes lacquered purple. He thumbed open the lid. The specs were black-rimmed, a little square. He unfolded the eyepieces. They were quite delicate. He unhinged his steel-rimmed glasses from his ears, and then carefully slid on this second pair. His reflection, ghostly and surreal, stared back from his empty vidcom screen. He hadn’t worn these glasses in a long time, over a year. They made him look bookish. Even better, they didn’t slide down his nose.
    Then he reached into the drawer again. He found the tiny nub he was looking for. A slight pressure and a small, rectangular panel slid noiselessly from the space between the overhanging lip and drawer.
    The radio was very slim and a brushed pewter color, about the size of a largish calling card. It folded, and now he unhinged it, stabbed up the power and then took a moment to decide exactly what he would say.

    Everything had changed.
    The room was at the end of a far corridor in the research wing. The corridor was always in shadow, the lights on motion sensors that clicked on and off, so that she trailed darkness behind. The room was secured with a magnetic lock that was always armed. It was a corridor she had not shown Bashir. Indeed, few people knew of it. Arin didn’t. Neither did Blate, because as he’d pointed out, she commanded this hospital, not him. So there were nurses, always the same ones and one to a shift, three times a day. And there was her. She came every day whether she needed to or not.
    The only sounds in the room were the hiss of a ventilator, the steady atonal blip-blip-blip of a cardiac monitor, and the tiny chug of an IV pump pushing a yellow nutrient solution through an indwelling catheter tunneled under the skin of the patient’s chest and into one of the large veins supplying the heart so he wouldn’t starve.
    Kahayn sat on a tall stool alongside the bed. Her mouth still hurt. Bashir had hit her very hard. She hadn’t expected that. But she understood why.
    And now there was Arin to worry about, too. She’d still perform the surgery in this wing, of course; had to. She counted on it. Because the OR was specially refitted, and the computer didn’t tie into the hospital’s database. Everything would be contained. So everything that happened would happen here and too quickly for anyone to do anything about it. But Arin was a problem because things had to stop, and Arin would not understand.
    This far. And no further.
    Things would only stop if every piece was gone: the technology, her records, the primates. Maybe even her, if she couldn’t get away. She wasn’t quite ready for death. Knew, though, that maybe it wasn’t so far distant after all.
    And, of course, Julian would have to die. There was no question. Even he saw that. Hadn’t liked it. Who would? But he saw the logic and knew it was the only way out. The only recourse left.
    Because there can’t be anything, absolutely nothing to work with. Nothing left.
    She looked down at the bed. She’d managed to rebuild the skull from where the bullet had blasted away bone and brain. She’d even managed a nice scar. She stared at the seamless face—because a man in a coma does not dream and cannot think. He can only be, like an empty glass waiting for something to fill it. And the supreme irony: The machines, these rudimentary tools with no innards of any interest, kept him alive even as the machine hidden away in his brain would fill and transform him from the inside out and only waited for the key—the donor—to turn the lock once more.
    This far. She bent and kissed him—the man he’d been—gently, thoroughly, and for the very last time because the man he was would be gone as soon as she flipped the switch. His lips were warm. But she