Free The Rotten Beast by Mary E. Pearson

 
    Move your fingers.
    I have no fingers. I’m dead. Go away.
    Move them.
    They’re gone. Long gone. I am only stumps and spirit. Go. Leave. But the voice circles back, a rabid dog that keeps biting at me, tearing at flesh I don’t have.
    Move your fingers, dammit!
    A sharp stab pierces my right index finger. Pain shatters my fog. A finger! I have a finger! Light floods the darkness. Colors, more sounds, a screaming voice.
    â€œShe’s awake!”
    And then Jenna. I blink my eyes. Jenna. Her face looms not far from mine. I lift my hand. Fingers. Not plastic, engineered, removable fingers, but flesh-and-blood ones. Permanent ones. Real fingers. One with a small drop of blood where it has been pierced. I bring these fingers close, running them along my lips and feeling the barest touch, tasting the blood on my tongue.
    And then the frightening sensation of toes curling on sheets. Not just the memory of toes, not just stumps and phantom movements, ghosts trying to remember the feel of fabric, but toes attached to feet…attached to legs…attached to me . I think of the horror the first time I woke and saw four stumps. A new horror fills me.
    My god, what have they done?
    I know what they’ve done.
    How many times had I read reports filed by the Federal Science Ethics Board? Violations? Abuses? Scientists pushing the limits? Scientists creating things in labs that were barely human?
    I try to get up, but I’m weak and easily pushed back down by Jenna.
    â€œHow could you?” I ask.
    â€œI didn’t. It was your parents.”
    â€œYou mean your parents.”
    â€œThem too.”
    â€œIt’s wrong. It’s illegal.”
    â€œIllegal, yes. Wrong?” She shrugs. “Who’s to say?”
    Fury surges through me. I reach out and swing, fingernails digging and scratching, making contact with her face. She pulls back, holding her cheek where I’ve left marks. She stares at me, her face dark and disturbed, and I wonder if she’ll strike back.
    â€œI know you’re angry,” she finally says. “I certainly was.” She walks around to a chair on the other side of my bed and sits. “I called your parents. They’re outside. They’ll be here any second.”
    I look up at the ceiling. I’m in a strange room that I don’t recognize, a bedroom, not a hospital room. Surely a secret room. A hidden one. “How long did it take?”
    â€œEleven months. Record time. Of course, my father already had a blueprint to work from.”
    I glare at her. “You.”
    She nods unapologetically.
    â€œHow much?”
    â€œReplaced? Eighty percent is new. Maybe a bit more.”
    I look away. I don’t have to add up the numbers. I’m well beyond the FSEB’s legal limits for replacement parts. It wasn’t just my limbs. My whole body was turning on me and shutting down at the end. Kidneys, heart, liver, lungs. All my organs were moments from death. The infection had ravaged nearly everything.
    My last weak breaths were to my parents, telling them to report Jenna. I had found out about her. I wanted the world to know too. It didn’t matter that she was my friend. This was bigger than our friendship. What she, her father, and his mad stable of scientists did was illegal. And now they’ve made me a part of it too.
    I hear noise, hurried clumsy footsteps getting closer, louder, and then I see my parents rushing in, their anxious faces filling the doorway. My father looks at my open eyes and cries, too overcome to move forward. My mother steps closer, a thin shadow of who she was.
    â€œAllys?”
    â€œWho else would I be?”
    She stumbles toward me, falling to the side of my bed, so we are eye-to-eye. She opens her mouth to speak again, but I cut her off. “How could you do this to me?”
    She recoils, as if I have slapped her. “How could we not? You’re our daughter.”
    â€œNo. Not