Free Mischling by Affinity Konar

sets of x-rays. But there was only one boy.
    And he was an iota of boy, a frail-boned brevity with an overbite and teeth that splayed themselves over his lips like a crooked fence. Tufts of white-streaked hair nested on his scalp and obscured his eyes, which seemed unable to focus on anything but the ceiling above. His veins stood so close to the surface of this boy that in the hospital’s faulty lights, their clusters lent his skin a pronounced hue of illness. In his chill and suffering, he was near blue.
    I fixed my eyes on him, hoping he might sense me and stare back, the way twins often do, but the boy only coughed showily, making no effort to disguise his sickness. The nurse frowned at him disapprovingly and boxed up half of the file—this action appeared to disturb the boy. I watched him sway where he stood and falter at the knees, and though I was sure that he was about to collapse, he simply stared at the box with all the reverence one might have for a grave, and then he reached toward it and tried to run a finger over the lid but the nurse slapped his hand away, and he withdrew like a wounded thing and inserted his thumb in his mouth again. The nurse declared him finished and gestured to him to dress, but he refused to accept his clothes, even as she thrust the garments forcefully at his sunken chest. It was as if he’d decided that nothing was graspable anymore, that there was no point in trying to hold anything other than a thumb to one’s mouth. Agitated, the nurse threw the garments at his feet and stalked off. And still, he stood bluely naked, refusing to follow her orders. He turned only to cough in her direction, and that’s when our gazes finally met.
    I looked away as fast as I could, which was slow enough to receive his friendly nod and quick enough that I could avoid returning it. I couldn’t face what he had endured, the horrors of which were made too obvious by the empty chair at his side.
    “I understand what you are saying,” he said to the empty seat beside him. “But our father, if he were here, he would say that curses curse their utterers. And our mother, if she were here, she would say—” And then he fell to coughing again.
    It was the boy and his empty chair that moved me to decide: I would be more than an experiment in this world. I was not as smart as Uncle Doctor, but I could study his movements without him knowing, and learn about medicine, and use him to my advantage. Pearl had her dancing to look forward to—I needed my own ambition. After all, when the war ended, someone was going to have to take care of people. Someone was going to have to find the lost and put all the halves together. I saw no reason why that someone could not be me.
    I planned to begin my practice with the boy. Not knowing his name, I decided to call him Patient Number Blue. I studied him, taking in what I could from a distance, but before I could think too much on his particulars, I was interrupted by a high, trilling note.
    Uncle Doctor. He entered whistling with a sprightly step, smelling of peppermint and starch, the long white wings of his coat trailing against each surface he passed and erasing them. I’d come to learn that he considered himself an expert at whistling, just as he considered himself an expert on hygiene and culture and art and writing. But while his whistle was errorless, there was no mistaking its robotic lean. Even as it leaped about the scale, it was monotone at the core, a hollowed thing that couldn’t know a feeling.
    I tried to mimic this hollow whistle, but I found myself unable to copy the doctor’s trill—when I put my lips together to blow, I could only sputter.
    Uncle saw this mishap and smiled. It was an amused expression that might have seemed harmless to an outsider, but the arc of it made me shudder. After all, we were in his laboratory for tests, some of which were surely designed to ferret out our inferiorities and determine how long we might be permitted to live.