Page 217 of Immune

The corridor curves to the left, and the smell changes gradually. Less like bleach and more like blood. Old sweat. Wet fabric. Cold air pumped too fast through the vents that are rattling above us. And under it all, something chemical and bitter trails through the hallway, similar to the blockers tucked safely under Dakota’s skin and inside her jacket, only harsher. More industrial. Wrong.

My father would know what it is.

That thought slaps my brain without warning.

Not my father as he was when the world fell apart, all quiet disappointment wrapped in old discipline. But my father before. Standing in the kitchen in Kyoto with papers spread over the counter. Arguments spoken in Japanese too fast for me to follow at that age. NOVAC printed in English on the corner of pages. My mother’s silence so thorough that it became just another person in the room.

I remember his voice, even now.

Careful. Low. Saying people were turning hope into machines, and machinery didn’t care who it swallowed whole.

I didn’t understand back then.

I understand it now.

A little too late, like most useful things.

Dakota stops so abruptly that Fletcher almost collides with her. Ahead, two guards wheel a gurney through an intersecting hallway. The person on it isn’t Maine. They’re too small, too still. A blood-soaked sheet covers half of their body, one arm hanging limp from the side of the gurney.

She watches the hand, though. Just the hand. And her own fingers curl once before releasing again.

“Not him,” Mercer confirms quietly, the kindness in those two words almost worse than cruelty.

Dakota turns her head toward him and says, “If you even consider saying that like it’s something comforting again, I’ll make you regret letting me out of that room back there.”

Mercer’s mouth pulls tight. “Understood.”

We move again, but slower now. Not because Dakota chooses caution, but because dread has a physical weight to it. I can see it in the line of her back, in the way her head stays slightly lowered under the hat I’ve come to realize belonged to Maine. That would explain why it’s so important to her, enough to risk her life to retrieve it from Ewan after he took it. I see it in the way she doesn’t touch the folded paper inside her jacket, even though I know she wants to. She’s holding herself away from that terrifying hope by sheer force and willpower.

I can understand that, too.

People think fear is finding a body, but sometimes fear is finding breath. Sometimes the dead are easier because they don’t ask for anything from you. They don’t need you to forgive them for surviving all wrong. They don’t look older. They don’t stand in front of you wearing years you weren’t there to witness.

Alive can be a merciless bitch.

We reach a security door with two guards posted outside. The door itself looks just like every other door in this wing. Too clean, too heavy, and too convinced of its own importance. A reinforced window sits at eye level, narrow enough that whoever designed it clearly wanted people to see just enough to suffer and not enough to understand a damned thing. Wire runs through the glass in a grid shape, and a smear of blood darkens one corner where someone’s hand must have hit it on the way through.

Dakota reaches the window first, because of course she does. There’s not an ounce of hesitation in her. No caution, either, and no room left inside her for anyone else’s rules.

One guard steps slightly into her path and Fletcher’s voice drops behind her. “Don’t.”

Just one word, but the guard freezes anyway. Smart man.

Dakota doesn’t even look at him, her focus already trained firmly past the glass, locked in on the room beyond it with the kind of concentration that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

She’s not scanning the room like someone looking for family. She’s searching like someone looking for a threat, and I understand that more than I’d like to. Because there is no safe way to want someone back from the dead, right? Not really. Hope is too sharp when it’s covered in razors. It doesn’t feel like light and warmth. It feels very much like standing barefoot on broken glass and hot coals and deciding to walk across it anyway because the door might just be on the other side of it.

The room beyond the window is just pure chaos pretending to be procedure, a single curtain splitting the room in two. Medics in white armbands are moving between bodies with fast, clipped urgency on one side. A woman is sitting on a bench with blood running from her temple to her collar, a medic wrapping a fresh bandage around her arm. An older man is bent forward with both hands braced on his knees while a different medic checks his eyes with a penlight. And another survivor is on the other side of the curtain, medics coming and going with serious painted faces and an urgency about them I can feel on the other side of the glass.

Guards are keeping watch, sticking to the walls with their rifles lowered but ready. A gurney lies crooked near the center of the room, one wheel turned at an awkward angle, as if it was just shoved there too quickly before it was forgotten. Someone has dropped a pack on the floor, and its contents are spread across the tile.

Field ropes.

A cracked canteen.

A bloodied map.

Three small metal cases with NOVAC hazard marks stamped across the sides.