Page 74 of Hollow State

"Right behind you." Darwin closed his case, grabbed the handle, and paused next to Wynn. He rested a hand on her hip—a quiet, grounding touch. "You good?"

"Yeah," she said.

He smiled before following Gideon down the hall.

Wynn stayed rooted to the floor, watching him disappear.

In a few hours, he was going to inject her with a compound that would shut off the pain in her leg. She'd never minded pain. To her, pain was just data. It was honest. It told her when she pushed too hard, when she twisted wrong, and when her body was failing. She’d built her entire career on reading that truth in her patients and trusting it in herself.

Tonight, that feedback loop would be severed. She’d move through Hyperion feeling invincible and strong, completely blind to whether or not her body was tearing itself apart.

The only person who’d know the truth would be the man watching her biometrics.

She’d trusted her life to her team countless times. That had been easy. But surrendering complete awareness of her own physical limits? That was horrifying. As she stood in the quiet kitchen, Wynn realized Darwin was the only person alive she’d ever trust to hold it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Beep, beep. Beep, beep.

Darwin rubbed his hands on his knees as he stared at the screens. He'd spent a lifetime listening to alarms. His career had been built on them. He wished he wasn't used to them. Even more so, it would be nice if he never anticipated them. But they were part of any drug development and happened throughout all phases.

He just hated it when they happened in the field. It made him twitch.

And that anxiety was compounded by the fact one of the alarms was Wynn.

"I've been on the flip side of enough HELIOS tests to know those red lines and the alarms can't be good." Gideon tapped his finger on one screen.

"They aren’t necessarily bad." Darwin pushed his glasses up on his nose. The information in front of him hadn’t changed in the last nineteen seconds. Coulter, Neve, and Scout were on the left screen. Zadie and Wynn on the right. Five moving columns. Five bodies reduced to numbers Darwin understand better than emotions.

Heart rate. Blood oxygen. Cortisol. Catecholamines. Inflammatory markers. Oxidative stress. Along with a multitude of other indicators.

"Should we let them know what's going on?" Gideon asked.

"Coulter's numbers indicate, as I predicted, that he's going to need a higher dose, but I need to see if they’re going to drop any lower in the next few minutes before I decide on how much." Darwin reached for the binder he'd created, flipped it open, and jotted down a few notes. "Wynn's numbers tell a different story, I'm just not sure what that story is, so I want to watch for a minute or two."

He scratched the side of his head as he drew on years of research and development of this particular drug. There had been a few situations in the field where the drug had produced odd effects in different people. Allergic reactions. Irregular heart rhythms outside of what Darwin would consider normal spikes. Low oxygenation. And there were other anomalies like Brea. But Wynn's vitals weren't acting like Brea’s, where Brea's body not only used the drug, but it also cleared the toxins.

And Wynn's body wasn't burning through VKR-1 the same way Coulter was. He'd still need to be injected with KTH-1 within a certain window or he'd have long-term consequences—which included permanent organ failure or death.

Gideon reached over and grabbed Darwin's leg. "Stop rattling the entire room." He lowered his chin. "And take a damn breath."

“Is that your idea of medical advice?" Darwin took the suggestion and slowly filled his lungs through his nose, letting the air out through his lips. He did that five or six times while he shifted his gaze between Coulter's numbers and Wynn's.

“It’s field advice from someone who would like you conscious when this goes sideways.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” Gideon typed something, and the right monitor shifted. Wynn’s baseline expanded beneath her live feed. “You made the drug. You adjusted the dose. You set the thresholds. At some point, you have to trust your own work.”

“My work was never meant for this.” Darwin let out a sarcastic chuckle. “It was meant for a soldier bleeding out before evac. For crushed spines, ruptured organs, traumatic amputations. It was meant to keep someone alive long enough to have a chance.” He glanced at Wynn’s name again. “A fair chance. Not an advantage. Not a tactical boost. Not faster reflexes so they can win a war.”

Gideon shifted the keyboard. “We've all been beaten up every time we face Finch and his men. Regardless of what the intended use was, Finch didn’t leave us much room for clean choices.”

Darwin hated that, mostly because it was true. One of the smaller indicators beneath Wynn's inflammatory panel turned red. It barely crossed the line, and in a hospital setting, Darwin would've noted it in the chart and told the nurse on the floor to keep a close eye on it. If it got above a certain level, he'd do something. If not, he'd let the patient's body work through the problem.

“I know what it’s like,” Gideon said. “Watching something designed for good get turned into this horror show of evil.”

“You don’t have to try to make me feel better.” Darwin jotted all the numbers down in the binder and began calculations for the next dose.