The Graceview Patient By Caitlin Starling - 36

I looked between them, uncomprehending: Isobel, dying, and Isobel, alive. The body in the bed was only half-real, wasting away, entirely out of its proper context, while the one by the window looked in every aspect correct.

Except for its impossibility.

For one bright, hysterical moment, I thought, Twins? Followed by, Is that Isobel in the bed or some other unfortunate patient? And then, when I was truly weeping again, Am I the one in the bed after all?

I slid to my knees. My calves were a mottled purple. I brushed at the pigmentation like it was just ink, like it could come off, and saw my hands were the same.

The Isobel by the window had stood and was crossing the floor to me, making a wide circle around the bed. “Meg?”

“I came to take you somewhere safe, too,” I said, tearing my attention away from myself, gazing up at her. “I brought—I brought a wheelchair.” But she could walk. Or one of her could walk. I felt something wet and hot slide from my nose, around the chapped bow of my lip. It soaked into the fabric of my mask, and I scrabbled, pulling it away from me as it tried to suck in against my mouth. I tossed it aside.

“I can’t leave,” Isobel said. “Not even with your help. Meg, you shouldn’t have come back.”

“I couldn’t abandon you!” The floor beneath my legs was freezing, and I could feel myself beginning to shiver uncontrollably. My vision shifted in and out, fading and returning, everything dotted with black. But I could see her, crouching beside me. “Come with me, please .”

“I’m not real, Meg.”

“You gave me the scalpel!” I shouted.

She winced at the noise. I made myself take deep, rattling breaths. I wanted her to touch me then. Invalidate her words, prove to me that something about her was concrete. But she didn’t. She made no move to wipe my hair off my sweat-soaked forehead, or to guide me up and into a chair. She made no move to clean away the blood beneath my nose.

“Isobel,” I whispered.

Footsteps in the hallway. I looked around the room, searching for a place to hide. But there were voices out there, voices growing louder. Somebody had noticed the wheelchair. Or maybe it was just time for shift change, bedside report. The sun was fully risen now.

“There’s no time,” Isobel said. She sounded so sad. This was it; they were going to find me and take me away. I’d failed.

I couldn’t fail.

I forced myself to my feet. “I’ll buy us a little more,” I said, staggering over to the computer cart. It was heavy but on wheels. I couldn’t lift, but I could push. I leaned hard against it, and it moved. Smoothly, slowly for the weight of it, slow enough that I could almost steer it. If I could just get it to the door, I could block it. Block the nurses and the infection both, because in here there was only us. The roar was gone, the walls were no longer flesh. We were both sick, I knew that, but there had to be a reason the room was clean.

I couldn’t let either of us be taken back out into that nightmare.

My feet slipped. I felt myself dropping. And then, behind me, around me, Isobel. She braced her arms on either side, hands against the cart bracketing my own. I expected warmth against my back, and it was there, but too warm. Hot. Feverish. And her breath smelled of the same rot as the hallway.

“You’re not Isobel,” I whispered, not looking at her.

She was the roar.

This close, I could hear it on her breath. Feel it thrumming against my spine. It was quiet, barely more than a whisper, but it came not from the air around us, but from her.

“I’m both,” she said into my hair.

She pushed. The cart moved into place. I moved with it. With her. With … them.

On the other side of the door, I could hear Louise, exasperated and a little afraid. Somebody else, stridently pissed. And Adam. Adam was saying, “Let me try, let me—she might listen—”

I tried to back away, and Isobel let go, allowing my retreat.

I looked at her, finally. I couldn’t see the infection in her. Symptoms were its only footprints, and the version of her now standing by her own bedside was healthy. Her scrubs weren’t even wrinkled. She looked at me, then down at her body in the bed. A ripple went through it, spasming, seizing in its sleep.

“Both,” I repeated.

“All three,” she corrected, softly. “Your nurse. The infection. And Isobel.” As she said it, her skin began to shift. Her bones moved. My stomach heaved as her skull rearranged itself, as two more pairs of eyes opened, as two noses joined them, two mouths split through to the surface. It wasn’t even or proportional; as her limbs split as well, as her ribs multiplied, her skin sagged and stretched to contain it all.

I wanted to look away. I couldn’t.

Her three faces slid one into the other into the last, her varying expressions distorting their neighbors. She looked simultaneously terrified, calm, and hungry. And beneath it all, pain: a begging open mouth, a furrowed brow, grasping hands.

This was what had come to me in my room and given me the scalpel.

This was what had woken me up, had tried to send me out of the hospital.

And it was inside me, too.

“It’s difficult to think straight,” Isobel confessed, speaking with her central mouth, the one that looked the most like it had before. “Even without the seizures. We must be quick. We need to find some other solution—”

“There is no other solution,” whispered the mouth that was in pain. Isobel’s voice was so weak and frightened.

And she was right.

There was no other way out of this room. The nurses knew I was here. I could hear a new page going out: “Code gray. Adult. Room seven-seven-two.” The same code from before, when they’d dragged me away from Isobel’s seizing body. It was only a matter of time before somebody got the door open, before they tore us apart again. And they wouldn’t see this contorted Isobel; they’d only find me half-dead, ranting and raving.

(And maybe that was the truth.)

“The phone,” Nurse Isobel said.

“And call who?” I asked.

She had no answer. No nursing board would take my call, even if she knew the number. No emergency services would believe me.

“Your mother,” whimpered the terrified mouth.

“I don’t know her number,” I said, ashamed.

Adam’s voice came from the other side of the door. “Margaret! Margaret, if you can hear me, you need to unblock the door.” I jerked where I stood, as if burned. “You aren’t in trouble. We just want to make sure you and Nurse Isobel are okay. Can you hear me, Margaret?”

“Another colony,” the hungry mouth said, eyes rolling in her lumpen skull. “Growing slowly, quietly.”

The pathogen.

And I could hear it, in my voice, saying, Can we live inside you?

Its gaze steadied, shifting to one of the cabinets. It pointed. The way it moved its allotment of arms was wrong, too fluid, as if it couldn’t figure out the point of osseous joints. I thought I heard something give way with a wet snap. “In there,” it said.

The other two faces appeared startled.

I didn’t move at first. But then Adam called my name again, and I dragged myself over to the cabinet, opening it.

Inside were my laptop and phone, stacked neatly.

“I don’t understand,” I said, looking frantically between the thing Isobel had become and the immobile body in the bed.

“Hidden,” the pathogen mouth said. “To keep you here.”

I shook my head but tried to turn my phone on anyway. I was met with only a black screen and my reflection. I threw it away from me, startled by my own gauntness, the filth on my chin, the peeling skin of my cheeks and nose. It slid into the tripartite Isobel’s foot.

“Nothing,” I said, standing up, trembling, back against the bank of cabinets. “Nothing, it won’t turn on. There’s nothing left.”

The frightened Isobel began to weep. The central arms tried to silence her. I couldn’t watch this.

I looked away from those two faces, only to find the pathogen face watching me.

Hungry , I thought again. Strange, to see the face of the mindless thing that was killing me. That was killing both of us. The light in its eyes was so unfamiliar, so alien, even as Isobel’s features tried to translate.

I tried, just once, to reason with it. “You can’t want this,” I said. I gestured to myself. “If you kill us, you die, too, don’t you?”

It blinked. “Yes,” it agreed. “But first, growth. Spread.”

“Not here, not with us, they have us on lockdown.”

Its stare was blank.

“It doesn’t understand that,” the nurse mouth interjected. “It’s not— It doesn’t think . It doesn’t plan. It just is. It makes more of itself, it doesn’t decide. That’s not why we’re sick, it didn’t target us, do you understand?” Her exhausted, snapping bitterness was so familiar I ached, but it gave me a bit of strength. I crept closer.

“Does it have a name?” I asked.

“Idiogenic collapse disorder,” she said with her pathogen mouth. I would have thought it would be mocking when it spoke, but it was strangely toneless. It didn’t seem to mind its name at all. “The hospital is a host.”

The roar lapped against my eardrums.

“Did you know? This whole time?” I asked Isobel the nurse.

I wanted answers, so badly. But when she said nothing, my heart sank. I knew. I could feel it coming. Whispered in my ear, before she ever spoke.

Eventually, she nodded. “It’s—a secondary topic of research, in the SWAIL study. Trying to isolate it, figure out what it is, what to do. Usually it’s fugitive, hard to find. Something about patients who have Fayette-Gehret makes them uniquely vulnerable, but only once we start SWAIL. Something about how fast your cells can grow, maybe, or some other mechanism of action that’s only uncovered when we take away your immune system. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Meg. Until Veronica died, I wasn’t certain— We didn’t know— There are so few cases—”

Adam was pounding on the door again. My throat was clogged with phlegm. I was so tired, I didn’t know if I should laugh or scream.

They’d known, all of them; they’d been waiting to see what it would do. I’d been right, that I was the petri dish, the culturing medium.

Isobel getting sick had just been a tragic accident.

I didn’t know, for one brief, violent moment, whether I felt all that bad about it anymore.