hospital network, I logged in to the BSI network. Thirty-five critical alerts, two hundred sit-reps, and half a dozen pleas for help littered my inbox. And one set of files I was waiting for. Downloading them took nearly an hour, but my reward was highly detailed photographs of every single inch of the inscription.
Written in blood like the others, it almost glowed against the blue cargo container walls. Why the sudden interest in water, something that would most certainly kill a co-org? Why the obsession with these inscriptions?
Drawings like that hadn’t been seen for nearly twenty years. Now here they were, showing up everywhere like graffiti. But it couldn’t be coincidence that a set of corpses in Louisiana took a jet-pack ride to Bentonville, and the same day a field team found this.
I believed in almost any god that would offer me an edge against the Re-Animus, and in my experience, random chances didn’t usually turn out to be random.
The Re-Animus I’d driven out at the Hughes farm was the same one I’d met in Greece, despite them seeming to be territorial. So the question was, Did it come after me for revenge, or something else? Was it already in Greece when I showed up, or sent there to deliver a message to me like it claimed?
The BSI’s translators couldn’t keep up with all the writing our field teams found.
The one that Director Bismuth sent me didn’t even have a translation. In a creaky plastic hospital chair, I hunched through the night, puzzling out words. The hours passed in shifts. Nurses changing. Doctors watching. I dozed from time to time, once Aunt Emelia went home for the night.
After the doctors came through on morning round, I returned to my efforts. The memories locked in my brain returned, of lessons forced on me in ancient Greek and Egyptian. The symbols became both familiar and foreign, haunting me with meanings I could almost remember. “Snake-barbecueantenna, urinal-prayerhat-antenna.” I paged through the listings, looking for the right glyph.
A muffled squeak from beside me caught my attention. Grace stirred and opened her eyes.
I triggered the call button over and over, then ran to the door. “She’s awake!”
A new doctor ran in, an Asian American woman with short black hair. “We’ll take the tube out. Grace, don’t try to talk until we do.”
Afterward, Grace lay sputtering on her side, sipping cold water through a straw.
I knelt beside her bed. “You scared me. That’s not allowed.”
“T’war.” Grace coughed again, and grimaced. “Snake wheat reticule. Means ‘path.’”
“It can wait.”
Grace struggled to sit up, triggering the bed. “Throat hurts.” She called the nurse again.
After the nurse removed her IV and gave Grace another cup of water, Grace began to struggle with her hospital gown, cinching it shut in the front, then trying to drag it down over her bust. The more she fought with it, the less it covered. Finally, she shrank down under the sheet and looked up at me. “Would you mind leaving?”
If she’d shot me in the stomach, it would have hurt less. I looked away and stood up, knocking my chair over by accident.
“Brynner.” She swallowed, cracked lips white and dry. “I just need to shower. By myself.” She rang the call button again and repeated her request.
The nurse looked at me like I was a dead skunk. “You could use a shower, too. And have you eaten at all? I told you to go get dinner before I left last night.”
I shook my head. “Takes three weeks to starve to death.”
She took Grace by the arm and shoved me toward the door. “You look like you’re about two weeks, five days along. Go get breakfast in the cafeteria while I help Grace feel presentable. She doesn’t need you standing guard.”
That wasn’t why I was here. “This hospital is the thirdsafest place on earth. My dad oversaw the barriers himself back when Aunt Emelia practiced here. Unless a meat-skin parachutes in from the sky, it’s not getting past the walls.” I was here because—because it felt like the right thing to do. But if Grace wanted time alone, I could give it to her. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done eating.”
GRACE
It wasn’t my first time to wake up in a hospital after being stung. Not my first severe attack, either, though last time, a wasp caused it. On the other hand, this was definitely my first time to wake up with Brynner Carson staring at me like a lost puppy.