a little wild, and our parents will regret ever setting us up.”
She turned the wheel and the car skidded around a corner. The tires squealed again. She cast a glance at him and laughed. “Now you’re getting into it. Choose some music.”
“Right.” He leaned forward and pressed the radio. “Uh, rock?”
“Whatever you want.” She drummed her hands on the steering wheel. “Wait, shit—”
His head jerked and his gaze immediately focused on the puppy. A ball of fluff that couldn’t be more than a couple of months old stood scared and frozen in the middle of the street.
Only for a moment, though, because Tina had jerked the wheel to the side in a desperate effort to avoid it. Justin’s head had begun to turn to make sure it wouldn’t run the wrong way—not that he could do anything about it, of course—before a massive bang shattered conscious thought and something hit him hard all across his body.
In the street, the puppy cowered, stared at the smoking pile of metal, and whimpered. It could hear its name but didn’t know where to go. The world was too big and full of fast things and loud noises. When at last footsteps stepped close behind it, the animal looked at its owner and knew something was very wrong.
“Oh, no,” she said. She scooped it up and cradled it against her chest, but her hand was over her mouth. “Oh, no. Sam—Sam! Call 911!”
Chapter Three
“All right.” Nick laid out two spiral-bound folios of information in front of Amber and Jacob. “Who’s ready for the sales pitch?”
“Did you say you needed a day and a half because you wanted to get it all put together nicely?” Jacob asked. He looked at the cover and binding. “I suppose it looks nice, but you don’t need to impress us. We’re all in, buddy.”
“It’s my job to make things look nice,” he replied serenely.
The truth, of course, was that he had claimed it would take a day and a half because it meant Jacob could go home and sleep. In reality, he could have whipped up most of this presentation in a couple of hours, but his friend looked like warmed-over oatmeal and frankly, they all needed sleep and food as well.
And, as it turned out, it was lucky he’d asked for the extra time.
“Should we get started?” he asked.
“Sounds good.” Amber lifted the remote and turned down the volume on the TV in the corner, which displayed a market report on the tech sector. “Okay, Mr. Salesman. Dazzle us.”
Nick grinned. “So, as you both know, the cost of a night in an ICU is prohibitive. On page two, you can see the range of values nation-wide. It varies wildly between hospitals, even in the same cities, but the one unifying factor? It’s insanely expensive.
“Now, you might think it’s all markups. And it is true, there are many markups. We can show that definitively by examining the operating costs of hospitals in other first-world nations and controlling for energy costs, et cetera. That’s on page three.”
Amber, who had yet to meet a spreadsheet she didn’t like, drank this in happily. Jacob, who had seen all this firsthand recently, seemed a little more despondent about it.
“However,” Nick said, “it’s not all markups. Running the equipment genuinely is expensive, and part of that is because it’s several distinct systems, each of which needs to talk to the others, receive updates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” He waved a hand expansively. “Which brings us to the numbers you’ve all waited for. Flip to page four, if you would.”
Both his companions turned the page and looks of extreme surprise settled on their faces.
“Whoa,” Amber said quietly. “Okay, I knew…I knew. But it’s crazy to see it.”
Jacob stared quietly at the numbers. On the table, one of his hands was in constant motion. The fingers danced over and around each other the way he did when he was deep in thought or stressed. It had become an inside joke in their class at MIT that he could have powered a small plant with his hand motions during exams.
The diagram on the page showed expected costs over time for a patient in the ICU in two scenarios. The first was in the current technological setup and the second in one of the PIVOT pods. A thick line ran horizontally along the page, and Nick didn’t smile as he pointed to it.
“This? It’s the median savings of an American family. Look how quickly it gets