The Death I Gave Him, page 4
I didn’t ask again after that. I didn’t want to know what he might say.
We found ourselves standing outside the door of the lab, trolley in hand. Hayden licked his lips, a quick flash of his tongue dragging over chapped skin, then bowed his head. When he opened the door, a nauseating smell seeped out from the cracks, making my eyes water.
“I can take it from here,” he said. “Thanks.”
I certainly wasn’t going to protest. The trolley squeaked when I pushed it towards him, bumping up against the wall. Hayden took the handle and turned it around, propping the lab door open with his shoulder as he backed into the room. He looked up. He held my gaze. I don’t know what expression I wore, only that I could feel icy fear creeping down my back, and I couldn’t tear myself away from his dark eyes. Still the same eyes, then. The entire time, he stared at me, as if there was some secret he might glean, if only he could scrutinize my face for longer. His mouth twitched, but he didn’t say a word.
That was how we parted: me, waiting and expectant; Hayden, backing into the doors.
From there, I could see what used to be an exit, except all that faced me down the hall now was a smooth white wall. I’d explored the halls so many times over the years that seeing that blank, sealed-off blunt end was surreal, claustrophobic. I thought of the tremble that shook the foundations of the building when the lockdown was initiated, the grind of walls slamming down—all the doors were blocked off like this, vanishing behind a blockade of metal. Elsinore was built to withstand a siege.5
I didn’t get a chance to pry at the gate, much as a panicked instinct inside me wanted to. Before I could, the doors to the lab swung open again, and Hayden walked out with the corpse.
After that, I didn’t dare speak—I might’ve gagged if I tried. I’ll spare the details of the body, but suffice to say, I did not recognize the Graham Lichfield I knew lying on the trolley.
Hayden nudged me with one shoulder. His hands, holding tight to the bar, were slick with blood. “Let’s go,” he said, and I followed him towards what would later become our makeshift morgue, my words dying in my throat.
* * *
5 It is uncertain how the specially constructed walls of Elsinore Labs function, nor who it was that initiated the construction project in the first place. Most sources attribute Graham Lichfield, consistent with the reputation he built in the twilight years of his life as irrationally protective of his space.
CHAPTER FOUR
HAYDEN
The body is heavy.
Alone, without Felicia, the weight is strangely more to lift. Hayden heaves the trolley into the cold-room, stopping just before the walls of glass that surround all their cold tissue samples. When he eases the trolley sideways, the body rocks. An arm dangles off the side before he can steady the wheels.
Wait for two breaths, in and out. Watch it crystallize.
Hayden heaves the limb back onto its chest. His blood-soaked hand leaves a ring around the limp wrist.
It’s a stark reminder of what he’s here to do. He turns his own hand, palm up. Old blood has seeped into the furrows of his fingerprints, thick and viscous. Further down, flaking on his palm, is a darker, ruddy brown. Hayden is here for a resurrection, but there will be more blood spilled.
He wipes it all as best he can on the body’s lab coat. Red blends into red, smearing the already dirty fabric.
Once he deems his fingers clean enough, he nudges the trolley aside and pushes on the glass pane. There is a beep, then the wall slides open neatly, freezing air hissing out into the small hall. Hayden shudders as he pulls the trolley fully into the chamber.
Usually, if he knows he needs to spend time here, he pulls on a heavier coat, at least some gloves, but there is no time and so he only has the same flimsy lab coat as always. But it’s not the cold that makes his hands quiver as he pulls out the vial of Sisyphus Formula and lays it out on the table. The metal clinks as he sets it down. From the drawer underneath, he pulls out cotton swabs, a scalpel, a suture kit, and the applicator designed just last month: a syringe with a smooth, metallic body and a motorized drill, its hair-thin fibreglass bit housed in a metal tip.
For a resurrection, two things must be brought back: the body, and then the mind.
For those purposes, two machines rest in the corner of the room. A modified ECMO—meant to prolong life, used here to give it—stands bursting with tubing; sitting beside it, the matching helmet meant to interface with one’s neuromapper. Hayden pulls them both over.
When all the parts to his irrational but insistent idea are assembled, he pauses.
“Are you really going through with this?” Horatio cuts in, not needing the direct link to Hayden’s own mind to figure out exactly what the plan is and always has been.
“You don’t think this is a good idea.”
“How could I?”
Hayden shrugs and presses his lips into a line. “I need to know who did it.”
“Didn’t even think to ask if he recorded it?”
“He connects his neuromapper every morning at seven when he comes in,” Hayden says stiffly. “Turns it off at night. You have nothing.”
Horatio doesn’t contest the point. “Hayden, do you have any idea how guilty you look right now?”
Hayden nearly brings his thumb up to chew before he catches sight of the dried blood that hasn’t quite flaked off yet. Rubbing the pads of his fingers together, he leans his elbows on the table. “They would believe that I could kill my own father, wouldn’t they?”
“It’s suspicious enough you didn’t immediately raise the alarm.”
“No one knows that I didn’t. What’s Paul Xia doing now?”
“Talking to your uncle.”
“You’ll tell me if he asks you anything, right?”
“Yes, but you’re aware I have to answer. Truthfully.”
“That’s fine. That’s a risk I’ll have to take. So long as the cameras aren’t recording. Are they?”
“They’re running, can’t turn that off in here. But I’m not recording. Only in here.”
Hayden stifles a laugh. “Always so paranoid, Dad,” he murmurs.
Horatio makes a muffled noise that sounds almost like a scoff. “Hayden, there’s something you’re not saying.”
“What?”
Horatio pauses, like he doesn’t want to press, but then: “Just tell me if it’s important.”
A wave of guilt crawls up his throat. Hayden closes his eyes, trying to keep the tide of emotion away from his mind: the neuromapper link is not infallible either, there is nothing impenetrable about this, he—his mouth tastes like acid and copper, bitter and thick. He flexes his arms, unsticking his stiff and cold-locked joints. The body is lying before him. Before them, because Hayden is not alone. He needs to remember that.
In front of it, there is an array of slick, shining tools, and his hands ache to hold them, use them, share the culmination of all their work.
“I want to know,” he says, because of all the lies he’s told and plans to tell, he doesn’t want to lie to Horatio. “I want to know if Sisyphus works. I want to try it.” His fingers curl in the air. Everything feels electric.
Hayden pulls out a bottle of methanol and rinses it over his palm to clean it. The quick cold as it evaporates sharpens his eyes, dries the last of his old tears. “I’ve been trying to achieve this my whole career,” he says, attention fixed on wiping down the table. “This isn’t novel; I’m only starting the first human trial a few months early.” And—Hayden bites down hard on his lip, unwilling to give the last thought breath. And if it works, he’ll have his father back. He will. Even if only for a moment.
Horatio can probably feel it, this bone-deep ache. The wanting.
Hayden grabs the body’s arm before he can think better of it. The flesh refuses to yield when he touches two fingertips to the skin, so he presses down harder until it does give. And then it’s much too soft, too much without structure. Hayden rubs his thumbs over and into the muscle, inch by inch working some tenderness back into the body. With some effort, he manages to roll it so that it lies face-up.
The entire left side of its face is caved in, a weeping wound crawling across the crumpled remains of its cheekbone. Hayden’s hands are still where they’re curled around the body’s neck, fingers lightly grazing both greying skin and the cool pad of the neuromapper embedded in the spine.
The eyes are still gaping open, dried tear tracks trailing out from their corners.
“It’s not him anymore.” For a second, it sounds like Hayden’s own voice, whispering from the dark corners of his brain, but then he registers that it’s Horatio, so close he could’ve been speaking from inside instead of outside.
Hayden bows his head. “I know.”
He takes the other arm, still as gentle as he can, and lays it out flat. Dull numbness falls like a blanket over his head. The table feels miles away. But as long as he can still think, he can still work.
Reaching back, he unspools coils of tubing from the ECMO and lays it over the body.
Taking the catheter needles and cotton swabs, he wipes down the unturned forearm. A tendon stretches taut from wrist to elbow. Hayden pushes the tip of the needle against one still-swollen vein. It slides in easily—barely a dribble of blood escapes. He tapes it down.
The other catheter is for the neck, but the jugular is still split wide open.
He forces his hands to stop trembling to pick up the scalpel.
It is surprisingly easy to cut the damaged skin. Easier still to identify the rubbery artery slithering between the exposed edges of the dermis. Hayden rips the suture kit open, plucking the needled wire up with the forceps. Under his guidance, the needle pierces the broken epithelium, sinks deep into the flesh. The wire follows, sharp, quick. What leaks out of the artery is pale, tinged yellow, not nearly the rich red it should be. When it’s done, he slides the other catheter into the lumen. Hayden grits his teeth and finishes the stitching. His knots are sloppy, but there’s no one around to care.
Staring now, his eyes refuse to blink. All he sees is the shattered mosaic of his father’s cheekbone. There is no fixing this puzzle; there is too much bone, too many shards. But the ugly break helps him remember this is not the same face that lingers too brightly in his memories.
His father—no, there is nothing of his father left here. Hayden squeezes his parched eyes shut, reaches out blindly for the ECMO, and flicks the machine on.
For a long time, nothing happens. The dull whir of the centrifugal pump drones on. Thick red liquid moves through the tubes, disappearing into the mess of machinery and winding back out, but the body is still. There is, mercifully, no leakage. His own pulse pounds in his ears, discrete against the rush of the machine, a steady beat to its unstable roar.
The ECMO was built to pump blood in lieu of a heartbeat. Can a body be called a corpse anymore, when life is forced to course through its veins?
Blood is easy. It’s the brain, what makes up a person beyond the prison of their body—that’s the hard part.
That’s the point of the neuromapper. Hayden slides the neurotopographer gently over the corpse’s head. The thin band of metal rests like a crown on his father’s brow, gleaming a polished silver. As the magnet snaps into place over the embedded device in the spine, the whole circlet hums. The corpse’s skin has taken on something of a flush. There is something moving inside it now, rushing, quick.
Hayden brings out the last piece of the puzzle: the vial of Sisyphus Formula. Trapped behind glass, the yellowing liquid inside bubbles. It shimmers, little ribbons of precipitation rippling like something alive. Innocuous on the surface, but this vial houses a miracle.
He loads it into the applicator.
This time, his hands do not shake.
Two fingers to the corpse’s intact cheek, he pushes to turn the head to expose the suboccipital, where he aims the applicator. He doesn’t close his eyes as he presses down on the trigger. The drill bit whirrs, slicing through the bone, then a shuddering recoil thuds up his arm as the needle slides in. As he pushes the syringe down to unload the formula, the neurotopographer beeps a rapid trill, recognizing the influx of neurotrophins flooding his father’s cranial space, past the dura, past the arachnoid, piercing the pia and cutting through all the natural barriers the body has evolved to protect the secrets lying in the folds of white and grey matter.
When the vial is emptied, he pulls the applicator out. The skin gives a wet gasp, and Hayden pales as he smooths over the damp edges of the wound with a bandage.
“Is that it?” Horatio asks. He sounds, despite himself, as fascinated as Hayden is.
“Yeah,” he says. “Normally we’d start with reconstructive procedures or something—I don’t know, I’m not a surgeon and we hadn’t worked out our plans for the trials, but there’s no time for that, and—”
“You’re not trying to keep him alive.”
The applicator clatters from his fingers. He stares hard at his own still shaking hands, traitorous things that they are. “No,” he whispers, and he should be drowning in the guilt, but there is only an empty, sucking cavern behind his sternum. “I’m not.”
All that’s left now is to wait.6
The corpse’s face is blank. Hayden wonders when it will cease being a corpse, if he will ever see it as anything but. He wonders if the carefully cultivated serum of mitogens and stem cells are working, signalling growth pathways to speed up, finding what few living cells exist and amplifying them beyond what they were ever capable of in life. And even if it did work, would they follow the course laid out by the neuromap? Could they relink the topography of his father’s brain, synapse by synapse? He wonders if there is anything left of his father in this corpse.
But no matter.
Hayden does not need his father back; he needs answers.
Before he can look away from the broken, terrified visage that he doesn’t recognize, a previously dark screen in the cold room flickers to life.
Hayden whirls around.
The lone console at the back of the room glows.
“Hello?”
It is, impossibly, his father’s voice. Not from the corpse—but through the speakers on the console.
“This is a bit odd, I confess,” the voice continues. “To be talking about one’s death before it happens, that is.”
A shadow fills the screen, the flash of a white lab coat surrounding it. Hayden is frozen. From here, the video is grainy, the details hard to make out. His father’s face is dim and blurred, but it’s still obvious when he reaches up to adjust his glasses. “I have been dreaming of dying of late,” he says, tone wry. “Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but if you are hearing this, Hayden, it means you’ve linked up my neuromap.”
Behind, the corpse lets out a low wheeze. Hayden stands stock-still, trapped between the body and the video7, both shadows of the man his father used to be.
“Needless to say,” the man in the video says with a wide, pearly smile, “I hope it works. And I’m proud of you, for trying.”
Hayden’s throat is suddenly thick. He presses his knuckles into the surface of the table to keep himself from swaying on his feet, eyes burning as he looks into the screen.
“To get down to business, if indeed I’ve gotten myself killed, you need to know how Elsinore works.” His father rolls out a map, smoothing it over the desk he is sitting at. The camera shakes as he angles it downward. It’s more of a blueprint than anything, and Hayden understands that he is looking at Elsinore’s insides.8
He takes a step closer.
The blueprint is utterly strange to him—disconcertingly so. As his father keeps talking, fingers gliding over the spidering lines that make up the floorplans, he realizes that he’s never seen some of these rooms before. Phantom halls, stretching out into what he once thought was empty space. An entire room on the third floor never before known to him. Hayden stares wild-eyed around him, trying to find Horatio’s cameras as if that will resolve Elsinore back into familiarity.
But Horatio is uncharacteristically silent.
“Tread lightly,” his father warns. “Some rooms are more dangerous than others.”
By the end of it, Elsinore sounds more like a prison than a lab. Worse, a prison he doesn’t know the way out of. Hayden’s earliest and fondest memories are of the soft white glow, moments spent cradled in a reading nook, Horatio’s voice at his back, before he was ever Horatio. Giving the Elsinore Labs Operating System his own name had felt like something meaningful, when Hayden was eight years old and too desperate for a friend. Horatio feels as familiar to him as ever. Hayden wonders if Elsinore has always been bigger than Horatio9, if Horatio has been as trapped as the rest of them, his consciousness held by the building’s concrete shell.
How much of this place did Hayden ever know? How much did any of them ever know?
“And,” his father says, “one last thing.” On the screen, he folds the map away. Neat, pristine corners. “There’s a lab, in the basement. I’ve kept it entirely private; it’s not on any of the maps. There should be samples of the Sisyphus Formula in there—make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. The room is passcode locked, labelled Supply Closet P28. Now, listen closely,” he says, leaning in. “The wrong code will fill the room with nerve gas. So—” his father shrugs good-naturedly, the corner of his mouth twitching in slight mirth—“I’m sure you don’t want to accidentally stumble into that. Everything I want to protect is in that lab. The code is five-eight-eight-two. It’s yours now, Hayden.”
His now, but never before.
Hayden’s fingernails dig into his palms, anger thrumming in the line of tension running from wrist to elbow. What else had his father hid? He wants to turn the console off; he doesn’t want to know.
But on the screen, his father falls still in the way that has always demanded Hayden’s attention. He settles his gloved hands on the table, then leans in close enough to the camera that the dim light finally illuminates his face. It looks the same as it always does—did. The wide eyes Hayden never inherited, the hard jaw he did, smiling like it’s the easiest thing in the world. From his slightly shaggy hair, pressed down by his glasses, Hayden guesses he filmed this months ago.
