Serenity
I watch the door for several minutes after the king leaves, making sure that he’s not going to double back to my room. When nothing happens, I fling the hospital sheets off of me, more than a little surprised that my body doesn’t scream at the movement. In fact, I feel fine—not at all like I’ve just woken from an operation.
I’m right in the middle of an Eastern Empire hospital, one of the most coveted and secretive places under the king’s control. It’s where cutting edge medical research takes place.
Now is my chance to find out what exactly that research is.
Before I leave my bed to go explore, I gather up my gown to take a look at the extent of my surgery. I don’t want to accidently reopen the wound and find myself a patient here for longer than absolutely necessary.
I lift the thin cotton fabric and reveal inch after inch of skin. I unveil my stomach, and a strange sort of disbelief twists inside my core. Just to be sure I’m seeing correctly, I run a hand over the smooth skin.
There are no surgical marks, no scars. Nothing. The only indication that something’s happened to me is that a dark freckle that should’ve lingered near my bellybutton has now vanished as though it never existed in the first place.
So what did they do?
I peer out the door of my room.
“What are you doing, my queen?”
I yelp at the sound of the voice. A guard stands off to the side of the door. Of course the king left a guard outside my room. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to shake him.
“I need to talk to a nurse,” I say, slipping out the door and walking past him. Now that I’m up and about, I can feel my exhaustion after all. I’m not quite as fine as I assumed I was.
“Wait—my queen!” the guard calls from behind me. “You should not be out of bed.”
I ignore him and continue towards the main desk on this floor concocting a quick plan to ditch my extra shadow.
The nurse manning the desk glances up when she hears my guard and me coming. Her face lights with surprise—I’m now that recognizable—before falling back into a careful mask.
“Do you need anything, my queen?” She doesn’t demand to know why I’m out of bed, nor does she rush to get me back in my room.
Whatever operation was performed on me, she seems to feel I’m in good enough health to walk around.
“Can I speak with you in private?”
The nurse nods, her brow wrinkling. My guard still stands behind me, and I shoot him a look.
“I’ve been commanded to not let you out of my sight if you leave your room,” he explains.
I turn back to the nurse and lean in close. “I need to use the bathroom and I’d like to not be shadowed like a prisoner.”
The nurse’s gaze moves from me to the guard.
“Is there anyway you can make sure he stays out here?” I whisper.
The nurse mulls this over, then finally nods. “I think that’ll be just fine,” she says, her voice low. “Need anything else?”
“Just directions to the bathroom.”
“Down the hall and to your left.” The nurse nods in the appropriate direction.
Perfect. I’ll be out of the guard and the nurse’s line of sight.
“Thanks,” I say, flashing her a genuine smile.
I push away from the counter. My guard is now looking at me suspiciously. I brush past him. When he begins to follow me, the nurse clears her throat. “Sir, sir—yes you,” I hear from behind me.
I don’t wait to listen to the rest. I move down the corridor and turn left, just so that it looks like I’m going to the bathroom. At the end of this hall is a stairwell, and right before it, a storage closet hangs slightly open. I stop by it and peek in. Medical supplies and a spare pair of scrubs rest on the shelves. I grab the scrubs and change into them quickly, just in case whoever left the door open is about to come back.
As I unfold the soft material, a keycard slips out. I pick it up and glance at the face of the male nurse whom these scrubs belong to. On it is a barcode, probably to allow him access into restricted areas.
The whole thing could not have gone better had I planned it.
I finish changing and palm the keycard. Slipping out of the closet, I enter the stairwell and take it down. It takes me ten minutes to locate where the research labs are, and I’m sure I only have minutes before the guard sounds the alarm that I’m missing.
I enter the lowest basement of the hospital. My first glimpses of this subterranean floor aren’t promising. Paint peels from the walls and the exposed metal pipes I see. It smells like mildew and rot down here—not exactly the ideal atmosphere for cutting edge medical research.
Despite my misgivings, I begin to scrutinize the hall. The floor is abandoned.
A shiver races down my back. An epidemic preceded the king’s war, culling the Eastern Hemisphere’s population to little over a third of what it once was. I’d never noticed what exactly that looked like until this moment, when I stood in one of their understaffed hospitals.
I go for the first door I see. Locked. Damn. I place my head next to it; I can hear lugging noises on the other side. It must be a boiler room. The next door I come to is the morgue. I wrinkle my nose at the thought. As curious as I am to see if any of the research occurring in these hospitals has landed test subjects in here, I decide against it. Who knows if victims of biological warfare are in there? It would be a damn shame to survive cancer only to die of a virus.
The next door is unmarked. I try the handle. Just like the boiler room, this one is locked. Next to the handle, however, is a scanner. I lift the plastic card in my hand and hold it in front of the device. It beeps and a light flashes green next to it. I try the handle again and the door opens.
I slip into the room and flip on the lights. Whoever normally works here is gone for the time being. I glance around, almost afraid to touch anything. The counters are covered with racks of vials, strange machines, and data readouts.
I don’t know where to start or what I’m looking for. I never thought my problem would be making sense of the research I came across. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m in the right place.
I begin moving, my eyes scanning the papers strewn across the counters. I see numbers and percentages, but nothing that I recognize. Moving further into the room, I scan the counters, the machines, the spines of books that are sitting out.
I want to scream. Nothing here corroborates the Resistance’s sparse findings.
I’m about to leave when the title of a document catches my eye: “Recent Medical Advances in Memory Recall and Suppression.” It looks like an article from a medical journal, and the publication date printed below it is from a month ago. Recent. I read the abstract at the top of the page, which summarizes the content of the article.
There are more scientific terms than normal jargon, but from what I read, the topic seems to have to do with repressing long term and short term memories as well as reversing memory loss.
Those dazed technicians the Resistance had reported on when I’d been back in the WUN… they’d been in the king’s research labs. Could their predicament be related to this?
The very non-scientific wheels of my mind whir. Why would anyone want to repress a person’s memories? The answer is so simple that I’m embarrassed I asked the question in the first place.
Control.
The last things I read are the news articles someone’s taped to the wall. They all have to do with biological warfare. Some discuss the pathogens involved, and some go over the cures the king doled out once a region fell.
Death and health were the stick and carrot the king regularly used to gain control of a new land on the eastern hemisphere. He still doesn’t seem to understand that repairing that which he broke doesn’t make it new again. It makes it scarred.
I try the other doors in the basement. All are locked, and none will open with the key card in my hand. It makes me think that I never entered the room where the real research is occurring. A simple nurse might not have that kind of clearance.
I’d like to explore the rest of the hospital, but I’ve already been gone too long. So I walk back to the closet, change into my hospital gown, and place the scrubs where I found them.
“Last time I checked, the bathroom was across the hall.”
I spin, only to come face-to-face with my guard. Despite his soft-spoken words, he’s angry.
My first instinct is to become defensive. So I do the opposite. “What does it matter to you? I’m the queen.”
He grabs my upper arm. “You need to get back to your room, now.” He begins leading me down the hall.
“I’m going to tell the king that you’re manhandling me,” I say, as I yank futilely against his grip. “He’s not going to like that.”
My guard chooses to ignore me. He opens the door to my room and pushes me inside.
“Hey—!” The door slams shut behind me.
What an ass.
I lean against the wall, not ready to get back in bed, and let my eyes drift around the room. They land on a calendar that hangs across from me.
I still. It says it is May, but it should still be April. I’m about to shrug it off when my hand goes to the smooth skin of my stomach.
What if some new technology was used on me—the same one that removed all traces of the king’s bullet wounds from his body?
Perhaps I’m being paranoid, reading into things that aren’t there, but that thought doesn’t stop me from reaching for the door handle next to me and slipping back out into the hall.
“Your Majesty,” the guard growls, blocking my exit. I feint to the right and duck under his arm, hurrying to the main desk.
“Can you tell me what day it is?” I ask, breathlessly to the nurse behind the desk, the same nurse who helped me earlier.
A moment later my guard comes to stand beside me, but he doesn’t drag me off like I worried he might. I guess threatening to narc on him was effective after all.
The nurse across from me looks baffled by my request—or maybe just the fact that I’m out here again. “Of course, my queen,” she says. She turns to the screen in front of her. “It’s May tenth.”
I do the math in my head. That would mean that it’s been almost three weeks since I married the king and over two weeks since I came here for the operation.
“Is something the matter, Your Majesty?” the nurse asks.
I shake my head, my mind still far away. The surgery should’ve taken hours, not days, and definitely not weeks. I’m not being paranoid after all. Something did happen to me.
“You’re sure that’s today’s date?” I ask.
The nurse glances from me to her screen again, looking uncomfortable. “Yep. May tenth.” She smiles warmly at me, but it falters a bit when she takes in my expression. “Would you like me to escort you back to your room?” The nurse eyes me and the guard at my side, missing nothing.
“I’m fine.” I back away from the main desk.
“I’ll have someone check in on you in five minutes,” the nurse says. She says it to comfort me, but I know her true motives are to make sure I’m okay before the king returns.
I walk back in a daze. Why would Montes not mention that I’d been out for weeks? And, more importantly, why was I out for that long?
Thirty minutes later, I hear the click of expensive shoes on the hospital linoleum. The king is coming back to my room, and I’m ready for him.
As soon as the king takes up the doorway, his eyebrows raise. I’m sitting on top of my bed in my hospital gown, my forearms slung over my knees. In one of my hands I’m playing with a scalpel that I lifted from the nurse that checked on me.
“Where’d you get that?”
I narrow my eyes at the king. “You don’t seriously expect me to answer that question, do you?”
He smirks, totally at ease with the fact that I’m playing with a scalpel in his presence.
Behind him I see Marco and some of the king’s bodyguards flank the doorway. “He,” I jut my chin at Marco, “better make himself scarce, or else this scalpel is going to find itself lodged into his chest.”
King Lazuli saunters into the room. “There is no need for threats, my queen.”
My eyes shoot daggers at Marco.
“Marco and his guards are going to wait outside while I spend time with my recovering wife.” The king’s mouth curves up at the last word.
Marco opens his mouth to speak. As soon as he does so, my hand tightens around the knife, and I rearrange my grip for throwing it. Marco’s eyes flick to my hand, and his mouth closes. Without a further word, he slips out of the room.
“You need to stop threatening my men,” the king says.
“Or else what?” I ask insolently. “You’ll divorce me?”
He sighs. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Make me regret my decision to marry you?”
“Absolutely.” Gone for the moment are my blossoming feelings for the king. Instead I can’t help but feel deeply disturbed once more by the king and his science.
The king leans in close—close enough for me to stab him if I desire it. He knows this too. I can see him daring me with his eyes.
“If I wanted to punish you for threatening my men, I’d find something infinitely more creative than divorce.”
I flip the scalpel around in my hand several times, a small smile forming on my lips. “You’re right. Divorce would hardly be punishment.”
Montes’s fingers touch my jaw, angling it to better face him. “Why are you so angry?”
“What have you done to me?”
The king’s brows lift. “This is about your surgery?”
“See, there’s where you’ve got it wrong,” I say. “Surgeries require this—” I raise the scalpel, “—and they leave scars. Most importantly of all, they don’t take two weeks.”
“My doctors have access to the latest technology. You were placed in a device called the Sleeper. It removed the cancer and regenerated healthy tissue.”
The king has equipment that can do that?
Before I can respond, the king wraps his hand around the base of the knife and tries to pull it from me.
“Hey—” I can tell I’m about to lose the scalpel, so I give it a good yank and slide it against the king’s skin.
The king curses as the knife cuts into the flesh between his thumb and forefinger and blood pools.
I let go of the scalpel just as the door to my room is thrown open. Marco comes in, gun drawn, a group of guards spreading out behind him.
I roll my eyes at Marco and very slowly relax my coiled muscles. Despite appearing indifferent, I’m not. I’m staring down the same gun barrel that my father had. The one that might’ve killed him.
“Your Majesty,” Marco says, taking in the scene, “is everything alright?” His eyes flick to the king’s bloody hand. “You’re bleeding.”
The king holds out the scalpel for Marco to take while studying me. “I’m fine,” he says as Marco takes the knife from him. “I just cut myself while I took the scalpel from the queen.” The king’s giving me a strange look. I get the impression he’s trying to figure me out.
“Your Majesty?” Marco says, not buying the story.
“That’s all Marco,” the king says.
“But sir, your hand …”
“Later Marco,” the king says, his eyes never straying from mine. “Leave us.”
Marco hesitates, piercing me with a look that says just what he’ll do to me if more harm befalls the king. I flash him my most nefarious grin as he backs out of the room.
“Must you terrify everyone you meet?” The king asks, grabbing some paper towels out of a dispenser to cauterize the flow of blood.
“Yes.”
The king comes back to me, and that strange look is back in his eyes. “Why did you cut me?”
My skin prickles, not because of his question, but because he’s not angry at all. He’s curious. It’s the wrong reaction, and it makes me worry that there indeed is something very, very wrong with the man I married.
“I wanted to see if you could bleed,” I say. My words sound cruel and calculating even to my own ears. There is also something very wrong with me.
“No, you didn’t,” the king says. “You’ve already seen me bleed.” He comes closer to my bed. “You want to know how I heal, don’t you?” he says, his eyes ever so inquisitive.
My heart thumps. “Yes,” I admit.
The king nods slowly. “You thought because I refused to tell you how I died before, I’d always refuse to tell you.”
“How you died before?” I go completely still. Already he’s admitted so much more than I expected.
“Perhaps ‘died’ is the wrong word.” He sits on my bed and cups the side of my face. In his eyes I see something I hoped not to. I don’t know what love is, and I doubt the king does either, but the expression he wears seems awfully near the mark.
“You really want to know?” he asks.
I nod.
He lets out a breath, then making a decision, he says, “All right. I’ll tell you the whole sordid story—it’s a long one.”
This moment strikes me as terribly anticlimactic. King Lazuli, the feared ruler of the entire globe, is about to tell me his biggest and most well kept secret. A secret men have killed and died for. A secret that used to bring goose bumps to my skin.
He presses his mouth to my ear, exhales, and breathes the first line. “But not here—”
The sound of shots ring out.
The king pulls back, and we stare at each other for a moment. Then we’re moving.
Ambushed. Someone knows we’re at this hospital, and we’re being ambushed.
On the other side of the door, I hear Marco’s voice. “Montes, Serenity,” he shouts, dropping our titles, “stay inside.” Then his footfalls move away from us.
He expects us to hide in this room like sitting ducks, but I’ve had too much military training to ever act like a civilian again. Oddly enough, Montes seems to have the same idea. He tries to push me behind him as he approaches the door. Instead I brush past him.
The king catches my hand. “Serenity—”
I turn and look at him. “I know what I’m doing.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it. Montes tugs me to him and kisses me.
“I’ll follow your lead,” he says when he breaks away. “Just don’t get hurt—that’s an order.”
I pull away from him. “I won’t.” I just hope I’m right.