Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
He’d left his gift in the vehicle, knowing Lei couldn’t use it yet.
It was a dress he’d purchased after he spotted a clothing outlet in the small automated mall that housed the convenience store. Automations in that vein had never quite taken off as predicted—even in majority-Psy areas, which was interesting in itself—but they worked in lonely places like this, with passing motorists glad for a place to find essentials no matter the time of day or night.
The clothing store’s stock had been limited, but he’d managed to find an ankle-length dress in a bright lemon yellow that seemed as if it would speak to Lei’s sense of color and style. She was always bright, Lei. Sunshine in human form. He’d tried to replace her denim jacket, too, but the store didn’t have that in stock, nor anything else that might suffice, so he’d made a note to get that later.
As he went to check out, the automated service station had offered him a list of other suggested purchases, and he’d indicated yes to all of them. It had then presented him with a small box that was labeled as containing underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a generic skin cream, and a small makeup palette for “midrange” skin tones. He’d figured she might be able to use the eye powder.
Lei liked putting sparkle on her eyelids.
Some might see his gift as a bribe, a way to nudge his way back into her life. It wasn’t. He’d do anything for her to choose him; to gain her attention by stealth, by taking advantage of her when she was hurt and defenseless … no, it would break him. He’d always know that it was all false.
Too soon. Too fast. But it had happened. He’d bonded to her with the same obsessive focus that had kept him functional and alive this long.
Now he had to learn to live without her.
As for the gift, Ivan simply valued the power of being clean and having clothes of your own. Those were the first things Grandmother had given him after she brought him home; he could still remember standing in front of the mirror after a bath, touching his hand carefully to the brand-new shirt that no one else had ever before worn—and that Grandmother had told him no one could take from him.
His, it was just his.
Even if Lei didn’t like the dress, it would give her some non-institutional clothing into which to change. But though he went through the entire multi-level hospital room by room, patient by patient, he couldn’t find her. There was no woman with her long limbs and specific pattern of injuries.
“We’ve been transferring a lot of patients,” a harried human nurse told him when he queried her, deep grooves marking the ebony skin of her face. The medical net she wore over the tight curls of her hair told him she must’ve just come out of a surgery. “Massive number of injured due to recent events.”
Though she was clearly tired, she went to a computronic monitor and said, “I can look up your friend for you.”
“She was brought in as Lei, last name unknown, from the site adjacent to the SkyElm ocelot pack. Identified as changeling, most likely ocelot.”
The nurse input the information, frowned. “I have a Lei here, but notes say she wasn’t ID’d as an ocelot. SkyElm alpha himself came in to ID the unknowns an hour after she was brought in, and he didn’t recognize her.”
Ivan tried to make sense of that; all he could come up with was that Lei had been passing through on her way home to her own pack and had stepped in to help. It was what she did, who she was. “Does it say where she was transferred?”
“It should.” A minute later, after bringing up multiple different pages one after the other, she sighed. “I’m sorry, it looks like someone screwed up and didn’t note the details of her transfer. We’re sending patients across the country—sometimes, in the rush to get a patient onto a jet-chopper, the record trail gets broken.”
The nurse brought up another document. “No female patients listed as DOA or expired in the past eighteen hours, so you don’t have to worry about that. She’s alive, just at another hospital. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you as soon as she’s able.”
Ivan nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and called Canto the instant he walked out of the hospital and into the cold and dark gray winter light. If anyone could locate Lei, it was his eldest cousin; Canto had an intelligence network so vast it reached every corner of the globe.
But even Canto couldn’t follow an invisible thread. “Medical records are in chaos,” he told Ivan two hours later. “Malware attack attributed to a fringe group inspired by Pure Psy—it’s wiped a ton of data.”