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  Nat’s phone rang again, and this time it was the general number of University Hospital. “Hello?”

  “Miss Doxiphus. Hi. It’s Dr. Hernandez. I have the results of your mother’s EEG. Can you and Dr. LaVista come back up, please?”

  “We’ll be right there. Oh, and my dad just landed. He should be here in about an hour and a half.”

  “Okay, good. I’ll meet you at the nurses’ station.”

  When they reached the nurses’ station, Dr. Hernandez was working feverishly on her laptop.

  “Doctor?” Natalia said to get her attention.

  Dr. Hernandez stood up. “Let’s go where we can talk.” The woman was moving briskly down the hall, toward the double doors. Her voice had lost its previous warmth, and she wore a guarded expression. Nat felt her lunch transform into a stone at the bottom of her stomach.

  Dr. Hernandez led them to an unoccupied patient room just before the double doors, then closed the door behind them.

  “Your mother’s condition remains stable. She’s not in any danger.” She put her laptop on the adjustable patient table. “But the results are…”

  “Inconclusive?” Dr. LaVista interjected.

  Dr Hernandez opened her laptop; a marked-up EEG trace was already up. LaVista examined it closely, then went quiet.

  “Not inconclusive, but I have no explanation, so I have to say ‘inexplicable.’”

  Hernandez went on as best as she could. “Dr. Doxiphus shows a great deal of lambda activity in the occipital region, which is where the vision centers of the brain are,” she added for Natalia’s benefit. “And there’s some theta activity in the fronto-temporal region as well. Everywhere else shows organized alpha activity.”

  “So what does this mean?” Atypically, Natalia was struggling to keep up while her uncle was quietly considering the trace.

  “You recalibrated?” he asked.

  “Twice, and then I changed out machines. I sent the first one to medical equipment for diagnostics. I had just used the second one this morning, and it worked fine then,” Dr. Hernandez quickly replied.

  “Photic stimulation?” he asked, pointing to the lambda activity.

  “That’s the hard part. The lambda activity was completely unaffected by any stimuli that were presented in the visual field. The activity remained consistent with the subject’s eyes closed!” Hernandez was clearly puzzled and was looking to one of the people she hoped would help her.

  “Uncle Tony, what does this mean? I can see the activity, so she’s not…” Nat stopped; she couldn’t bring herself to say brain dead. “What does this mean?” she blurted, with a mixture of anxiety, frustration, and strain in her voice.

  Her uncle used his professor’s voice. “Okay, see all the lines that don’t have the red boxes? Those leads show organized alpha activity. That’s exactly what we would expect to see in a normal awake adult brain.”

  “Mmm-hmm…wait, but Mom’s not awake,” Nat managed to muster.

  “Right, she’s not. Now, lambda activity usually is generated when something novel and visually interesting is presented in the visual field. But that’s not what’s happening here. The activity is occurring independently of what’s going on in the visual field.”

  This wasn’t making sense to Natalia, and her frustration was growing.

  “Lastly, there’s this theta activity, which usually is associated with dreaming and sleep.” LaVista had his reading glasses on now and was staring closely at the trace. “Did you get this out to the attending for interpretation?” he asked Hernandez.

  “Yes, Dr. Jones has them now,” Hernandez replied, looking a little relieved that she had taken all the right steps and frankly that LaVista was stumped too.

  “Good, keep on it. Start a long-term study with video recording.” LaVista turned to Nat. Taking her gently by the arm, he led her into the hallway.

  “Nat, I don’t know what this all means. Technically, those readings, that trace—it’s not possible. Your mom has plenty of brain activity. There’s a lot going on, and we’ll find out what it is.”

  Hernandez entered the hallway. “Dr. Jones just called. He’s in consultation room three and wants to meet with you.”

  “You go, Uncle Tony. I’ll go sit with Mom. My dad should be here in a little while anyway,” said Nat.

  He gave her a quick hug and turned to follow Hernandez to consult three.

  Natalia leaned against the wall for minute, hands at her head, trying to keep it together. Then she stood fully, pushed through the double doors, walked three rooms down to her mother’s room.

  She opened the heavy, wide door, hoping to find her dad already there, but instead she found a nurse leaning over her mother and looking between the EEG trace and her mother’s eyes.

  “Hi. I’m her daughter. Who are you?” Nat asked, feeling oddly suspicious. Perhaps there’s been a shift change.

  “I’m from neurology. Just checking a few things,” the nurse replied.

  “Dr. Hernandez and Dr. LaVista just examined my mom. What are you doing?”

  The nurse moved so that her back was to Nat. She was white, with shoulder-length, shapeless, dishwater-colored hair. “I’ll be done in a minute, if you can just wait outside, please,” the nurse said without looking at her.

  “I’m staying here with my mom. My dad is due here any minute,” came the determined reply. The nurse was doing something with the IV catheter in the crook of her mother’s arm. “What are you doing to my mom?” Nat demanded, surprised at how quickly her anger and frustration were rising.

  “You seem exhausted, dear. Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee? I’ll be done in a few minutes.” The nurse reached into a pocket and pulled out a blood-collection tube.

  Nat practically exploded. “I told you my mom just had an exam. Why do you need to do another one?” She moved to the opposite side of the bed, her back to the window so she could face the nurse. The nurse turned away from Nat to face the EEG cart. “Why won’t you face me?”

  “Really, dear, it’s okay. Go take a short break. I’ll watch your mother.”

  This time, Nat did explode. “No, get the hell away from my mother, bitch!” she shouted, leaning across her mother’s body to push the nurse away.

  “Hey, let’s all calm down,” came a deep male voice from the doorway. The nurse didn’t turn to look, but Nat’s eyes snapped toward the stranger. A man in a medic uniform stood in the doorway. He had the solid, lean look of a swimmer and closely cropped dark-brown hair.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, miss. I can do this later,” the nurse said in a quiet voice, then quickly moved to leave the room. As the medic stepped aside for her, the woman kept her head down, so Nat still didn’t get a clear view of her face.

  She pulled herself up from her mother’s bed, her pulse still pounding but starting to slow. “Thank you,” she told the medic.

  “What for?” he replied.

  “For helping get rid of her…and who are you?” She paused, then yelled out to the duty nurse who was walking by, “Excuse me!”

  “Yes?” the nurse said, entering the room.

  “There was another nurse in here just now—shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, about my height. Do you know who she is? She said she was from neurology and had to examine my mom.”

  The nurse bit her lip and thought for a second. “That could be a lot of the nurses on staff. What did she say she was doing?” The quizzical look on the woman’s face didn’t reassure Nat. The duty nurse came over to check her mother’s vitals and IV.

  “She said she was from neurology and had to do an exam,” Natalia repeated. “It looked like she was going to take a blood sample.”

  “Well, everything looks okay here with your mom. Let me go check the orders. I don’t know everyone who works here,” the nurse said, then left the room.

  Nat turned to the medic again and eyed him.

  “Sorry, I’m John Holden. I’m the medic who brought your mo
ther in this morning.” He grinned sheepishly, getting his first full look at Natalia as she walked around the bed. Nat’s long brown hair, frazzled as it was, caught the sunlight from the window, and hues of gold, red, and auburn shone clearly. John was stopped in his tracks by the sight of sunlight shining through something wondrous. He came over to her, almost tripping. “Are you okay? You’re obviously pissed off.”

  “Yeah, sorry about the yelling. I just didn’t know…that just didn’t feel right. Why are you here?”

  “Why am I here?” he repeated, looking at her face. “Right, uh, I just brought in a guy who tried to put his car through a bridge column—he was drunk. Anyway, there were some odd things about your mother’s call that I remembered. I already talked to 911 dispatch, and I wanted to tell the doctors too. I was going to wait until the end of my shift to file a report, but I was here anyway, so…” He paused, looking over to Aida and then back to Nat. “I’m sorry about all this.”

  “She’s…well, the same,” Nat said, turning to her mother. “I’m Natalia Doxiphus, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Natalia?” called a voice full of concern from the hallway. A second later, Dr. Gregorio Doxiphus strode into the room. Nat moved to her father, whose skin glistened with a slight sheen of sweat.

  “Dad.” Her voice cracked as he held her for a moment.

  “Sweetie, are you okay?” he said, then gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, and they let go of their embrace. “This is John Holden. He’s the medic who brought Mom in.”

  Greg glanced at John and muttered, “Thank you” as he moved toward the bed.

  Gregorio Doxiphus was trimly built, with a salt-and-pepper black beard and a full head of hair. He took his wife’s hand and sat on the edge of the bed, stroking her face with his other hand. After a long moment, he got up and went to examine the EEG trace. He studied it for a long minute and then another.

  “This doesn’t make any sense, Nat. What did Uncle Tony say?” he said.

  “He said there’s a lot of brain activity, but basically the same thing—those readings aren’t possible. But here they are. He’s with other doctors now, trying to figure it out.”

  Sitting back on the edge of the bed, Greg leaned over and kissed his wife tenderly on the cheek and whispered, “Aida…where are you?”

  4 Withdrawal

  T urn right, and it’s fifteen steps to the double doors. She had planned for this. The nurse walked with purpose, but not so fast as to draw attention. Once through the doors, take thirty steps to the nurses’ station and another thirty to the next set of double doors down the hallway. I’ll be through the next set in a few seconds.

  The hard part about withdrawing was resisting the urge to rush or, worse, to run. The trick was to avoid being noticed, and running was a dead giveaway. The human eye is naturally drawn to movement, especially if it sticks out in a scene. It’s a reflex buried deep in the primitive brain, and it served our hunting ancestors well.

  She fought the urge to speed up again as she approached the nurses’ station with its wide-angle camera mounted on the ceiling, but her plan had accounted for this too. She raised the clipboard in her hand. Pretending to read something off it, she strode past the station, her face clearly visible only to the clipboard.

  Go through the second set of doors, then into the fourth room on the left.

  The patient room was empty except for a cleaning cart, with only the afternoon sun leaking in through the drawn blinds. After making sure the door was closed, she went straight to the cart and stripped off the nurse’s identity, then dropped it into a hanging laundry bag on the cart and pulled out a set of surgical scrubs. She kept the exam gloves on and dressed in smooth, quick motions. After she finished, she tucked her hair up under a surgical cap and slipped on a surgical mask. The last items she put on were an ID badge from a facilities worker and a pair of glasses with thick, dark frames.

  She pulled the cart behind her to the door, listened for a moment, then slowed her breathing. She then pulled the door inward in a casual, almost careless fashion before propping it open with the cart. As she walked around to get behind it, she completed her transformation, taking on a slight hunch and a slower, tired gait. She belonged here; she was doing her job just like everyone else. She wouldn’t be seen, and no one would ever see the “nurse” again either.

  Pushing the cart ahead of her, she turned left and continued down the hallway, moving away from the commotion at the nurses’ station. She heard the duty nurse’s voice. “Who was just in 206? Did neuro have someone up here?” Good timing.

  She plodded along to the elevator at the end of the hallway, not looking at the security camera in the corner. Go down to LL1. Drop the cart, and go out the service entrance. Those were the next three steps. She kept her cart—or surgical cap or something else—between her face and the cameras at every turn and never made eye contact with passersby.

  Three minutes later, she made her way down the sidewalk, under the green summer trees, her stride once again purposeful. With a parking lot on one side and the back of an apartment complex on the other, there would be few eyes to see a hospital facilities woman walking to the bus stop after her shift.

  When she was halfway down the block, a cab pulled up to her and stopped. Without missing a stride, she got in the back seat. One whiff told her of the countless junk food meals that had been eaten in the cab, fries stuffed into the mouth between pulls on a cigarette and slurps of coffee.

  “Where to, lady?” the cab driver sneered, and she stiffened, freezing in place. She felt his eyes on her but didn’t look up. Without a word, the driver reached up with a meaty, pasty white hand and flipped the meter. The doors locked automatically as the cab pulled out onto the nearly empty street.

  She swallowed, trying to wet her throat. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Plans change.” His eyes drifted slowly up to the mirror, then back to the road. “Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  Her eyes searched the cab’s interior; there was nothing for her to use to defend herself, not even a pen. She swallowed hard and sat back, her eyes drawn to his bright-red hair.

  “That’s right—just sit back,” he said. When the cab was a few blocks away from the hospital, the driver nodded, glanced at her in the mirror with indifferent ice-blue eyes, and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Her EEG is similar to the observers,” she said, scratching her eyebrows. “The daughter interrupted me, and I couldn’t get blood or cerebrospinal fluid samples. I had to leave the sampling equipment on the cart.”

  The driver flashed a sharp look at her in the mirror. The terms of her mission had been clear: payment only with samples. Now with him here, she realized other terms might have changed.

  “I had planned for the daughter, but a male medic intruded as well.” She cursed herself for making excuses and glared out the window at the concrete dividers that were speeding by. “I was compromised; I withdrew. I got out clean.” That was all there was to report. If they don’t like it, fuck them. Dispassionate eyes met her nervous glance in the rearview mirror. He owned her right now, and they both knew it.

  The cab was heading east on the interstate, toward the airport and the river. The setting sun was behind them. She felt the back seat of the car close in on her, and her pulse pounded in her ears. The hulking driver nodded again. “Acknowledged.”

  His large bowling-ball head swiveled with surprising ease. Determined not to cave in this time, she kept her eyes up and faced him square on. He saw this and considered it for less than an instant. He snorted and said, “Get changed. You’re going to the airport.” He passed a small overnight bag to her from the front seat.

  She didn’t feel connected to her hands as they opened the bag, but they seemed to know what they were doing. She took out the pants, blouse, vest, scarf, and shoes of a flight attendant and breathed deeply.

  “Where am I going?”

 
“You’ll find out on the plane.”

  She pulled off the thick-rimmed glasses and then the irritating facial prosthetics that had hidden the true shape of her cheekbones, jawline, chin, and the distance between her eyes. There were too many cameras in the hospital; there was even one in the patient’s room. After she pulled off the surgical cap, her hair fell free. She thought there was probably a camera here in the car as well—not that it mattered. She was used to letting people see her only as she wanted them to. She slipped into another persona as she stripped, one that liked being watched. Disguises weren’t all about makeup and clothing; you simply had to give the observer just enough, and then their minds would see what you wanted them to see. People were excellent at deceiving themselves—a flaw from which she made her living.

  The cab rolled into the private area of the airport, where a small jet, its engines already turning, waited on the tarmac. With its running lights on, it looked like a firefly in the quickly settling summer night. As she got out and pulled the handle on the overnight bag to pop out the wheels, the driver’s burly arm shot out, his massive hand grabbing her wrist. He pulled her down so her face was inches from his, wrenching her elbow and shoulder in an effortless move. There would be no disguises to hide behind now.

  “Quiet, now. Don’t draw attention,” he cooed to her, and then the ice returned. “Next time, you finish the job. Those are the rules.”

  Wincing in pain, she knew if he squeezed just a little bit harder, she’d be dealing with a fracture. But apparently that wasn’t part of the job, as a few seconds later he relaxed and let go. She stood, clutching her nearly broken forearm.

  “That’s good,” he said, grinning. “I’m glad my message got through all those masks you have.”

  She boarded the plane, which was empty, save for whoever was on the flight deck. A jolt of sharp pain electrified her arm as she pulled up the aircraft door. “Okay, asshole. Message delivered,” she admitted.