The Fifth Healer

71.

My body suddenly feels unbelievably heavy, like the weight of the whole mount of the Acropolis is sitting on top of me.

"Wait. What?" I say. "Leaving?"

"Yeah," she says.

"To go where?"

"Anywhere. Home. Not here."

I'm staring ahead, still, at the Parthenon. But the world is drained of color. I turn to her. "But why?"

"Do you really have to ask?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, is it not obvious why I'd leave?"

"No. I don't understand. You just-"

A tourist walks up to the wall beside us, staring out over Athens. He snaps a photo and then turns to walk away.

I say again, in a lower voice, even though I know passing tourists are paying us no mind, "You just got instated."

"Provisionally."

"Yeah, provisionally instated."

"So you're one step away from what you wanted."

"What I wanted was to get rid of the cancer. To get better. Not to be a cog in a bureaucratic behemoth. You saw the same meeting I did, right?"

I hold up my empty palms as if to say as if to say, yes, obviously.

"So you know there's no way to get on that list of luminaries. Are you not at least a little interested?"

"In what?"

"In, you know," she motions toward my lower body. "Having two legs."

"I already do. One of them happens to be prosthetic."

"You know what I mean."

"I mean, I wouldn't say no to a second biological leg. But I'm not desperate for a cure."

Her eyes go wide as I've insulted her. "God, you really look down on me, huh?"

"What? No, that's not what I mean. Cancer is different."

"Desperate for a cure?" she says, throwing my words back at me.

"If I were you, Ainsley," I say apologetically, "I'd be desperate for a cure, too."

"Well, I'm not," she says, looking away. "Just desperate to get outta here."

"But what about that pilot? We have to figure out why she was trying to kill us! And how she got back here to the Kastro."

"By all means, play Sherlock Holmes to your heart's content. Am I curious? Sure. But unraveling some chronopathic deep state conspiracy isn't going to increase my lifespan."

I'm struggling to imagine life around here without her. I've only known her few days, but it feels like I've lived lifetimes in the time since waking up at the hospital. She and I have been alongside each other through all of it. At this point, how could I go on alone?

I thought I'd made peace with the idea we could never be together. But now that it really comes down to losing Ainsley for good, it's clear I never really let go of my feelings for her. I was just denying them.

"Please," I say. "Don't go. We can still cure you."

"You saw the same council meeting I did, right? It's impossible."

"You don't even want to try being a chronopath? There must be-"

"You mean being a worker drone in this highly administrative temple of red tape? Maybe-maybe-I would stick around if I thought it mattered. If I thought I'd wield real power, be able to make an actual difference for other sick people. But they only heal one person a day, and that person gets chosen by this politicized self-important douche council. They don't need me. If anything, I feel like they see us as completely expendable."

I guess she's right. There's only one slot left anyway. So either we're separated now, or we're separated after the final test when one of us gets fully instated. If I had cancer, I'd probably be pretty disappointed by the Guild, too.

"There's gotta be another way," I say.

"Sorry," she says. "I just don't have time to waste."

She thinks it would be a waste to spend any of her remaining time with me? I feel like my organs are being deflated and twisted inside my gut.

"I don't have a moment to waste," she says, standing from the rock wall.

No. This can't be happening. I can't let her walk away, disappearing into the loose crowd of tourists around the historic structures. If she walks away now, I'll be trapped here, and she'll end up trapped in a hospital somewhere in Maryland, ravaged by cancer.

"Wait, Ainsley," I say. "Please wait."

The tone of my voice, the desperation, causes her to stop and turn. She's standing right in front of me.

"Look, I need to tell you something," I say.

I see a flicker of interest in her eyes. She takes a half step forward, the front of our shoes almost touching. I feel a tingle in all five of my toes.

She nods for me to continue. I look down at my knees, bent, almost touching hers.

"Look, the truth is..." I'm not even sure where to start. There are so many secrets, so much truth. And so many questions still unanswered.

She raises an eyebrow, growing impatient.

"The truth is," I say, grabbing her hand. "I can't do this without you."

"Do what?" she says softly.

"Remember what Dr. Khan was saying about dimensions? Animals only know three. Humans know four. All that?"

She nods.

"A few days ago, I was given a mission. A purpose. And that purpose was the only thing in my life, my only reason for being. My life was a straight line. I was living in a single dimension."

I can tell she wants to know what mission I'm referring to, but she lets me continue.

"Right, so then..." I say. "Then my line intersected with your line. And suddenly, I saw another direction, another dimension, that I had not noticed or even known about before. And suddenly, instead of a single line, my life was this infinite flat plain. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I understand that you really like geometry. Or is this physics?"

Right. Leave it to me to make attraction (or is it love? Dare I even ask myself that?) sound like a school subject.

"No, it's biology," I say. "It's a matter of the heart. You're an infinite plane to a heart that had only known straight lines."

She gasps a little, letting go of my hand to place her fingers over her mouth.

"Ainsley," I say, "what I'm trying to say is-"

"Shut up," she says, placing a finger on my lips. "I know what you're saying. Don't mess it up with more words."