Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

28. Lazarus

"Thanks," she cut him off. She tentatively clenched the hand into a fist.

"Any pain?" he asked. She shook their head.

"It's perfect. Thanks a lot, Cyril."

She looked up from their hand and found him staring back. In this light, his eyes looked dark, just like the shadows underneath them. She had no idea how much time had passed since she had come into his practice, but he had probably not gotten much sleep. Yet he did not seem to have any intent of leaving. Was he waiting for something? Was she supposed to say something?

"Cyril, where did you get that scar?" she asked, thinking of the first thing that crossed her mind.

"Wha- oh, you mean this?" he brushed his hair to the side and touched his temple. He hesitated a moment, then he averted his eyes and a wry smile appeared on his face.

"That... was a close encounter with a very young, very upset patient who was not happy about having his augments removed, back in the early days of the purge," he said in a low voice.

"What happened?" she asked.

He pressed his lips together, and for a moment she thought he would not answer. Then he leaned back in his chair and began to speak while staring off into the distance.

"It was... bad. It was on a remote colony in an outer sector. A desolate place. I had been working for days in a makeshift clinic. We were in a hurry because we had some intel that the hunters were coming. We had already run out of general anesthetics when they brought in that boy, and..."

Cyril rubbed a hand over his face.

"We thought... well, I thought, I could save him, and it was better to have him suffer through the stripping than what the hunters might have in store for him. I tried to explain, but... he was too young. Way too young to understand any of it. His augments were small, life support, but not as crucial as yours, so we could have removed them safely. But they were embedded deep into the tissue... and the local anesthesia wasn't enough... it was horrific."

His voice had grown more and more silent as he spoke, until it was barely a whisper. As he sat there now with his shoulders drooping and his face buried in his hands, she regretted having asked. Hesitantly, she inched a bit closer and put a hand on his shoulder.

"You were just trying to help," she said.

"I cut him open, Amy. While he was awake and screaming for me to stop," he whispered. "It took two grown men to hold him down, and still... he broke free and lashed out, managed to somehow grab a scalpel, and that's how..."

"I understand," she said. "What happened to him, in the end?"

"He died," Cyril said meekly, "After he broke free of his restraints, he just... bled out... It was-"

"It's okay. I'm sorry," she cut him off. "I didn't mean to - well, you don't have to tell me these things if you don't want to."

He shook his head slowly. "No, it's alright. In fact... I feel like I have to remind myself of what happened back then from time to time. Just to make sure that I will never again make such a mistake."

"It's not your fault," she said. "You were worried for the boy's life. You wanted to protect him from the hunters-"

"But the hunters might have just taken him to one of the prisons," Cyril argued. "They might have stripped him safely somewhere, in some facility, with proper medical care. They might have-"

"Or they might have killed him. Or they might have put him in a prison where he might have died anyway. You made a bad choice, but what happened was not your fault," she insisted, and noticed that she sounded angrier than she felt. "You just tried to help... the Purge made everyone desperate. Orion's Reach, Neo Tokyo, and all those other stuck up bastards that play along with them – they should feel guilty. Not you."