Gatlin's miraculous walk ends brutally.
One moment I'm in his arms, desperately kissing him back, and the next, he's falling on me. His blue eyes, electrified by my tech, dim and go black as they roll back into his head. All I can hazard is a frail scream before I drop with him.
With tears rolling down my cheeks, I lift him up and carry him back to the operating room. Iris' voice echoes in my mind and in the lab, but I can't focus for more than a few seconds. Something is wrong... terribly wrong.
His vitals are strong. Heartbeat is normal. There is no evidence of an internal bleed, broken bones, or improperly placed tech.
What the fuck is wrong with him?
Trembling, I heft him onto a stretcher and stumble back toward the monitors. The same mechanical arms from the surgery come to life with a hiss, dropping from the ceiling to surround him. Each breath I take hurts, as if there are shards of glass in my lungs, but I bottle up my wayward emotions to find the cause of his fall.
"Chris... Just hold on.... Please, hold on." I breathe his first name under my breath. He can't die. He can't.
Doubt creeps in, but I can't let it get any further. It wants me to drown, to admit defeat and to curl into a ball on the floor. I've let it win before and it cost more than I ever want to admit.
Gatlin can't wait for me to fall apart and put myself back together. I convinced him to do this. I told him this was the best option and I won't let it be a lie.
Faster and faster, the data on the screens flitter by. Zoning out, I funnel down the rabbit hole, shoveling through a mountain of data to find the chink in the armor. There must be something...
Lower and lower, I drive, ending and shirking off unnecessary programs to extend more of myself. My breathing deepens and my heart rate slows as my eyes squeeze shut. I don't need to see, don't need to smell or taste or touch. What I need lies in thousands of lines of code, strung together on teal and blue lights, firing at a million characters a second.
Like a vortex, the complex sequence of flashing numbers and letters leads me further into the abyss. With no other option, I follow. His genetic code is an unruly, dark sea, churning and quaking as it crashes against my tech and coding.
His genetic code fights for supremacy, refusing to coexist with the new intruder. Gathering everything I have, I mentally wade out to meet it. For years, I spent learning as much as I could about the human body, but genetics is still an unexplored frontier.
If Zhyv or her men were here, I'd have an easier chance to correct this issue. She's the product of a mad geneticist father who ventured to make her better than anyone else on the planet. But she isn't here and I don't know Gatlin's situation or have his permission to tell anyone else what we've found.
In the center of a massive whirlpool containing genetic data, I fall. Like quicksand, I sink into the information like a stone. Iris is right behind me, watching me break down the data with a bird's eye view.
She's quicker than me, more advanced, and at every update, she becomes more friend than computer. Her fingers stretch out and catch me, barely keeping my head from going down. There, in the fray, the answer finds me.
It's smaller than I was expecting, but the red lines draw my attention. Buried deep in Gatlin's genetic code is a weakness. Reaching out, I quarantine it from the rest of his mind and body.
It flips and flops in its new habitat like beta fish in a fish tank. I'll have to study it more, but whatever they built into his genetic code requires a shit ton of energy. Honestly, this discovery explains how the man eats enough for a dozen grown men.
"Hey, Blue." Abruptly, Charlie's voice yanks me out of the tide. Blazing back on full force, my eyes pop open and I swung around to meet his curious gaze. "What's going on? Why is everything beeping like that?"
"Charlie..." I swallow, battling with my emotions and the overwhelming sadness burrowing inside of me. "How did you get in here?"
His head slowly tilts to the side, and he stares at Gatlin for a beat before spearing me from head to toe. "Ryker let me in. He figured I'd seen worse with Darcy, but I've never seen anything like this. What are you doing down here? What are you doing to Chris?"
"Saving him, but I don't have much time."
"Saving him, how?" He asks, voice taking an edge. "Those diagrams over there," he points to a series of screens monitoring Gatlin's motor functions, "aren't normal."
"For him to walk again, it required more than normal medical care. In fact, without this surgery, he never would have walked again."
Surprise flickers across his face, but it's gone as soon as it comes. "And...?"
"And so I made him like me." Pressing my hands to my chest, I suck a deep breath between my clenched teeth. "He's augmented. I replaced what couldn't be repaired and improved him in other areas, but something's wrong. He... he went down and I'm trying to find out what went wrong."
As I speak, his eyes widen. They're nearly circles by the time I finish, but he doesn't do what I know he wants to. He doesn't launch into a myriad of useless, time consuming questions. Instead, he steps closer and nods his head a single time.
"Fine. How do we fix it?"
"I don't know." Frustration simmers under the surface of my emotions. It's eating up space I don't have to give. "It doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't make sense?"
"Do you know anything about genetics or coding?"
"I basics."
Groaning, I shove a hand through my hair. "Then you won't understand a word I say."
"Then make a way for me to understand it." He sighs. "Look, I may not know the answer, but maybe talking it over with someone who's willing to listen will help."
"Well... well... well... is Charlie Hendrix offering sage advice?"
His face pinches. "Don't push your luck, princess."
"Okay," I hold my hands up in surrender, smiling madly. He smiles back, but it doesn't hang around long. Seconds later, his face grows serious, and he nods in my direction.
"Tell me."
"He's suffering a multitude of symptoms. He has a fever, there are signs of swelling on his skin, especially around the incisions, and the tests show an increase in creatinine levels."
"What else?"
"He was fine—at first—but then he just crashed. Gatlin was up, talking and walking up around before he simply went pale, his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out."
"Alright. Swelling at incisions, creatinine level increase—whatever the fuck that is—fever, and passing out. What could cause those?"
"Uhhh..." I fumble through the internet, searching Gatlin's symptoms against every known and unknown database to find the answer to Charlie's question. "According to Web MD, he's suffering from death."
Charlie scoffs to cover a chuckle. "Nah, I don't think he's suffering from death, yet. Next."
"Could be infection, but other than the fever, he's not experiencing flu-like symptoms. He doesn't have blocked arteries, leaking urine, diarrhea..." My brain short circuits when Gatlin coughs harshly, throwing blood all over himself and Charlie. "Shit, he's coughing up blood."
Things only worsened for him. Luckily, Iris was on top of his symptoms and immediately sent the mechanical arms into action. They, along with the nanites under his skin, bored a hole in both sides of his chest. To drain the blood building in his artificial lungs, a long, thin translucent tube was attached.
"Don't look at him, princess." Charlie's hands caught my face, forcing it to turn until our gazes clashed. "He's getting the help he needs. What else?"
"This happened within hours of the augmentation. He was in surgery for roughly 29 hours. They completely rebuilt his spine and replaced the organs damaged during the fight at Darcy's."
"So, we know his body was severely traumatized from the fight, and being in surgery for so long had to have some effect, right?"
"Yes..." I stare at Charlie longer, taking in the flecks of lighter colored blue deep in his irises. "I didn't have a chance to do a complete blood and genetic workup before he underwent the augmentation. So, there's no way to determine what exactly was in his blood or genes before this happened."
Yet, Ryker told me he was genetically modified. He never said where the modification stopped. What if before he joined my team, something caused him to have an organ replaced?
What if my system wasn't simply rejecting the augmentation? What if it was also rejecting another organ? If he suffered from a type of chronic rejection and this massive change simply exacerbated it?
Iris hadn't noted any extra organs inside Gatlin... He had two kidneys, and a single liver... his pancreas wasn't removed and there was no evidence of a heart transplant. But that didn't mean he hadn't been a recipient of a transplant in the past.
"What did you just think of?" Charlie gently shook me, bringing me back to the present.
"What?"
"Something changed. Your face dropped and your eyes stopped glowing."
"I—I think I know what it is." I breathe, still reading through the massive data dump Iris downloaded. "From what I can tell, he's suffering hyperacute rejection."
"His body is rejecting the augmentation process?"
I shake my head. "Not the process itself, but the machinery installed in his body. His immune system is treating the new spine and organs as foreign objects—attacking them like it would a virus."
"Wouldn't that be normal?"
Charlie's question stops my next sentence and my mouth drops open.
"What?"
"The augmentation—the machinery, his spine and other organs—aren't natural bodies, so his immune system's response is normal and natural."
"Yeah... yeah, it would, if there were donor antibodies already present in his blood. It would cause a large influx of neutrophils to rush to the affected areas and they'd treat them like a virus—attacking them until they die. When my system couldn't fight the white blood cells anymore, it shut down, but his spine and movement are attached to my augmentation.
He'd have inflammation around the organs and his spine, and ischemia. With no blood going directly to these organs, it would cause his other systems to shut down. That's why it felt like I was trudging through mud in his system—it's bogged down."
Gatlin's heart rate slows as time passes, and I rush through the rest of the data to pinpoint a solution to the problem. If I fail, he'll die and all of this will be for naught.
Again, Charlie asks, "how do we fix it?"
"He needs anti-rejection meds. Iris can you—"
"Currently producing Solumedrol. Doses can be found in the cabinet upon completion."
"You're saying he'll need to take these meds for the rest of his life?" Confused, Charlie studies me. "Why don't you have to take them?"
"Because the augmentation process was developed for me. Gatlin and I aren't a perfect blood match. For now, the pills will work. When he's up and moving around, we can correct it at the source."
"Alright, princess, and how do we do that?"
"We trick his immune system into thinking my tech and the metal are his original organs."
But nothing is this simple, and the next few weeks put us through more hell than I ever could imagine.