Chapter 21: Xain
It’s been two days since the last fight. Someone shot Jada in the back with a poison tipped arrow, but she’s alright. She’s lucky, the arrow was a tiny ways away from her heart and for some reason, the poison didn’t get all the way through her blood stream.
She woke up yesterday to a crying Melissa, who actually slapped me after I brought her in. For someone very caring and frail, she sure can hit hard. She and I aren’t on speaking terms right now.
“Jada,” I stroke at Jada’s black hair as she looks at me with big, brown eyes. She’s been placed on bed rest in the infirmary.
“I heard Melissa’s angry with you,” Jada starts before I can continue, “She kept saying how you promised her that I wouldn’t be hurt and that she could never forgive you.”
“She made me promise,” I sigh sadly, “I promised her that not even an arrow would pierce you, but you almost died by an arrow. I so sorry I left you, I should have known that Brute would come to our base to look for me. Now over twenty unnecessary lives have been lost.”
“I forgive you,” Jada grabs my hand, “it’s my fault for telling you not to worry about me and not sticking with you or Katya.”
Her eyes grow wide with horror as the words come from her mouth. Katya was trying to protect her when Brute beat her.
“She’s fine,” I quickly tell her, “she just had the wind knocked out of her and has a minor concussion.”
“There was a girl...”
“Maria,” I interrupt her mid-sentence. Her eyes are wide again, but no words come from her mouth.
“She told me that you were up in a tree and had hidden the flag there, and that Brute was there,” I pause and clear my throat, “Last I saw her was when she was fending off fighters so that I could get through to you. There were so many fighters. Not just rookies, but very experienced ones.”
“Brute,” Jada trembles, “where is he?”
“After his fight with you, his worth dropped ten percent,” I answer, “No one wanted to support or sponsor a warrior who was a hot head and fought with a little girl, not to mention have a girl stab him. The biggest impact was the beating of Katya. They have him in an asylum as a protection. Funny thing is, not even Vice has been in that maximum of security.”
Melissa comes in with a cheery smile on her face, but upon seeing me, her smile melts and her face turns to a look of anger.
“Oh, it’s you,” her voice sounds very harsh. She looks at Jada and sees that her hand is in mine and continues with, “If you’d stayed that close to her, this would have never happened.”
“Melissa,” Jada says, but Melissa’s glare is still on me, “He’s sorry, and he did keep his original promise to keep me alive.”
“While still breaking the promise to not let you get hurt,” Melissa looks to Jada now, but I can tell that her words are meant for me. “But while you’re here, you may as well report to Doctor Ken. He wants to discuss something with you.”
I start to say something, but then decide that it’d be best if I walk away and say nothing. Melissa turns her body just enough to let me out. I don’t even look back at Jada.
When I get to the far end of the infirmary where the doctor’s office is, he’s waiting for me. He’s looking at a patient file at his desk when I enter. He doesn’t even look up as he greets me.
“Morning, Mr. Austin,” he says to me, “How are ya today?”
“I’m good,” I answer in a semi-solomn voice.
“Miss Anderson?” He peers up at me.
“You’re the doctor,” I respond, “shouldn’t you know her condition?”
“I meant to ask if that was what’s bothering you,” Dr. Ken is now looking fully at me. “I know you’ve grown fond of each other, and I saw her friend slap you across the face and yelling at you for not watching her. She was pretty upset when she saw what happened on the screen, and that you left her in a tree by herself.”
I lean against the wall and sigh. “I made a promise to Melissa, said that I wouldn’t let an arrow pierce her. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Dr. Ken sighs out. “Well, there’s something I need to show you.”
Dr. Ken leads me to the elevator and into the EIT. We get into a car that’s marked as “Lab” and it almost immediately asks for a code.
“Please don’t tell anyone I’m doing this,” Dr. Ken says as he types in a code. “No one but a selected crew is even supposed to know this unit exists.”
We go into an old and derelict storage unit that smells of mold and mildew. I’m wondering what we’re doing in this place, and then I Dr. Ken opens an old cabinet and places his hand on one of the shelves. The back of the metal cabinet moves up along with the shelf pieces and we step in. It’s an elevator.
When we’re down, there’s a brief second before light floods into my eyes. This looks like any other lab. What makes it so different? There are computers and monitors everywhere along with chemicals and equipment being shuffled around. Dr. Ken leads me into a back room that has multiple monitors and a couple test tubes of what looks like blood. I approach one that reads “sample”, but then I see one that makes me almost jump: Anderson, Jada #504-5.
“What is this?” I ask as I pick up another that has Jada’s name and ID. “Why are there all of these samples of Jada’s blood?”
“This is what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dr. Ken pulls up two screens, “your friends blood”
I don’t respond, but nod my head and set the test tube down.
“You see,” Dr. Ken starts, “before the games started, I realized that Jada’s DNA wasn’t matching up with what we had on file. Now this wasn’t much of a red flag, but as you know, we track the fighters in the arena by scanning their active DNA, which sometimes also may require injecting the bloodstream with microtechnology to help. That’s not the case for most, though. I had one of the medics aboard your ship to extract a tiny bit of blood from Jada, just enough to put it into the system so that the judges could track her.
“The games went on, and as you know, Jada was shot with a poisoned arrow. Toroxan, very lethal. She was rushed to a medic and to here and we were prepared to do a complete operation in which we drained the blood, which of course then meant calling you back, but when the medics on the ship extracted the arrow, they said that the toxin wasn’t as saturated in the blood as they thought. They brought her here and there was hardly enough in the bloodstream to kill her.
“I drew some more blood, for testing of course, and it showed very little sign that she’d been poisoned. That’s when I drew some more blood from her and added toroxan to it. To my astonishment, her blood completely broke apart and expelled the toxin. I magnified her and your bloods to show you something.”
I look at both pictures on the screen, but I don’t notice anything out of the ordinary. “What is it?”
“Look at a ‘normal’ blood sample,” Dr. Ken brings up a third screen.
It is now that I notice tiny, black dots in both mine and Jada’s blood, the only defining difference in the pictures. What are those?
It’s as if Dr. Ken read my mind, because he zooms in on both of our bloods, showing a close-up of the black dots. It seems that they have a spherelical shape to them, until a replay of the toroxan experiment is played and they become shapeless and begin multiplying. Not only that, but they engulf the toxin and break it into an elemental—and safer—form. Some of the ones that fought the toxin actually seemed to diminish, a few change form and become like any other blood cell. They actually changed!
“What are you saying?” I’m in shock.
“I don’t know what or where you are from, or what those little...attackers are, but they are incredible,” Dr. Ken is near stammering, “In fact, I mixed your blood with another sample of someone else’s—other fighters from other districts with the blood types—and it immediately killed they’re blood. Jada is the only one that survived.”
I’m more shocked than ever now. I donated blood to a dying girl who ended up going into the arena and getting shot with one of the most deadliest toxins in the world and ended up not dying because of the blood I gave her.
“And Xain,” Dr. Ken says, “Not only does Jada have these little black dots in her body, her body has actually mutated and is producing them like yours is.”
“Sorry Doc,” I shake my head, “I need to lie down somewhere so that I can sort this out. Talk again?”
“Of couse,” he responds, “let’s go.”
When we get back to the infirmary, it’s only about ten seconds before my mind is taken off of what I was just shown. Katya has yanked my arm and is running. I hate how silent she is.
“Katya, what’s wrong?” I ask as I stumble along. She turns to look at me, but she’s smiling.
“Nothing,” she responds cheerfully.
“Then where are you taking me in a hurry?” I’m trying to figure this girl out, and so far, I’ve got nothing. But my heart skips when I hear her answer.
“Izzy’s awake.”