The receptionist took her into an open room. “Yuslanie? Your Three of Two, Lenith Thaymen, is here.” And with that, he vanished.

Across the room, the young doctor’s thick black brows perked. She rose from a desk far too big for her.

“Oh, h-hi. Come in! C-come in.”

Yuslanie’s features were dominantly Glinkadian:

Morbidly pale. Dense black hair and thick eyebrows. Hairless, soft skin everywhere else. Short and petite. Far too youthful to be a doctor—a deception of nature (Korvilene had once, in the not quite yet forgotten past, learned the folly of discounting Glinkadians).

Her smile was brimming and sincere. Beautiful gray eyes as big as her poorly hidden uncertainty. She lowered the slate she had been fiddling with. A plain, pink vase held dying flowers at the desk’s edge. Fallen, discolored petals stirred across the white desktop as she hurried to greet the new patient.

Yuslanie wore a black bodice, a clear demarcation from the other doctors but not even that matured her features. Her top lip lacked a bow. Her bones had hardly a trace of fat or muscle.

Lenith thought it might have been a joke at first.

Approaching, she was as tall as Lenith’s chest. Her hand hovered close to Lenith’s back but never touched it. “Take a s-seat, p-please. You c-can c-call me Bridge,” Her smile faltered with every stutter. “I’ve never d-done this k-kind of evaluation on my own b-before.”

Her cropped hair smelled of crisp, sliced vegetables plucked from a garden.

Lenith struggled between heading toward the designated chair or an examination bed to the right. Eventually Bridge went with her to the desk. 

The Glinkadian fumbled with the slate and nearly dropped it as she tried to find comfort leaning on the front of the desk instead of the high-arched chair behind it. She set the device aside. In its stead she took two syringes. The first was easily recognizable. Marlic had used one on Lenith’s arm to detect lecribria.

“Does it bother you?” Lenith asked.

Bridge’s eyes darted from the needles. “Does w-what?” Her thick lips pursed. The smile had abandoned her completely.

“Your stutter.”

“N-no! S-sometimes. Does it b-bother you? I c-can get a d-doctor.”

Lenith gave Bridge a warm smile and said “Not at all. You’re not a doctor?”

“I w-wish. I’m a low-level c-clinician”

The girl was odd, out of place. Lenith related. She liked this Bridge Yuslanie. She tried to keep Seid’s words in her head. Perhaps Bridge only did what she could to survive. Of course she did. She was Glinkadian, after all. The only people who had it worse off in a post-Eton Veil Korvilene were Wylos. And, in order to survive, Bridge slipped a thin, yellow glove over her left hand and took a hold of Lenith’s elbow.

The patient gripped the armrests. She knew what was coming before her clinician could utter a brief warning. The last bruise had just faded.

The first needle pierced her wrist and drew blood. The screen on the needle’s side flashed from blue to orange, as expected, and chirped at uneven intervals.

“Why’s it beeping?” Lenith asked in a rising panic. Marlic’s syringe had not chirped. It had not made a sound at all.

“Oh, it’s r-reading your b-blood,” Bridge said and stabbed the second needle into Lenith’s other wrist without warning. This one remained silent, docile, and lightless. It drew a cylinder’s worth of blood from her arm.

“What about this one? Another standard inoculation?”

Bridge’s small face tightened into a confused expression. She glanced shyly at the vial filling with blood. “N-no. It’s for Iscleption to m-make new blood for you in c-case of an accident.”

“Make new blood?”

Bridge nodded meekly, as if still coming to terms with it as well.

“What else can they do?”

“I d-don’t know.”

The young Glinkadian applied thumb-sized adhesive bandages to the incision points before taking the needles across the room. Both fit into the side of a tall machine with a round platform for its base. Horizontal arms stuck out on either of its sides, attached to tracks running from top to bottom. 

It looked like a man desperate for a hug, if men were silver apparatuses with rectangular displays on their chest. A logo on the side read Anatomical Analysis & Replication Scanner.

Bridge tossed the glove in a trash bin and waved Lenith over.

“R-remove your shoes, p-please.”

The metallic platform was cold under Lenith’s bare feet. Bridge adjusted the arms accordingly until hugging around her back. Lines of text scrolled down the display—letters and numbers all streaming like water over rocks. She wondered if this was the story of her blood, analyzed and dissected.

“Are the arms t-too close?” Bridge asked.

“No, they’re fine,” Lenith said idly. The data enamored her.

Runes kept scrolling.

The insides of the hugging arms were laced with black, glossy grooves. Bridge pressed a few buttons on the AARS’s side. 

The arms locked together. Lenith jumped. Humming and ticking along the rails, the arms rose around Lenith’s auburn mop, and then down to her heels. A figure formed beside the endless scroll of text on the screen. It was her in abstract. Her weight, height, bone density, heart rate, blood pressure, everything appeared one at a time.

“How is this possible?” Lenith mumbled. She had no clue if most of the numbers were correct, but who was she to assume otherwise?

“I d-don’t know. I c-came to the city a few cycles ago,” Bridge said over the AARS’s low growl.

“And now you’re already working here?”

“K-kind of. I… I—they p-put me in a p-program because I w-was good with medicine. Th-they called me ‘p-proficient.’” Her ruddy smile returned.

“Huh.”

The mechanical arms returned to her mid-back and split away. Lenith broke from her amazement. Bridge giggled.

Returning to the desk, the chair’s high back once more dwarfed Bridge. She scooted it and herself closer with great effort and pressed a button on the long, bowed armrest that rose her higher. An oversized green coat hung off the back of the chair, threatening to fall away. It had been patched and sewn several times. A fragment of another terminated past, perhaps.

Lenith cleared her throat and eyed the AARS with suspicion from afar, safely in her much smaller chair. It had stopped humming. The lines of indecipherable information were gone, permanently implanted into some knowledge bank beyond her reach.

Bridge’s bottom lip jutted out, eyes wide, brows downcast, as she once more struggled with her slate. A frustrated sigh escaped her.

“Do you like it here? More than the Gray Area, I mean. Do you feel safer?” Lenith asked. Still, she glared at the machine.

“I think so,” Bridge said after a pause. “I d-don’t have to be afraid of d-dying anymore.”

Lenith hummed an agreement, though she had a hard time accepting such a thought and shuddered with how close her hum had been to the machine’s song.

“I h-have a few questions for you.”

At last, she turned back to Bridge. A brief prickle of purple fragments spilled across the wall, like she had stared at something bright and false for too long. She blinked until it vanished.

Bridge bit down harder on her lip and pushed the slate toward Lenith. Her cheeks had turned rubicund.

“Is everything okay?” Lenith took the slate and put it on her lap.

Bridge bowed her head and whispered “Y-yeah. It’s easier t-to let you do it.”

The questions were stated plainly, along with dropdowns and forms for answers to the side. Personal history: Powder/Substance abuse, Excessiveness, Hallucinations, Aggression, Mental illness, Relative Dissociation. She checked ‘No’ for each, hovered over the last two a tad too long for comfort, and carried on. As for Family History, she chose ‘Yes’ for all but the last.

‘Has the patient engaged in sexual intercourse?’ Lenith tapped ‘Yes.’

‘Has the patient engaged in sexual intercourse with Impurities?’

“Impurities?” Lenith asked.

Bridge hopped to her feet and came over, staring at the question with a blank face. She dashed out of the room after muttering the word for memory. Returning, she looked reassured and sad.

“P-people from Glinkadia or Wyloworth, o-or if their f-family is. D-descendants. Like m-me. D-doctor Redon said I’m a Double Impurity.”

Ξ