Usually, he’d tell himself not to overthink it. Nurses are trained not to get attached. Lian isn’t heartless. She couldn’t be.
But her smile reappears too quickly.
“So anyway, Divya said we should go tomorrow—”
Rafael isn’t listening.
His attention locks on a doctor hurrying down the corridor, medkit in her hand.
Suddenly, that familiar sight snaps Rafael back to Shreveporton that first night.
Echo lies motionless on the holo billiard table. Kane looms over, demanding Rafeal save his lieutenant. The others watch in silence.
They never treated injury as routine. They never spoke of the dead in numbers.
Here, Mrs. Gambo is another statistic, a problem. Even to his own coworkers.
Bitterness rises in his throat, hand tightening around the chair arm.
Have they always been this numb? Or was Rafael too comfortable to notice?
He glances at Lian, still not facing him. “Well,” she says lightly, “guess we don’t have to worry about 2166 today either. Mr. Brown was dismissed.”
The name brings the patient’s face to mind. A gray-haired man in his late fifties with an infected leg. He was a Boatwright local who worked at Lux Systems, if he remembers right.
“Really?” He scrolls through the patient records. “What happened? I don’t see an update on my end yet.”
“Apparently, he couldn’t afford the alpha-gen limb yet, and the beta model in his size is out of stock.” Lian shrugs and looks back. “Why so shocked?” Her brow lifts. “He was a slum dweller. You know how they are—always looking for a handout and a free night in Midtown. I’m surprised he lasted this long.”
Slum dweller.
Did Lian always call them that? What about the others? He’s not sure. Or did he just decide not to hear it?
His hand curls into a fist. This isn’t like the mindless night at the club with his friends, or when a doctor scolds him fora “mistake” they ordered. He could chalk those up to people coping or being stressed.
This—this is different.
Lian, his best friend of six years, is reducing human beings to an address.
The very ones she knows nothing about, the ones defending their neighborhood like Echo, Wren, Viper, Coda, Pixie—and Kane, the man he loves.
She’s insulting them all.
The Code Blue alert stops pulsing, drawing Rafael’s focus.
Dread coils through him. He opens Mrs. Gambo’s chart. A new entry has appeared beside her name: death recorded. Cerebral hemorrhage secondary to cyberoptic implant overload.
Rafael inhales sharply.
Another life lost. All because she was promised a better life by VitaCorp’s marketing, exactly like his dad.
“Raffy, you okay? What’s going on?” Lian asks. When he looks over, she stands behind him, arms crossed and forehead creased.
“I—I don’t know,” he says, which seems a lot safer than voicing the gravity of this loss.
She leans in to examine his screens. “Ah, I see.” Lian pats his shoulder. “Sorry, she seemed nice.”
That’s all she offers before walking back to her station, where she surprisingly remains silent.