Page 42 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Some of the doors to individual rooms were closed, little green lights lit above them to signal their occupation. I considered sticking my head inside, and decided against it. I wanted to find Sarah. It wasn’t a need, not yet, and until it became more pressing, I wasn’t going to invade the privacy of perfectly innocent cryptids who probably didn’t expect a ghostly guest in their hospital beds.

Halfway down the hall, I finally heard voices. I moved toward them, turning down a smaller hall and into an antechamber occupied by half a dozen people in hospital scrubs. Dr. Morrow was easy to spot, his broad white wings standing out even among a cluster of nonhumans. He was holding a clipboard, as he so often was, and looked unsettled in a way I wasn’t accustomed to, the small white feathers that topped his head in place of hair beginning to rise up like a cockatiel’s crest.

“We can’t remove her,” he said, to the others. “It would be unsafe to approach her physically in her current condition.”

“What do you want us to do, then?” asked a dark-skinned woman in nursing scrubs. There was a faint, almost indiscernible pattern of scales on the skin of her arms, marking her as a female wadjet. They make fabulous medical professionals, being immune to most mammalian diseases and the majority of known toxins.

“Hope she leaves when she realizes visiting hours are over?” he suggested, wearily.

The other Caladrius in the room, a smaller woman whose wingspan was nonetheless greater than she was tall, straightened as she spotted me. “Excuse me,” she called. “This is a staff meeting. You can’t be in here.”

All of them turned to look at me, and Dr. Morrow’s expression softened when he realized who I was. “Mary Dunlavy, as I live and breathe,” he said.

“Dr. Felix Morrow, as I do neither,” I replied. “Can I safely assume that all this fuss is about Sarah?”

He blinked. “That’s a fairly specific guess.”

“I’m here because I was trying to find her, and I generally can’t pop in precisely on family members who aren’t actively looking for me,” I said. “So when a search for Sarah drops me in your hospital, and I find half the staff muttering in a private area about a visitor you can’t safely approach, well. I don’t think it’s much of a leap to go from there to ‘I found her.’”

“She showed up a little while ago, and went straight to her friend. When one of our head nurses tried to inform her that visiting hours were over, she—the nurse—went to sleep and hasn’t woken since.”

“We poured water on her,” said the wadjet. “Nothing.”

“Tell me where she is,” I said, with a shrug. “I’ll get her to stop knocking out your staff.”

“Down that hall, third door on the left,” said the female Caladrius, pointing. Dr. Morrow shot her a sharp look. She lifted her wings in what looked like the avian equivalent of a shrug. “What? We can’t have an out-of-control cuckoo rampaging around the facility, even if sheisa friend of the Price family, and even if her rampage is extraordinarily subdued. We need to be able to move through our workplace with confidence.”

“She’s with a patient,” said Dr. Morrow—a fragile protest, and one which she ignored.

“If you can get her to talk to you, please ask her to let Nurse Michelle wake up before she leaves? She’s supposed to be taking the evening shift, and I don’t have the staff to cover for her if she’s unavailable.”

“Got it,” I said, with a quick salute, before I took off down the indicated hall.

The third door on the left was labeledLONG-TERM CARE, which didn’t bode terribly well, and there was a gray-skinned bogeyman woman in scrubs asleep on the floor outside. I stepped over the woman and through the door, into the room on the other side.

It was small and square, windowless, dominated by the large ergonomic hospital bed in the middle of the floor. A figure was stretched out there, unconscious under white sheets, connected to multiple machines and monitors. They beeped and measured away, charting everything but a heartbeat.

Because Mark didn’t have one. No cuckoo does. They’re highly evolved insects, more closely related to wasps than they are to any sort of mammal, and the antifreeze-like hydrolymph they have in place of blood moves through decentralized vascular pulses. I don’t know how they keep it oxygenated, but they apparently do a pretty good job of it, since his displayed blood oxygen level was in the high nineties. His eyes were closed, making his shaggy black hair the closest thing he had to a splash of color. Like all cuckoos, he was pale; unlike most cuckoos, he was pale enough to have faded all the way to the shade of bleached bone, barely distinguishable from the dead.

Sarah was sitting next to the bed on a rolling stool she had pulled over for that purpose, her head down on her folded arms. I took a step toward her.

“You should stop,” she said, voice dull, without lifting her head. “I wouldn’t come any closer.”

“I’m dead, Sarah,” I said. “You said it yourself: ghost thoughts are hard to grab hold of. I don’t think you can hurt me, whether on purpose or by accident.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I stopped where I was. “I don’t know. But I know you’re one of my kids, and you’re hurting, so I’m going to take the risk either way. You don’t scare me. I love you too much for that.”

She finally lifted her head. There were tear tracks on her cheeks, but her eyes were clear, not bloodshot in the least. Without blood, her capillaries might burst, but it would never show when they did. “Jane’s dead,” she said, voice almost devoid of inflection.

I nodded, risking another step forward. “I know.”

“Jane’s dead, and they’re going to take her body back to Portland, and Elsie’s going to grieve because she’s lost her mother, andI don’tknow what Artie’s going to do.” Her voice was low and urgent, pitched like she was trying to tell me something terribly important but didn’t know precisely how.

I frowned. “He’s going to grieve.”

“Is he?Canhe? I built him from memories and experiences that happened outside him, and rewrote them so they would feel like they were his own. But they didn’t include grief. They didn’t include him learning to understand what death was. I took him away from his family, from his mother, and now she’s gone, and I don’t even know if he’ll be able to mourn for her.”

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