Page 126 of Even Robots Die
“He’ll wake up in six-to-eight hours with the cocktail of medicine I sent through his blood system. Try not to jostle him too much in the meantime if you can. He shouldn’t need any medicine when he wakes up, but if his head is painful I’ve left painkillers on the desk. I tried not to shave his whole head before opening, we glued some hair on top of his head. It might itch for a little while, but I’d advise for him to keep his hair that way another couple of hours once he wakes up or there is a risk of tugging on the healing skin while it’s still too fresh and that the scar around his head becomes swollen. I tried to cut directly on top of the other scar so as not to make an extra one, which means it’ll be sensitive for a little longer. There is a balm near the painkillers that needs to be applied every other hour for a couple days so that it reduces the scar. It is only aesthetic, not using it won’t make him heal slower,” she pauses after that last part as if she knows we probably won’t have time to apply the balm over the next few days. I have to remind myself that she’s human and highly intelligent. She probably put two and two together when we rushed her here. She knows and she’s trying to reassure me in her own ways.
“If anything happens while he sleeps, call on my personal holo, not the hospital’s, and I’ll come back as fast I can. I don’t see any reason it would happen, but just in case …” she sighs at my wide eyes.
I think I remember everything she just said, but I could be wrong. I don’t think the little time I slept in Brice’s arms earlier was enough to compensate for the lack of sleep of the past few days.
“I left you a note on the desk with the painkillers and the balm. Everything is on there, my holo number included,” she tells me, and I feel like I can breathe again for the first time since she started explaining everything I need—or don’t need—to do for Brice.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and from the way her eyes are scrutinizing me, she knows my thanks are for more than just the note she left for me.
She grabs her bag from where she dropped it on the ground when she came to talk to me.
“I’ll send him my bill,” she says before walking away.
Before she arrives at the end of the corridor, she stops and turns my way.
“By the way, if someday you decide your abilities can be used for something other than building weapons, give me a call. I’m pretty sure we could cure a lot of mental illnesses with a little change here and there in your programming.”
And then she disappears around the corner and I’m left speechless at Brice’s door.
72
Brice
When I wake up, my head is pounding but I don’t care.
Because wrapped against my side is Florentine, sleeping with her head on my chest.
I want to wake up like this every morning for the rest of my life—minus the headache, obviously.
I have no idea what time it is; all I know is that I don’t see any light around us. It must be the middle of the night and I try to remember what the doctor told me about my recovery. I’m supposed to sleep—more than I’m used to—and the medicine she gave me should have made it so.
I have a feeling that it didn't completely work.
If I had slept enough, the sun should be starting to rise already since we started the surgery later than anticipated.
I don’t know why I’m awake already.
I hear a buzzing sound on the small table right next to the head of the hospital bed I’ve been sleeping in. The bed is small, but Florentine still managed to slip under the sheet with me. I’m pretty sure she could fall at any moment, though, so I wrap my left arm around her as I fumble blindly for the holo buzzingon the table.
It’s mine. I had to remove it for the surgery, hence why I heard it and not felt it.
I look at the time. 2:11 am.
Who would be awake at that time?
I turn the volume to the minimum so as not to wake up Florentine—she’s barely slept since she started the preparations and she needs to rest—and listen to the message that woke me up.
It’s from Cassiopé.
“Dad, someone just delivered a package for Florentine. They refused to leave unless I opened it. It’s awful. It’s a finger. I think it’s a pinky from what I managed to see before Léandre stored the box away. The note that came with it says it’s from her father and that if she doesn’t come to exchange herself for him in twelve hours they’ll send something else.”
The message was sent three minutes ago and Cassiopé was oddly calm but I shouldn’t be surprised; she was very much a book worm before I got kidnapped by the birds, but while I was in a coma, she decided to embrace the rage they had fanned inside of her and went to kill the source of all of her problems.
It didn’t kill all of our problems, though, or else I wouldn’t be here, in Blois, listening to a message about the woman I love needing to give herself away to save her—piece of shit—father.
She’s going to hate herself. I know it. She’s going to think it’s her fault if the birds have started to send pieces of her father, that she shouldn’t have slept and that they should already have made the trade, even though she knows the device she attached to her armored wings can only function under the sunlight.
She might hate me, too. We had three days to prepare and somehow we forgot that the first messenger came in the middle of the night and that meant we would lose a full night due to her need for the sun.
