ARC10

Chapter 10.4

I don't need him here, but I'm going to borrow his strength, just for a little while.

The Maroon Coat in front doesn't lose focus from his device when we enter. He's one I've never seen before, with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a coat much too baggy for his body. He stands behind a desk and taps rapidly into his PAHLM.

"Captain Lorn?" His eyes never leave the screen as he continues tapping.

Without a word, I nod my head.

"And . . . you are?" The Maroon Coat looks over the rim of his frames and points his stylus at Dean's chest.

"Captain Dean Freyer." Dean crosses his arms. "The father."

The Coat chuckles once like a hiccup. "Captain, we don't need you here anymore, you're free to go."

"I want to be here anyway."

He looks to his PAHLM, back at Dean, back to his PAHLM, then at me. He scowls at both of us.

"All right then. Follow me, please."

We trudge through a bleach-drenched corridor and into a series of rooms I hadn't registered before. Each door has a small, rectangular window on the front. Women in various stages of pregnancy occupy the rooms we pass. They lie on the singular beds the same hue as rotting oranges. The Coat leads us to the far end of the hall to an open door.

"Have a seat." He waves his arm over in the general direction of the bed while digging through his pocket.

The plastic is cold. It chills the back of my thighs, even through my stiff-as-fiberglass fatigues.

The Maroon Coat initiates the process with mechanical precision from the practice from a million mothers before me. He takes my wrist in his hand and shoves my sleeve to my bicep, exposing my skin to the prickly air. He wipes the bend of my inner elbow and stabs me with a syringe drawing blood into its empty bank like the burst of a sneeze. I barely flinch, but, honestly, that shit hurts.

He pulls out a machine from the back of one of the desks in the room and drops the little vial of blood through the tube at the top.

Dean stands like a sentinel guard beside me, not moving, not making a sound, not trying to hold my hand or do any of the other mushy crap I thought he would've tried by now.

"Well, that's not right," the Coat says as the results flash on the screen. "One more time." He fishes around his pocket for another syringe and stabs me in the forearm again before I have a chance to react.

"Ouch!" I say this time out of shock.

"What's wrong?" Dean asks the kid in maroon.

The Coat drops the tube into the machine again and drums his finger on its bulky sides a few times before a faint alert sounds and confusion mars his face again.

"This device hasn't been working right. Give me a second." He pulls the door and exits the room only to return moments later with an identical machine.

"One last time, Captain Lorn. Let's try the other arm."

I hold out my left arm this time, and he stabs it again with the syringe. My blood spills into the empty tube, and he rushes it to the open mouth of the little machine.

Confusion.

"It seems, Captain Lorn, that you are not pregnant."

The room falls silent. Next to me, Dean slumps forward.

"How is that possible?" I prod. "I thought you guys had a hundred-percent success rate." My anger and my relief build together slowly.

"Oh, we do. Every once in a while, it takes more than one attempt, so this isn't too irregular. Please wait here while I bring in the fertility specialist." His maroon coat barely follows him out as the door slams shut behind him.