Broken Mirror Read Free Page B

brought him to a small examination room and asked for his name and MeshID, entered them on a type-pad, and then examined and treated his eye. She left the room and shut the door.
    Victor looked down at his hands. Specks of dried blood hid under a thumbnail. He picked at it with another nail, but tiny red stains remained in the hard-to-reach crevice. He scratched again, deeper. New blood seeped from the worn-away skin. Pain flared as sparks from his fingers. He watched them bloom with each painful dig: beautiful, multicolored, ephemeral things, like confetti aflame. They were his secret magic tricks and worth the pain they cost.
    He sat in the room for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to come and tell him what a bad person he was for hurting Alik. If he had a MeshBit, he could call his parents, but his fa had refused to purchase one. They were pieces of Euro-fascist tech, according to his fa, that kept nations in the American Union from reaching their full potential. Ma never let Fa’s assertions stand, and always countered that the benefits of Mesh access outweighed any nebulous, jingoistic, proto-nationalist-revivalist nonsense, as she called his fa’s rationale. Victor didn’t know much about politics; he just wished he could call his parents, though the school might have already called them. Victor listened for them through the door.
    At one point, footsteps tromped closer, and someone knocked. A scowling man came in wearing a starched canvas coat adorned with the snake-and-staff logo surrounded by a circle. His name tag identified him as Dr. Rularian. He held Victor’s chin with one hand, which reeked of bleach. “Open your mouth,” he instructed. He roughly swabbed the inside of Victor’s cheek. Just as abruptly as he’d entered, the doctor left the room, shutting the door behind him.
    Victor was alone again.
    Alik would probably get many visitors during his recuperation. Well-wishers would stream into the hospital with their flowers, cards, and packages. Balloons would float around Alik’s bed, holding vigil until he woke. If he woke.
    No one would care about Victor if he’d been the one so badly hurt. He’d been in fights before, never voluntarily, and he usually lost. Now he would be known at school as vicious and dangerous in addition to strange and “problematic,” as he’d once heard a teacher call him. The one time he won a fight was worse than all the times he’d lost.
    Dr. Rularian returned. “Come with me,” he said.
    Victor followed him to a room packed with electronics. Two technicians —always two— stood by, men in their mid-twenties wearing translucent gel surgical masks and canvas hats. The burlier of the two unbuttoned Victor’s shirt, pushed him into a reclining synthleather seat, and stuck small sensors on his forehead, neck, chest, inner elbows, and wrists. The other technician had a flat face as if he had no nose at all beneath his mask, and his skin looked perfectly smooth, like plastic.
    “I’m going to remove your pants,” the flat-faced one said.
    Victor started to tear off the sensors. The burly technician with unblinking lizard-like eyes placed a firm hand on his chest. “Relax,” he said, “you’re safe here.”
    Victor let his head fall back into the cushioned headrest. “You could have just asked me to undress,” he said.
    The flat-faced technician undid Victor’s belt buckle and tugged his pants down to his ankles. Victor felt the smooth sensors’ cool metal against his inner thighs and panicked again, gripping the hems of his boxers to hold them up.
    “Hold still, please,” the doctor said in a low voice. “You can keep your underwear on.”
    The flat-faced technician placed a helmet-shaped device on Victor’s head while Lizard-Eyes tapped on a type-pad. Victor gripped the arms of the chair, feeling a strange buzz course through his skin.
    The doctor activated a control, and Victor’s view of the room disappeared, blacked out by the helmet’s visor.