The Brokenhearted

by Amelia Kahaney

  Ford eyes me curiously, but shakes his head. “Just you.”

  “I . . . the reason I was on that bridge so late is because my boyfriend was kidnapped and I was going for help.”

  “Sorry.” Ford lowers his head. “About everything. Really.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Anthem,” Jax jumps in, her fingers closing around mine, pumping them up and down a little too enthusiastically. “Ford used to be a boxer before he got on the wrong side of a few fights. It may have made him into the reckless idiot he is today. He didn’t tell me he was responsible for your death until later. I was furious when—”

  “My death?” I look down at my paper gown and notice something black and wormlike swimming beneath it, near the center of my chest. I start to lift the hospital gown, but Ford lifts my chin up, his eyes carrying a warning.

  “Better not look just yet.”

  “Why not?” I manage, my voice scraping my throat. Again I notice the tight, tingly hum in my chest, the whirring sensation.

  Jax interrupts. “The river was ice-cold. Your heart stopped. Ford tried mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late. You were . . . clinically dead. Until we brought you back, of course.”

  “Brought me back how?” I whisper, putting a hand onto the metal table to steady myself. The lab animals. The scalpels. The—oh, God. The walls. The blood spattered across them. I begin to shake so violently that my body rustles the paper on the gurney.

  “Maybe you should lie back down for a minute?” Jax says, her lips pursed with concern. She presses two fingers against her wrist, on top of the heart tattoo. “You’re still extremely weak. I’ll need to keep you for observation for at least a couple more days—”

  “I’m fine,” I lie, my throat constricting, my larynx strangled by a crushing fist of dread. “Just tell me what you did.”

  Jax nods. “I dabble in a lot of different sciences. Chemistry, biology, genetics, a bit of physics—” She titters nervously. “I was actually the youngest professor ever hired in the bioengineering department of Bedlam University, before a couple of experiments got away from me and they raided my lab.” Her expression grows stormy.

  “Total mad scientist, in other words,” Ford interrupts. “She’s wanted by the Feds, which is why she never leaves this lab. I do her errands, buy her equipment, that kind of thing.”

  Jax scowls and perches on a rolling metal stool, her face now level with mine. “Yes, Ford, I don’t know what I’d do without you. But enough about me, right?” More nervous laughter spills from her mouth, and she stops abruptly, growing serious again. “After three minutes without a heartbeat, a person is pronounced clinically dead. Your heart stopped for approximately forty minutes, but because of the lake, you were also experiencing hypothermia, which is very good for a dead person. The river may have saved your life every bit as much as the surgery.”

  Surgery. I feel bile rise in my throat and swallow it down. “I hooked you up to the ventilator for a while.” Jax waves her hand toward a huge, hulking machine with accordions encased in glass tubing above six rusty dials. “But your heart refused to restart on its own. So I intervened.”

  “You intervened,” I repeat dumbly.

  “See those sweet little guys?” Jax points to the corner of the room. I force myself to look at the table with the cages, where the rats are frantically racing on their creaky wheels. “Maybe we should go take a closer look at them, if you think you’re strong enough to get there.”

  I nod, sliding slowly off the metal table and following Jax and Ford toward the cages, careful not to move too far from the IV pole still dripping pink fluid into my veins. We stand side by side and watch them run. They’re moving so fast in their exercise wheel that their feet are just a white blur.

  “About a year ago, I used recombinant technology to culture stem cells from a hummingbird and grow a powerful chimeric heart. These little speed demons each have one.”

  I stare at the furry blurs of motion, transfixed by their speed. Their little legs move as rapidly as hummingbird wings. “Chimeric? As in a chimera?” I think back to Greek mythology and flash on the sculpture in our foyer, his eagle head, his lion body. “Like a griffin?”

  “Like a griffin, yes . . . in that their hearts are formed from a combination of more than one species.”

  “And . . . how does that relate to me?”

  Jax turns to me, her expression delighted. “Well, now you have one, too.”

  I watch her mouth move as she goes on excitedly, spirals of her silver hair bouncing as she talks, her eyes dancing. But all I hear is the whirring, louder now that I know its terrifying source. So loud it’s thudding inside my head. I start to feel faint, the room stretching out like a funhouse mirror.

  “Just like a hummingbird’s,” she’s saying, “your chimeric heart beats ten times per second. It’s working so hard and so fast that it appears to have already reversed all the effects of hypothermia. Lucky, because I didn’t want to have to amputate your legs. . . .”

  My eyes move back to the rat cage. The rats appear to speed up, their bodies almost flying in their wheel. I’m not sure if it’s because of their unnatural speed or my blurred vision. I put a hand to my chest, resting it lightly on top of the jagged line Ford warned me against examining. Knotted wires poke through the hospital gown. Stitches.

  Picturing it, the edges of my vision turn black. My legs start to give out. I stagger back to the gurney and grab hold of it. Inside me, there’s that fluttery sensation again, only now I know its source. A freakish hummingbird heart, beating ten times faster than my old one. Racing at 600 beats per minute. Pushing the blood through my veins faster than any human heart could, or should. Pumping hard and fast until the day it burns itself out.

  “My clothes,” I mumble, my eyes flicking across Ford’s face before I squeeze them shut against the dizzy whirling of the room. “I’m cold.”

  He nods, springing toward the door. “I bought some stuff for you. I’ll grab it.”

  “How long will I live?” I whisper frantically to Jax the moment Ford leaves the room.

  “If you’re very careful to resist torpor, you’ll live to a hundred, maybe longer.”

  “If I resist what?”

  “Think of your heart as like an engine. If a car sits in the garage for too many days, the engine will cease. Your heart is the same way. Your blood flow will slow if you’re too still for too long, or if you deprive it of fuel. This slowing of the system is called torpor, and it can kill you if you aren’t careful.”

  “What about when I sleep?”

  Jax shrugs. “We’ll observe you over the next few days and see how the heart responds to eight hours of REM state. After that, we’ll know more.”

  But I don’t have a few days, I want to scream. All I can think about is Gavin being dragged out the door by the kidnappers. If I’ve been here three days, I have less than forty-eight hours to get them their money.

  Jax taps the IV pole. “This is glucose. It’s been keeping your blood sugar steady. Once we disconnect you from the IV, you might find you’ll need to eat more often than you’re used to.”

  “I need to go home,” I say, my voice thick. “My parents . . .” I silently add, Gavin. Everything depends on getting that money to the kidnappers by tomorrow night. My stomach sinks as I stare at the rats trapped in their cage. Ford comes back, holding a carefully folded sweatshirt and workout pants with a pair of tube socks sitting on top. Under his arm are two shoeboxes. The tags are still on everything.

  “I had to guess your size,” he says apologetically. “I hope some of this fits.”

  I look at him, then at Jax. “Could I have some privacy?”

  “Of course,” they say in unison.

  Jax pauses in the doorway and turns around, her eyes tearing up. “Your recovery is truly astonishing, Anthem. If only this were legal, we would make history.” Her eye twitches as she leans into the room and continues. “Every scientist in the country would give their right arm to st
udy you in their lab. For now, it’s best that we keep this between us.”

  A shudder ripples through me at the thought of being studied, hooked up to wires for the rest of my life. I nod and force a weak smile as she backs out of the lab.

  Alone again, I grit my teeth and rip the IV out of my hand. It stings and burns at the same time, but I manage to swallow my scream. There’s a little blood, so I grab a roll of gauze from the metal table and wrap it around my hand, ripping it with my teeth and tying it in a sloppy knot. I slip into the workout pants, rolling the waistband so the bottoms don’t drag on the floor, and carefully untie the strings on my hospital gown. Nobody thought to find a bra, thank goodness. This is one of those times when it comes in handy not to really need one. I stop myself from looking closely at the black line of stitches and pull on the huge maroon sweatshirt, careful to avoid brushing it too roughly against my bare chest.

  After I lace up the sneakers, I slowly turn the door handle, peering out into what must be the main room of Jax’s lab. She’s bent over a Bunsen burner in the far corner, heating water in a large beaker, humming an aimless tune.

  I dry-heave a couple of times when I see the rest of the lab. Along each wall are dozens and dozens of animal cages, full of rats, rabbits, mice, and even a monkey, black and scrawny with a large tuft of white chest hair. My heart whirring, I begin to move quietly in the direction of the door. As it creaks open, I see Jax’s frizzy head whirl around from the corner of my eye. But by the time she makes it to the door, I’m already halfway down an alley. She won’t chase me too far, I realize as I gather speed. A fugitive can’t risk being seen.

  And then I’m running, running, running, a lab rat loosed from its cage.

  CHAPTER 12

  At first, I run slowly, nervous I’ll hurt myself so soon after major surgery. I stop for a moment behind a smoldering tire fire to gauge how I’m holding up physically. I should feel like collapsing, but I don’t. I feel energized. My muscles are warm and loose. I put a hand over my whirring chest. What was it Jax said about my heartbeat? Ten times per second? It’s so fast I can’t differentiate between the beats at all. It feels more like a vibration.

  I take off again, and with each block I’m pushing harder, daring myself to go faster. The longer I run, the more the tightness in my chest fades. Soon it’s nothing but an internal itch. My feet pound the trash-strewn streets of the South Side, my pace quickening until it feels as if my sneakers are barely touching the ground. The rhythm of my toes on the sidewalk, the blast of cool air in my lungs, the simple fact of being alive after everything that’s happened makes me feel that even with this . . . thing inside me, I’m still healthy and strong.

  Maybe I’m more than just healthy, I realize as I speed past a couple of ragged street kids on skateboards. They stop to watch me, their mouths hanging open.

  Concentrating on my newfound speed allows me to temporarily shove all the horrors of my back-alley operation into a tiny corner of my brain, slamming a door on the whole mess of it and locking it tight. The operation, I can block out. But Gavin—held in some dark room somewhere, suffering, at their mercy—fills my thoughts.

  After I run twenty more blocks in the empty dawn-saturated streets, I start focusing less about running away from the lab and more about running toward home. I have maybe forty-two hours to get the kidnappers their money. I know they won’t think twice about killing him if I don’t meet their demands.

  I turn right, then left, then right again, marking a zigzag course. When the skyscrapers of North Bedlam loom into view, I begin to run even faster. My arms pump through the cool air, my legs lunge higher and harder with every step—until I see a flash of blue in the street just behind me, keeping pace.

  I skid to a stop and instantly fold over, putting my hands on my knees and pretending to breathe harder than I really am, for the police cruiser’s benefit. It pulls up alongside me, and a bitter laugh escapes my lips. Now—when I don’t need them—they show up.

  My laughter dies as I catch my reflection in the smoked glass window. A rectangular swatch of gauze is stuck to my forehead, a blood spot the size of a grape seeping through it at my hairline. The gash from the birdman, I realize, shivering slightly. My hair is a wild red rat’s nest tumbling around my shoulders, but my cheeks are rosy and flushed.

  The window lowers halfway down, and the cop smiles at me. “Running from someone?”

  “Just out for a jog, officer.”

  “In this neighborhood. At five forty-five in the morning. Kind of risky, don’t you think?”

  “Well . . .” I start, not sure what I can say to make myself look like a reasonably sane person. The cop has two deep laugh lines on either side of his mouth and intelligent blue-gray eyes.

  “You’re right, it’s probably not the best idea,” I admit, my hands wandering nervously up to my bandage.

  “How about letting me drive you home,” the cop says. I look out at the sky over the Midland, now blazing orange and red as the sun rises behind the glass towers of Upper Bedlam. The tightness in my chest morphs into an ache.

  “Okay, officer.” I smile and open the door to the backseat, slipping inside the car.

  The bulletproof glass separating the front and back seats has a small door in it, which he opens so we can talk. “I’m Detective Marlowe.” Our eyes meet in the rearview, and he flashes me a professional, polite smile.

  “Thanks for the lift,” I say, craning my neck to get a glimpse of Fleet Tower in the near distance.

  “You’re the Fleet girl, aren’t you?” he asks casually. “A lot of people have been looking for you.”

  I stare into the rearview and take a breath before I answer, careful to keep my words and expressions as light and straightforward as his. “That’s me, yes.”

  “Mind telling me what happened?” His eyes flick from the road to the rearview, maintaining their neutral, patient gaze.

  I stare at the back of his neck for a minute, his light-brown hair buzzed close to the skin, neat and tidy under his blue police hat.

  “I’d love to, officer,” I say, pasting the bewildered, dazed expression of an amnesiac onto my face as I allow my eyes to meet his again in the rearview. “But the truth is, I can’t remember a thing.”

  Half an hour later, I’m seated alone at the kitchen table, my stomach in knots. I’ve already hugged my parents tightly while Detective Marlowe looked on. They finally sent him on his way, but before he left, he instructed them to take me in for questioning once I’ve had some rest. Once she’s got her memory back, he added, winking at me as if we both knew the truth about my amnesia.

  As my mother and father move toward the kitchen, I pull the sleeve of my too-big sweatshirt over my bandaged hand and hide it under the table. When they sit down on either side of me, the silence in the room is thick enough to slice.

  “We thought you were dead,” my mother says finally. I can tell she’s heavily sedated by the way she’s slurring her words. A single tear travels down each of her pallid cheeks. “This was our worst nightmare come true, Anthem. We’ve already lost—” Her voice breaks, and a sputtering cry of grief breaks through her narcotic haze. My father moves his chair next to hers and hugs her against his chest as she buries her face in his shirt, her body shaking with muffled sobs.

  “Since you’ve already lost one child,” I finish for her, an irrational swell of anger rising in my throat. Normally when my mother brings up Regina, all I can feel is guilt. But right now, I feel indignant. Even now, after all I’ve been through, I have to compete with my dead sister for center stage. It’s a competition I can never really win.

  “I’m sorry,” I say tightly. Sorry I’ve disappointed you. Sorry I’m not as perfect as I’ve led you to believe. I look away from her, not wanting to meet her blank sedated face. The clock on the oven says 6:21. Time is inexorably ticking by, the kidnappers’ deadline getting closer. I have to get them their money by midnight tomorrow. My father is keeping it together, his eyes red but dry, his v
oice steely. “What happened out there? I don’t believe for a second that you’ve got amnesia.”

  I swallow hard, trying to buy some time and collect my thoughts. If I open up the floodgates, I risk letting everything out. Not just the kidnapping but the attack, my deathly swim in the river, the operation. The best thing, I decide, is to tell them as little as possible and focus on the money.

  My mother pulls her head away from my father’s chest, her blond ponytail lumpy and askew on the side of her head. She looks so fragile and frayed, worse than I’ve seen her in years. Too fragile to find out her only living daughter is a medical experiment. I take a breath and cautiously try to explain what I can. “It sort of started the night of the Orphans’ Ball. Will and I—”

  “We’ve spoken with the Hansens and the Turks,” she interrupts. “We know Will broke up with you. And we know from Zahra that you’ve been seeing a boy from the South Side.”

  I sit back in my chair, stunned. It didn’t occur to me that they’d already know about Gavin. “I ended things with Will, actually, not that any of it matters now,” I say, my voice thick. The kidnapper’s bloody footprint on Gavin’s floor flashes through my mind, and I shudder in my chair.

  “We just don’t understand,” my mother starts. “Will was perfect for you—”

  “Enough, Leenie,” my father stops her. “We need to know what happened, and whatever it was has nothing to do with the Hansen boy.”

  “It was all my fault,” I begin, shaking off my mother’s comment about Will. “And I will never forgive myself for putting you both through this.” I take a deep breath and tell them about meeting Gavin. About sneaking out to his place, about the kidnappers in their horrible masks, about their demands. I leave out everything that happened after the criminals left, saying instead that they knocked me out and that a neighbor found me a day later, bandaged me, and helped me get back on my feet.

  My parents sit back, stunned and horrified. Their eyes meet and exchange a look of raw fury, then turn back at me.