Seraphina's Revenge: A Rebirth In The Apocalypse Novel

Chapter 199: Hello, Dr. Orhan

The overhead lights pressed a thin layer of light across the square room, the kind of light that never warmed anything and never really helped you to see anything either.

Sera stayed on the floor, her back to the plexiglass, and her knees drawn up so that her arms could loop loosely over them.

Across the corridor, Luci still lay curled in his own clear box, his paws tucked under his muzzle, and his chest rising slow and even. The sedatives clung to him like a second pelt. One ear twitched when a vent cycled, then settled again.

Footsteps approached, crisp and unhurried.

The rhythm reminded her of clinics, of clean halls and permission slips, of rooms where the sound of paper could make a body sit straighter. Keys clicked. A latch turned. A woman stepped into view with a clipboard angled across her forearm as if it were an extension of the bones there.

"Oh, you are awake," came the voice of a woman. It was soft and soothing, something that people would normally be attracted to... if they had a thing for snakes.

"Dr. Orhan," Sera greeted, tilting her head as if greeting a neighbor in an elevator. "It’s been a minute." She let her gaze travel, slow and unapologetic. "You look... older than I remember."

And Sera remembered every minute that they had met in their last life.

A very small wrinkle pinched the bridge of the woman’s nose. "I have never met you before in my life."

Her pen moved without looking at the page, a neat check mark placed where Sera could not see the label. "And you will stand when addressed."

Sera smiled at the other woman, but did not stand. "Oh," she replied, her eyes widened a fraction, the way people do when a memory skitters out of reach. "Must have been another life. My bad."

The pen paused for a single moment.

The lift of Orhan’s chin suggested that she was preparing for a debate—a choice between correcting Sera’s tone and inaction or moving on.

Apparently, she decided to move on.

"Vitals were stable through transport. The sedative held better than expected, given your body mass index and the suspected metabolic irregularities."

More ink went on to paper, and it wasn’t nearly as endearing as when Elias did it.

"You will answer any question I ask you. If you do not know the answer, you will say so. If you do not wish to answer, you will say so. Silence wastes time."

"You brought me here to save time?" Sera rested her temple against the plexiglass. The surface held no warmth for her to steal. "That is adorable."

"Mm." A small noncommittal sound, barely a breath. Orhan turned a page and began ticking through what might have been a script. "Name."

"You can read."

"Name."

"Sera."

"Full name."

"If I tell you, will it change the way you spell it?" She let a tiny smile touch one corner of her mouth. "You will write it wrong anyway. People always do."

Another check appeared. Orhan did not look up. "Age."

"Old enough to be a problem."

"Menstrual history."

"Try another one."

"Sexual history."

"You are truly determined to make this awkward."

This time, there was a longer pause.

Dr. Orhan lifted her gaze slowly, as if she had been waiting for a fixed moment to do it.

Her eyes were not cruel. Cruelty requires attention and care. These eyes held only patience forged in other rooms where she was forced to play nice. "You believe you are in control here."

"I believe I am bored," Sera returned, her voice calm and even. "If you want to move this along, perhaps you skip to the part where you tell me why I am still breathing."

Luci’s tail thumped once against the floor—no more than a muscle choosing life—but the sound pulled Sera’s glance sideways for a heartbeat.

His eyes did not open. His breath stayed slow. Her own lungs eased a thread at the sight.

"You are breathing," Dr. Orhan went on, "because the government of this country values data. You are not unique, despite what I’m sure you tell yourself."

The pen resumed its march, scratching across the paper. "You are a data point. A set of sequences worth exploring. A body with traits we can measure."

"You are trying very hard not to say experiment."

"It is the correct word."

Sera let the silence lean between them, then shifted just enough so the overhead light broke in the plexiglass into a long white ladder across Dr. Orhan’s coat.

She watched the woman’s mouth for a sign of thirst or sleep or impatience and found none.

There was only the faint, clipped efficiency of someone who had spent a long time asking bodies for answers and then cutting the answers out when the words did not suffice.

The creature inside her listened without blinking. It did not push. It did not pace. It took the shape of her ribs and rested there the way a blade rests in its sheath—edge quiet, promise intact.

Another set of footsteps sounded behind Dr. Orhan—heavier, familiar, carrying a cadence Sera’s muscles recognized before her mind did.

The air in her chest changed temperature without actually warming. She did not stand, but she did sit taller as the second figure stepped into view.

Dr. Alaric Davis stopped two paces short of the cell and forgot to breathe for a count of three.

The lines around his mouth pulled into something like shock, then into something like relief, then into a tidy composure that looked a lot like a mask he had worn for years.

"You’re alive," spilled out before he could reorder it into something clinical.

His eyes found her face the way a man finds the horizon after months underground.

"I thought—" He cut the sentence and let it die. He looked over his shoulder as if to confirm the corridor was empty, returned his attention, and let a restrained smile lift the corner of his mouth. "You look well."

The creature did not stir. Sera did not move. She let that almost-smile run through her like a current and waited for it to break apart on the rocks.

"I’m great, Dad," she sighed, closing her eyes for a quick second. She lifted her hands and made a small show of her cuffs not existing, of her freedom to gesture within a box that ended twelve inches from her knuckles. "When am I getting out of this cage?"

"You’re not."

There was no heat to his voice. No whisper of an apology. No echo of the relief from a breath ago.

The two words fell clean and flat, as if he had said them to students in a lecture hall for a decade and could not imagine why they would land any other way now.

Something in her throat tightened without choking. Sera breathed through it once and watched him through the brightness that comes when the body tries to decide whether to fight or sleep.

Dr. Orhan checked the time on her watch and sketched a note across the bottom of the page. "Welcome, Dr. Davis. Now that you are here, we can proceed. I will require your confirmation of protocol seventeen and authorization to begin the first tier of extractions."

"Later," Dr. Davis, Sera’s adoptive father, replied without looking at her. "Two minutes." He stepped closer to the plexiglass and stopped when his shoulder aligned with the camera’s blind corner—a habit he probably did not know he had. "Seraphina."

She looked at him and let her expression hold no shape he could read.

"I looked for you," he went on, voice low enough that the microphone above the door would struggle. "After the flood. After the ice. I found nothing. I told myself that meant you had made it somewhere better."