novelraw Chapter 207: Who’s Next?
Chapter 207: Who’s Next?
Elias looked around the room as he forced himself to relax another notch.
His baselines were normal.
Nothing to see here.
Keep walking.
A nurse in a different cut of scrubs rolled in a cart with labeled vacutainers and a portable centrifuge.
Endocrine draw timed off the treadmill. ACTH stim pending. He could have listed the whole protocol for them and spelled out what they’d miss.
He didn’t.
The nurse tied a new tourniquet with careful hands.
"Palpable cords?" she asked herself out loud as she found a line. "Good veins."
"Lucky me," Elias returned, dry.
She tilted her head like she wasn’t sure she’d heard humor. The needle slid; the tube filled; the centrifuge whirred. He watched the gel barrier form. He’d watched too many of these not to.
They moved him again.
Ultrasound.
Gel warm from a bottle warmer.
Wand across abdomen, the indifferent sound of a machine resourcefully peering.
The tech avoided bones, chased organs, checked sizes, flows, noted nothing. He catalogued her pattern. Inferior vena cava collapsed well with respiration. Good intravascular volume. Liverspan within normal limits. Spleen not enlarged. Kidneys clean. No stones. No free fluid. The kind of scan you could pin to a teaching board under healthy and invite first-years to breathe.
Dr. Orhan’s pen paused once. "No old surgicals?"
"No," Elias answered.
"Scars present," she countered.
"Not from what you just asked," he replied, studying her like she was looking at him.
Her mouth tightened by a millimeter. "Tissue," she directed.
They didn’t take him back to the chair.
Instead, they brought the chair to him. A small tray unfolded from the wall. Instruments lay in a tidy fan—punch, curette, swabs, lidocaine, drape.
The nurse shook a vial, flicked the bubble out of the neck, capped the syringe with the careful cap you only learned after too many sticks.
"Local," she told him. "Small shave biopsy. You’ll feel pressure."
He let his gaze stay on the ceiling while the needle slipped intradermal and raised the familiar blister.
The sting faded almost immediately.
He kept it human; he let the lidocaine work at a normal pace in his body instead of burning off like sugar.
The circular blade pressed, twisted, lifted. Blood welled.
The nurse blotted with gauze once, twice. He didn’t need to look to know the edges were already knitting when she reached for the second piece of gauze.
He invited a little bleed with his breath anyway. Don’t show them that trick.
"Good sample," the nurse decided. "Another site?"
"Three total," Orhan instructed. "Different dermatomes."
He gave them three.
Let the second bleed a fraction more so the first didn’t look like an anomaly. Let the third hold a droplet on the surface so the nurse would feel useful pressing it away.
When she placed the adhesive, he did not heal it off. He left the tape in place like a man who trusted bandages.
The guard shifted at the door with a small squeak from a boot that had not been oiled recently.
Elias filed the sound in the same drawer as everything else. Oil, storage, guard station likely two turns back, second door on the left—the one with the worn mat.
"Urine," Dr. Orhan added, almost bored. "Saliva. Hair."
The kit arrived as if she’d conjured it.
He gave them what they wanted without dignity and without commentary.
He knew what these samples were worth when you were building a map of a body. He also knew he could salt that map later if he had to—too much hydration, altered diurnal pattern, little lies in plain sight.
They finished with a mouth swab he pretended to resent.
The tech scraped his inner cheek like she meant to take more than cells, sealed the tube with the pop of a well-seated cap, labeled it with the neat handwriting of someone who wanted to be taken seriously.
"Done," she announced to the room.
"Phase one complete," Dr. Orhan confirmed, flipping a page on her clipboard. Her pen paused. "Not impressive."
Dr. Davis didn’t rise to that.
He watched Elias the way he might have watched a specimen settle to room temperature.
Elias eyed the tray, the placement of each instrument, the way the shadow of the wand arm fell across the floor. "You’re missing something," he offered, tone mild. "In your panels. You won’t see it with the assays you’re using."
Dr. Orhan finally looked at him in full, like he’d coughed at a funeral. "Enlighten me."
"You’ll try to quantify the way bodies fight back," he replied. "You’ll find markers that look like infection and inflammation and call them aberrant. They aren’t. You’re measuring a system you don’t have a word for yet."
The tech at the console glanced between them, uneasy like a dog at the edge of an argument.
"Return him," Dr. Orhan instructed the guards, voice flat again. "Schedule nerve block trials for afternoon. Double dosage range."
The taller guard lifted the strap from the table.
Elias slid off, his joints and movement smooth, his breath steady.
Gel dried on his skin in faint tacky patches. He left it. It made him smell like everyone else in here—cleaner, plastic, ghosted citrus.
The corridor received him again.
Lights hummed. A rolling cart clinked behind a half-closed door as someone restocked needles. He caught a glimpse through a side pane—another cell, not his men. Empty.
The next two, opaque privacy film frosted the glass.
Behind one, the shape of a body moved, low and broad. Lachlan? The gait fit. A guard’s shadow crossed and the opacity deepened as the door sealed.
They turned the corner and the cold grew teeth for one breath before settling back to a bite you could live with. His door waited—8×8, plexi, the little tray slot, the floor scored in one corner where someone had kicked too often.
Zubair leaned where Elias had left him. Alexei wasn’t in his cell. Lachlan’s door sat closed, a new strip of tape angled crooked over the lock. Elias marked it for what it was: a small fix done too fast.
The guards keyed his door. The latch released. He stepped through and turned so the last thing the corridor saw of his face was nothing at all.
Zubair lifted his eyebrows a millimeter. Question without a word.
Elias let the corner of his mouth tilt. Answer enough: later.
The door sealed, pressure equalized with a soft sigh.
A scrap of gauze clung to the tread of his boot.
He peeled it off and let it hang from two fingers while he listened to the building breathe.
Somewhere above, a fan spooled up to a higher setting. Somewhere below, metal knocked against metal—a cart catching a lip, or a door that didn’t sit right in its frame.
Footsteps approached from the far end—measured, two guards, one set lighter, maybe the nurse returning with a cart.
A third rhythm joined them, bare seconds behind, longer stride, different weight.
Alexei’s laugh—quiet, wrong in this place—bounced off the plexi from around the corner and cut short as if someone lifted a hand.
"Dr. Orhan wants him prepped now," a voice announced.
"Now?" the other returned. "We just ran—"
"Protocol shift. New instruction."
Keys rattled. A lock snapped.
Elias set the gauze on the floor beside the tape he’d stepped over that morning and glanced once at Zubair.
The handle on Lachlan’s door twitched. Someone on the other side cleared a throat—thin, irritated, trying to make impatience sound like authority.
"Open."