Consequence

Ken’s eyes fluttered open, but even in his delirium, he could immediately tell that he was in a completely foreign environment. A bright white light shone down onto his face from above, implanted in the tiled ceiling. A warmer, friendlier light spilled in from the window, illuminating the room in the glow of sunset.

He closed his sore eyes, throbbing against his temples. The bed beneath him was rough, and a bit hard, though not unpleasantly. Definitely not his, at home.

A pinching radiated from the cook of his elbow when his probing arm ran too far up the fabric beneath him. He opened his eyes to a squint and weakly lifted his arm to see an IV connected.

A hospital?

He glanced out the window through narrowed eyes and let his arm fall to his chest. His head and, strangely, his back began to throb. It worsened with each passing moment, and he put his hands over his eyes to steady it. That helped, and the pain subsided. What happened? he thought, rubbing his head with his hand.

It was bandaged tightly around. A shot of adrenaline passed through him, setting him awake more completely. “May!” he shouted, trying to sit up. The back of his head exploded in an array of spots of discrete pain, setting him reeling back into his reclined posture.

“Dad!”

He made the mistake of trying to roll over to see the source of the voice. It sent a shock of pain through his neck and back, along with triggering another pounding headache, fixing him back to his spot.

Alice’s face popped into his view, hanging over him. “You’re awake!”

He groaned, reaching up to her. She lowered herself down, and he pulled her into a warm hug, sending a cascade of pain washing over him. But he ignored it this time.

“Where’s May?” he croaked. His mouth was dry, though he couldn’t discern the cause. “Is she alright?”

“Um, yeah. She’s at home.” Alice’s expression darkened. “She’s… sad.”

“Sad…?” He looked at her confused, but she just nodded, not elaborating further. “What do you mean?” He shifted his posture, dragging his leg to one side—

A tickling, tingling pain radiated from his ankle and foot. He hadn’t noticed it before. He bent his leg up and out of the blanket, looking for the source.

But where his right foot should have been, there was nothing. Empty space. Everything below his mid-shin was missing completely, replaced by some bandaging.

He clawed frantically at the gauze, as though his foot might still be beneath. But a gentle, calm hand placed against the back of his made him pause.

“I wouldn’t,” came a familiar accented voice.

His eyes and head flicked to the source. A mistake, as a pang of blunt pain exploded through his skull. “Irina?” he asked, pressing his eyes closed.

Irina stood next to him on the opposite side from Alice. One hand was tucked into her lab coat’s outer pocket, but the other hand was extended to him, still resting against his own. A man on the medical staff stood behind her, over her shoulder. A doctor, he presumed.

“Hello,” he said, addressing the doctor.

“Good morning, Ken.” He stepped forward. “How’re you feeling?”

“Uh, good,” he replied. “Groggy.”

“Y’know, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Oh, I know,” Ken replied. “Extirpations are no joke. My daughter—”

“No. Not that.” He tapped his head. “Acute subdural hematoma, traumatic brain injury, fractured rib and scapula, and,” he gestured to Ken’s missing foot, “oblique traumatic amputation through the lower part of your leg, just above the ankle. In surgery, we revised the amputation to a flat transtibial stump to promote healing, and to better allow for prosthetics down the road.”

“What?” Ken’s mind, still delirious, worked through the information with little grace, leaving that word all he could say.

“I don’t mean to dump everything on you; I’ll explain everything more. But for now, just know you’re lucky to be alive. You’ve been in a coma for a couple weeks, slipping in and out of fragmented consciousness. Though, you were never as… coherent as you are now.” He smiled. “Hopefully that's a good sign.”

Ken turned all the information over in his mind. He was familiar with the injuries, to some extent—he’d considered going to medical school for a time, and so had some basic understanding of what most of the doctor’s words—

“Wait.” He narrowed his eyes. “A couple weeks? Don’t you mean hours? Or days?”

The doctor pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Unfortunately not. The date is April 4th. So that puts us at… twelve days.” He looked up from his wristwatch. “How much do you remember?”

“I… remember diving out of the extirpation boundary with May, but nothing after that.”

“That’s excellent. I don’t believe much came after that. It may be because of the emotionality of that moment.” A ponderous look took over his face for a moment, but after a moment he snapped back to attention. “I’ll leave you all to talk. Let me know if anyone needs anything, or if the pain is unbearable. That should keep you going for now, though.” He pointed to the IV bag connected to Ken’s arm, and started walking out. “The nurse will be in about every hour to change it,” he finished, the door closing behind him with his last word.

He leaned back to lay down again, but finally learned his lesson and reclined slowly. His mind still struggled to turn over everything the doctor had said. He cursed his current slowness.

“Two weeks…” he muttered, rubbing Alice’s head. He didn’t even think he properly comprehended the implications of being comatose for two whole weeks—he was much too close to that threshold still to have his mind back in working order enough for that to even make sense. “What… happened? Can I see May? And why are you here, Irina?”

Alice wrapped herself around his other idle arm as he asked the question, bracing against him.

“Well…” Irina began, noting Alice. “I will begin with the first question.” She pulled over a lounge chair from the corner, sitting in it. Ken relaxed himself, wrapping his other arm loosely around Alice. “When you all were in Opal Tower two weeks ago, and you saved May’s life, you struck your head on a number of steps as you rolled down, and your shoulder and back on the wall and ground. Is that right, Alice?”

He felt Alice nod into his side.

Ken stared at Irina, stunned. “I guess that’s what happens when you dive down stairs, but…”

“Yes, it is. You were lucky to survive the trauma.” Her expression was as level as usual, but the longer he looked at her the more he discerned something else there: relief. “As for that,” she continued, gesturing toward his foot, “as you dove free from the extirpation, all of you pulled free except for one part—”

“My right foot,” he finished.

Irina nodded. “Thankfully, May was largely unhurt. She had a few bruises, but outside that, you did save her.”

“Thank God.” Ken breathed a sigh of relief it felt like he’d been holding for the past two comatose weeks. “So… where is she?”

“She’s at home,” Alice said again, a whisper this time.

“When can I see her?”

“She’s… quite unstable right now.”

“I don’t care.”

“Then, as soon as you are discharged.”

Ken nodded. That would have to do, unless she decided to visit him of her own volition. I need to talk to her, he thought.

“As for your third question…” Irina looked down to her lap. “I came to apologize. And to explain.”

“What?” That was the least believable thing he’d heard since waking up, he thought. “You?” he asked, incredulous, before he could think it through.

But her usual burst of fleeting rage didn’t come. She just nodded solemnly. “The truth is that you were right. And that girl that you spoke to knows more than I would like.” She folded her hands in her lap.

This timidness is unsettling, Ken thought.

“The truth…” Her eyes met Ken’s, glistening with regret. With grief. “The truth is that the cause of the extirpations is not cosmic; it is purely man-made. The front the government set forth was to cover its true nature. It’s… an experiment gone awry; an idea taken too far. And I am to blame.”

“How involved were you?” Ken asked, dreading the answer he knew was coming.

“Well,” she replied, sighing, “I created it. Directly.”