Another primate had died during the night, the third in six weeks. Dr. Idit Kahayn knew because of the smell. The primate lay in a pool of vomit and feces: black eyes glassy as a doll’s, purple tongue lolling from a mouth stretched in a rictus of death.

Death and more death. That was her life now. Death for breakfast, death for dinner. Death in her dreams: the image of soldiers and rifles and Janel’s face exploding into a mist of blood spray and bone, and her screaming a warning, too late. That same dream every night, like her mind was stuck in an endless, recursive loop. No way off; no way out.

The remaining primates tracked her as she passed through the animal room to fetch gloves, a gown, her safety glasses. But she paused, staring them down. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t mean for this to happen. But I don’t have a choice.”

The primates didn’t answer. They just looked at her with their grave, liquid brown eyes, and she could sense the room getting thick and electric and icy.

“It’s not my fault,” she said again. Then she went to the isolation room, pulled the body from its cage, bagged it, and lugged it to the lab, leaving the animals to throw their thoughts back and forth in the air above her head.

The lab was chilly and smelled of antiseptic and old death. The counters were metal, the walls were white ceramic tile, and the floor was scuffed gray linoleum. A metal autopsy table stood on rolling casters in the center of the lab. The table was fitted with gutters all around to funnel away blood and other fluids. She unbagged the body and placed the primate on the table where she hosed it down, sluicing away vomit and filth, grateful that the water was triple-filtered at least so its color wasn’t black but a shade of watery ash. Then she braced the primate’s neck on a block so the head hung back and those blind eyes fixed on a point somewhere far away.

She used a scalpel for the skin along the crown and from ear to ear, incising through tough, calloused scalp and stringy muscle all the way to bone. Then she pulled the front flap down over the primate’s face and tugged the back flap to the base of its skull just above the spine. She took up a rotary bone saw, thumbed it to life. The saw whined, then dropped in pitch as the blade bit bone. As she cut, watery wine-colored blood dribbled into the gutters. She buzzed the circumference of the skull, notching the bone at the occiput. If the skull slid off when she bagged a dead animal for cremation, it made a mess.

When she’d cut through, she lifted the calvarium from the brain. The skull and tissues made a hollow sucking sound, like picking up an overturned bowl of thick gelatin. The primate’s brain was so edematous that once the cap of bone was removed, gray matter (though it was never really gray but a dirty pinkish purple like thin jelly) lipped the edges of the cranium like an underdone soufflé. The dura mater clung to the underside of the skull cap, so she got a good look at the brain in situ. The gyri were plump and choked with fluid, and she saw the bruise at once: a purplish-black splotch fanning around the implant like a squashed bug. She nudged away brain until she spied a clear bulb that was the proximal end of the implant: a thin, nearly filamentous metal cylinder bristling with synthetic dendrites.

Inflammation and swelling; probably a reaction to the separation. But how to beat that? After an easy dozen primate deaths in the past twelve months, she still wasn’t sure. Either way, the animal’s brain had swelled with fluid. Intracranial pressure had built up and the brain—really nothing more than a gelatinous mass of tissue and fluid held together by the thin bag of the meninges—had nowhere to go except the spinal canal. There would have been pain. The animal would’ve lost the use of its arms and legs, then bowel and bladder control. It would have been frightened. A horrible way to die but, then again, Kahayn didn’t know too many ways that were terrific either.

After separating the brain from the spinal cord and the tentorium, the dural connections between cerebrum and cerebellum, she scooped out the brain with both gloved hands. The cooling brain was tepid against her right hand but cold in her left.

She suspended the brain with a string in a formalin solution. She’d leave the brain in the preservative for the next ten days or so while the tissue firmed enough for her to section and see where she’d gone wrong—again.

By six-thirty in the morning, she was done, and then it was time for a stim and the OR. She wasn’t hungry. As she passed through the primate room, she didn’t look at the animals but she could feel their eyes on her back and their thoughts chasing her down the hall and out of the research wing.

Late afternoon now, and on her fourth procedure of the day: a rail-thin man with lung rot. Her pager shrilled as she was wrist-deep in a small, plum-colored lake of blood that smelled like an old clot. She had a fistful of rotted left lung and the tip of her left pinky plugged an arterial rip. There was so much blood, she’d gone by feel, tweezing through stiff, filamentous lung until she felt the rhythmic pulse of a tiny gusher a third of the way down the aorta. The blood was warm, but the tip of her pinky was cold and she needed her right hand free to do the fine work.

Her pager nagged again. “Someone get that, please? I’m a little tied up here.”

A surgery tech patted at Kahayn’s left hip, found the pager, killed it, glanced at the display, then hip-butted his way out of the suite. Kahayn jerked her head at the lieutenant standing opposite: a new girl who was all round blue eyes set in pale blue skin above a white-edged blue mask. “C’mon, c’mon,” said Kahayn, “get some suction going so I can see what I’m doing here.”

The lieutenant jumped to, stabbing the patient’s pleural cavity with the suction tip.

“Easy, go easy,” said Kahayn, grabbing the lieutenant’s gloved wrist with her free hand. Grape-colored beads of blood pattered onto green surgical drape. “Not so hard; you’re going to give him another bleeder you keep that up.”

“Sorry.” But the lieutenant slowed down, working with exaggerated care. Blood gurgled through tube, and the blood lake receded until Kahayn saw first the knuckles of her gloved left hand and then the spot where she’d plugged the artery. The rip was, thankfully, small, and the artery not yet so brittle that she couldn’t simply suture it shut. But rot had eaten into the left lung, and the normally spongy blue tissue had morphed into tough, stringy, prune-colored filaments that had insinuated through pleura and into the patient’s rib the way ivy suckers clung to old brick.

“Okay,” she said to the chief OR nurse, who stood with anesthesia behind a green drape at the head of the surgical table. “We’re going to need a left lung here.”

“I think we only have nine lefties on hand,” said the nurse. She was a major, and a perennial hard-ass. “Besides, this casualty hasn’t built up enough credits for a lung and if people get wind that he got one without…”

Kahayn drilled the nurse with a look. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said, get the lung, Major.”

“Colonel, I am just following protocol—”

“I don’t care. Now either get the lung, or get out.”

“Colonel, there are established procedures for—”

“That’s it.” Kahayn cut her off with a jerk of her head. “You’re out. Breynar,” she called over to the circulating nurse, “I need a left lung.”

The nurse, a first lieutenant, shot a hesitant glance at the major, then nodded and scurried out, his booties whispering against linoleum. The major’s eyes narrowed over her mask before she did a quick pivot with the precision of a drill instructor. She hipped the door. “I’ll be reporting this,” she said and pushed out through the scrub room. The doors had hinged flaps and fwap-banged.

No one said anything, so the suction gurgle was very loud in the silence. Then the anesthesiologist said, “You got to go easy, Colonel. She has a point.”

“Don’t start,” said Kahayn.

“I’m not. But you think we’re busy now, all they got to do is riot out there and then you’ll be getting up before you go to sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah, and eating gravel for breakfast. Look, this guy needs a lung. So you have a better idea? Like I’m supposed to go to all this trouble to stitch up an artery but let him suffocate?”

“I’m just saying. She’s doing her job.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kahayn said again, exasperated. She blew out. Her blue surgical mask puffed then crinkled back in a papery rustle of accordion folds across her nose and mouth. He was right, of course, not that it mattered much because the patients just kept on coming. The medical complex was short-staffed, nothing new about that either because they were always short-staffed, the casualties streaming in for replacements, and there was never enough to go around. Kahayn felt like one of those rats on a little wire wheel, running and running and running nowhere really fast.

Nothing was getting better either. The air was bad and getting worse, and there were a lot of people with lungs so sooty they looked more like bloody bags of pulverized charcoal. Cancers in the bone, the liver, the gut; eating people alive a piece at a time. The whole thing was so damned futile.

Don’t think. Kahayn stared down at that ruin of a chest, what was left of a man’s lung. Nothing you can do. Just work and keep on working but don’t think.

So she worked steadily like an automaton and was a suture away from finishing with the artery when the surgical tech banged back in, door whap-flapping in his wake. “That was the ER. They want you down there.”

“Uh-huh, well, I’m kind of busy now. Major Arin’s on; he can handle it.”

“It was the major who called.”

“Did he say what it was about?” Kahayn held her hand out again, palm up, and the nurse slapped a needle holder into her gloved palm. Kahayn poked the wire-thin tip of the curved needle into arterial wall, rotated her right wrist counterclockwise until the needle appeared, and then tied off a friction knot in a double-wrap throw followed by a single. She nodded. “Okay, that’ll do it for the artery. Now all we got to do is wait for that lung. We’re just damned lucky he didn’t need a new hose. Arguing with the major about that would’ve been fun.” She looked over at the tech. “Well? What did Arin say?”

“Major Arin didn’t say, exactly.”

“Meaning?”

“Just…he said it was some sort of casualty brought in under heavy guard.”

“So it’s a Jabari? Or some other freak? Whatever it is, Arin’s going to have to harvest this one on his own. But let me know if there’s a good lung. I could use it up here.”

“No, this one’s still alive. Major Arin said he wants you to break scrub; he needs another opinion. He sent Captain Storn up to scrub in for you.” A pause. “Major Arin also wanted you to know that Colonel Blate’s on his way.”

“Okay,” said Kahayn, though it wasn’t. If Security Director Blate was involved, things never worked out well. She’d had a lot of experience with that. With Janel…

Can’t think about that now. Just go do the job.

She peeled off her smeary gloves, then said to the lieutenant, “Wait for Storn, and don’t touch anything.”

On her way down to the ER, she passed Breynar hustling back with a lumpy polystyrene sac full of the lung she’d wanted. He looked a question, but she hooked a thumb over her shoulder and he skedaddled. As she turned right to take the stairs, she happened to glance left down the long hall. She spotted the major marching hard-ass-style and double-quick at the head of a phalanx of administrative types, and as they did a hard left for the OR and disappeared, Kahayn figured she’d just done a whole bunch of really good work for nothing.

Death for breakfast. Death for dinner. She banged open the door to the stairwell. Yeah. Typical day.