The Shadows

“Actually, he’s never heard of such an illness. The closest he’s come is dealing with arthritis-related symptoms.” She shook her head. “It makes me wonder, if we were able to do genetic sampling from the Chosen, whether there would be a recessive gene in them somewhere. With a captive breeding population, such as they have been, you’d expect to find exactly this kind of a disease cluster.” She shrugged. “But back to Selena, I wish I could tell you what was going to happen, or even what to look for. I can’t, though. I’ve done a complete blood panel on her, and her white cell count is slightly elevated along with her inflammatory markers—but other than that? Normal. All I can say is that if she’s up and moving around, her joints are by definition functioning well, and they will let us all know when they aren’t.”

He cracked his knuckles, one by one. “Is there nothing we can do for her?”

“Not that we can think of so far. One of the challenges is that we don’t understand the mechanism of the disease. My suspicion is that after the bone growth is triggered by God only knows what, her immune system somehow rebounds and attacks the offending material, destroying it as if it’s a virus or infection. And her body’s defensive mechanism knows when to stop, as her original skeleton is intact afterward. There probably is something inherently different about the ‘bone’ growth, but I wouldn’t know unless we did a biopsy.”

“So why does she have to . . .” Shit, every time he blinked, he saw Selena lying on the table, her body in that god-awful contortion. “Why can’t she just keep fighting things off and recovering?”

“My guess is, the immune system fails. When you think about it, it’s an extraordinary series of events on the cellular level. When I saw the first set of X-rays, I would never have guessed her body could come back from that to any kind of functioning.”

He fell quiet, and stared at the tile floor. “I want to take her out tonight. You know, for a date.” When the doctor stayed silent, he glanced up. “Not a good idea, huh?”

Doc Jane crossed her arms over her chest, and pushed her chair back and forth on its little black wheels, the seated version of pacing.

Fuck. He should have had this conversation before he’d suggested an excursion—

“How frank do you want me to be?” Doc Jane asked.

Trez had an image of Vishous’s goateed profile highlighted under that ceiling fixture outside in the corridor. “I need to know where we’re at.”

Even if it killed him.

It was a minute or two before Doc Jane answered, and he guessed she was running scenarios in her head. “The most conservative route is for her not to leave the compound, and for me to do a total work-up on her, one that involves multiple biopsies, a CAT scan, an MRI out in the human world, and consults with human doctors through Manny’s contacts. And then we’d probably want to start her on an aggressive course of steroids—even though that’s more a hunch than anything certain, I have to believe the inflammatory process has something to do with all this. There could be other drugs to try, maybe some procedures, but it’s hard to guess at them with any certainty from where I’m sitting right now.” She rubbed at her short hair until the stuff stuck straight up in blond spikes. “We’d have to get moving fast because we don’t know how much time we have, and everything would be trial and error, with probably more of a prolonging goal than a cure. Although again, that’s just a hunch, nothing concrete.”

He closed his eyes and tried on for size telling his queen that instead of going to that restaurant she was so excited to eat at, they were going to—

“But that’s not what I would do if I were her.”

Trez popped his lids and looked over at the physician. “So there’s another way.”

Doc Jane shrugged. “You know, at the end of the day, I think you have to consider quality of life. I’m not sure how far we’d get in treating or understanding this disease even if we climbed all over her. I’m basing that on the fact that she is, to borrow an infectious disease term, ‘patient zero’ for us. Nobody has seen this even though a minority of her sisters have suffered for generations from it. There is a very complex series of things going on, and I just . . . there’s a lot to try to get a grip on. And for what? Do you want to ruin her last nights—”

“Nights?” he blurted. “Jesus Christ, is that all we have?”

“I don’t know.” She lifted her palms. “No one does, and that’s the point. Would you—would she—rather spend whatever time she has living, or simply waiting to die? I’ll tell you right now, if it were my choice, it would be the former. That’s why I’m not going to make her come down here or try to have her feel bad because she’s not in a big hurry to lie down on my table.”

Trez blew out the breath he’d been unaware of holding. “Rehvenge went up North. To the colonies. To see if there was anything in the symphath tradition that would help.”

“I know, Ehlena told me. We’re hoping to hear something soon.”