Storm Prey

bunch of nurses ...”
    “Nerves,” Weather said. “See you down there.”
    She was cool in her scrubs, but comfortably so: she’d been doing this for nearly fifteen years, and the smell of a hospital, the alcohol, the cleaners, even the odor of burning blood, smelled like fresh air to her.
    No point in looking at the kids, but she’d do it anyway. There were two nurses outside the temporary ICU, and they nodded and asked quietly, “Are you going in?”
    “Just a peek.”
    “They’ve been quiet,” one of the nurses said. “Dr. Maret just left.”
    Moving as silently as she could, in the semi-dark, she moved next to the babies’ special bed. When you didn’t look closely, they looked like any other toddlers, who happened to be sleeping head-to-head; small hands across their chests, eyes softly closed, small chests rising up and down. The first irregularity that a visitor might notice was the ridges in their skulls: Weather had placed a series of skin expanders under their scalps, to increase the amount of skin available to cover the skull defects—the holes—when they were separated.
    There was really no need for her to look at them: she simply wanted to. Two babies, innocent, silent, feeling no pain; their world was about to change. She watched them for a minute. The one named Ellen sighed, and one foot moved, and then she subsided again.
    Weather tiptoed out.
     
     
    THE OLD MAN in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.
    “Dorothy, can you hear me?”
    A muffled “Yes.”
    “I think I’m hurt bad. If I don’t make it, tell the police that I scratched one of the robbers. I should have blood on my hand.”
    She replied, but the reply was unintelligible. He’d been working on the tape on his wrists, and eventually pulled one free ... He tried to get up, but was too weak. He couldn’t orient himself; nothing seemed to be working. He fumbled at the tape over his eyes, failed to get it free, moaned, moaned ...
    More time went by and the old man felt himself going dark; didn’t know what was happening, but his heart was pounding and he told himself, calm down, calm down. He’d had heart and circulatory problems, clots, and he didn’t need a clot breaking free, but his heart was pounding and he was sweating and something was going more wrong than it should be, more wrong than rolling around on a tile floor gagged and blinded and beaten. Hurt bad.
    Then the door rattled and he shouted and he heard an answering shout, and he shouted again and Dorothy tried to scream through her gag, and some time later the door rattled again, and he heard it open, and somebody cried out, and then more people were there.
    He blacked out for a moment, then came back, realized he was on a gurney, that they’d put a board on him, they were moving down a hallway. Somebody said, a few inches from his face, “We’re moving you down to the ER, we’re moving you.”
    He said, as loud as he could as the world faded, “I scratched him. I scratched him. Tell the police, I scratched him ...”
     
     
    THE OPERATING ROOM had been reworked for the separation operation. Maret had stripped out all the general surgery stuff, put in more lights, brought in the custom table. The table had been made in Germany, and lined with a magic memory foam that would adapt to the kids as their bodies were moved this way and that.
    Sara and Ellen Raynes were joined at the skull, vertically, but slightly turned from each other. If an observer was standing at Sara’s feet, looking at her face, and Sara was looking straight up, then Ellen’s face was upside down and rotated to the observer’s left. Imaging studies, done by Regan and her associates, indicated that their brains were separate, but they shared a portion of the dura mater under the skull, a kind of fibrous lining that protected and facilitated the drainage of venous blood from the brain.
    The incoming blood in the arterial system was good in both babies; but if the blood couldn’t be drained away, and recirculated, it would put increasing pressure on the brains, eventually killing them.
    Sara and Ellen were eighteen months old. Their parents had known the