Visiting the hospital now was much more like when she’d been there with her mother. When her mother was dying. The halls were clean and carts of medicine and equipment lingered by doorways, and nurses and doctors popped in and out of rooms, and all the lights were on.

At the hospital they wheeled Cami’s bed into a room and told Izabel and Kaito that a nurse would be with them shortly. Izabel couldn’t believe they would leave them alone with an unresponsive child. She thought a doctor would be waiting at the door to rush in with them, like in old episodes of ER and Grey’s Anatomy when an accident had been called in ahead of the ambulance. But then, maybe, if they weren’t worried, she shouldn’t be either.

Kaito got up and began to examine her. Before the Turning he’d been a doctor, a surgeon, with the da Vinci Surgical System. He still got called in, on rare occasions, to remove a prostate or uterus. But now they needed someone with his skills for the robots.

He got an otoscope off the wall and checked her pupils. There was such an ease in his wrist as he flicked the light into each eye.

When Izabel’s mother was dying, Izabel didn’t spend every moment at her bedside. Her mother slept often, and Izabel roamed the halls and sat with people in the ER, seeing how the injuries were calculated and weighed against each other. The wheezing child got taken first, then the boy holding a cut on his eyebrow, then the man with his head between his knees.

Izabel was nineteen and studying to be a nurse at college. She had taken the semester off to be with her mother, even though she didn’t know what that meant at the time. She thought it meant saving her. But she knew now: it meant creating months of memories that she could look back on with guilt.

A nurse came in. Clipped to his shirt was his hospital ID, with his picture and his name, luis. He made a funny face at Kaito, and Kaito put the otoscope back on the wall. “I used to work here,” Kaito said, staying next to Cami.

“Oh, okay,” Luis said. “I’ll be your nurse tonight. The doctor’s coming in to check on your daughter soon, and I’m going to take some blood and then check you two out.”

Luis took Cami’s hand gently and extended her arm. He tied a band of rubber high around it. Izabel thought she saw a change in her veins, her soft skin. Luis tapped a finger on the crease of Cami’s elbow and then wiped it with alcohol. Izabel wanted to stop him but she couldn’t say why.