He put the needle in and the little tube that ran to the vial turned red and then the vial filled. He popped the vial out and popped in a second vial. Izabel imagined the hell Cami would’ve been giving them all if she was awake.

As Luis stuck stickers on the vials, he gestured at Izabel. “Is this correct?” he asked.

Each sticker read kalloe, camila 11-02-2038.

Izabel nodded.

Luis put the vials into a plastic bag. “I’ll check you out first,” he said to Izabel, and as he reached around Kaito for the otoscope, Izabel watched his arm brush against Kaito’s back. But Kaito didn’t move from Cami’s side. Luis put a pulse ox on Izabel’s finger and then looked in her ears and nose and mouth. “Anything bothering you?”

“My throat hurts,” she said.

He got her a lozenge out of a giant jar by the sink. “It’s a minor irritation. Otherwise you look good.” He put the cuff on her arm for the machine to take her blood pressure. The lozenge tasted like cherry medicine, like the recipe hadn’t been changed in a hundred years. The cuff tightened around her arm and then released. Luis put the numbers into a tablet.

Next was Kaito’s turn. He finally left Cami’s side to have a seat. Luis said he looked fine as well. He added Katio’s numbers to the tablet, put the tablet on the wall, and left the room.

That meant there’d never been too much pollen in the air in the house. That meant Cami should be okay. That meant Cami should wake up. Why wasn’t she waking up?

As Izabel’s mother got sicker, she slept more and more of the day. So Izabel explored more and more of the hospital. It didn’t take her long to discover the morgue. Malik was the medical examiner and he seemed to take to Izabel right away, though she didn’t know why. She wondered if he was warm toward everyone.

He let her watch autopsies. He even let her put on gloves and hold the organs. He had her place them on the scale, one by one, as he recorded their weights in pounds and ounces and muttered about the superiority of the metric system.

After her mother died that fall, Izabel tried going back to school. But she started failing all of her courses. At least I have a whole semester to fail out, she thought.

She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life anymore. She didn’t know who she wanted to be. She didn’t know what she thought about the words profession or occupation. She didn’t like anything. Except spending time with Malik, who seemed to value her and the skills she was picking up in the quiet of the morgue.

It was there that she heard the first emergency warning.