Cassie sat on the other side of my bed, munching snacks in panda-patterned pajamas. She shoveled a handful of popcorn into her mouth as she noted I was awake. “Mrn-ing, snshne.”

“Stop eating on my bed.” I rubbed my forehead against the deep ache settling in. I remembered heading off to the senatorial ball and then… Something unexpected, but a chasm yawned in my thoughts. I’d either downed one too many cocktails—maybe twenty too many—or my pod had gone off the tracks on the way there. “What happened last night?”

“Try last week.” Cass brushed the crumbs from her shirt onto my bedspread. I opened my mouth to scold when my vision finally came into focus. She’d lost another two kilos and red rimmed her violet eyes. “There was a lab accident.”

“How?” A week? I didn’t want to believe, but the changes in her face spoke for themselves. She couldn’t have lost that much weight overnight, even on the programming binge of her life.

I wore a T-shirt and loose pants under the sheets, but my arms—

Frigid dread shot through my system. I was down to two tattoos. My Green Helix and the shimmering, invisible Raven. The Nordic ropes and braids I’d been bracing to be chastised for at the ball were long gone, with no residual redness to say the ink nanobeads had been recently dissolved.

That process took time. Time I’d missed.

“I don’t know.” Cass pressed her cold fingers to my forehead, and a hint of fear still lurked in her eyes. “You got posted to some secret mad science lab and it’s all classified and mega suspicious. The med guy said you’d have some memory loss but you’d be fine otherwise.”

“And I’m not in a facility because…?” Memory loss wasn’t a game. Neither were lab accidents at facilities I couldn’t remember.

“What? I’m not a good enough nurse for you?” Cass poked my forehead and then passed my glasses from the nightstand.

“You? When was the last time you ate a vegetable?” But I smiled as I slipped on my frames. I’d much rather wake up to Cass and her crumbs than to our parents or some evasive med team.

“Corn is a vegetable.” She shrugged and lifted another handful of the stuff to her mouth. It had exponentially more caramel and puffed starches than corn.

“If you say so.” I did a mental inventory for injuries while Cass defended the nutritional value of her snacks, obviously venting her stress. I hardly blamed her. She’d been alone. I was her only real ally, and when it came down to it, the reverse was true as well.

Pain crept through my head.