Ify’s resolve stiffens, and she looks through the window and into Peter’s hospital room. All white, even the cyberized nurse who attends to him. The door slides open, and the nurse looks up, golden hair in a bob framing an angular face that ends in a pointed chin. She looks like a cartoon drawing of a nurse.

“May I help you?” The voice is too robotic for Ify’s tastes, like the voices announcing a rail line stop. Please mind the gap while descending from the train.

“I am visiting the patient.” She presses a button at her waist, and out of her eyes beams a holographic projection of her name and medical credentials.

“This is the trauma ward, not the neurology wing.” Rudeness or a mechanical lack of decorum, Ify can’t tell. The nurse stands before Ify and doesn’t move. It doesn’t help Ify give her the benefit of the doubt that this half-droid is coded as white. “Your pass does not permit you access to this patient.”

“My pass?” Ify grits her teeth, clenches her fists. In that moment, she doesn’t want to dress down the cyberized nurse who’s refusing her, she wants to hit her in the face. But she calms herself. The last thing she needs prior to her graduation and official appointment as assistant director of neurology and chief of the Refugee Program at this very hospital is documentation of a physical altercation with a half-droid who doesn’t merit the effort. “I’m family,” Ify says at last with a sigh. And it sounds like a concession. Like admitting defeat. She calls up her biographical information, and the nurse’s eyes go blank as she, undoubtedly, scans a list of permitted visitors behind her retinas.

“Very well,” the nurse says, before walking past Ify and leaving the room.

Ify swallows the anger. It burns her throat and stomach on the way down. A younger, less acclimated Ify might have looked into how to get that nurse fired or transferred to more odious work or might even have attempted to hack the nurse herself, enter her braincase and wreak havoc in direct violation of not only hospital protocol but Alabastrine law. But now, she gives herself several deep, long breaths and lets her shoulders settle. Her fists unclench. She has already forgotten the nurse.

When she gets to Peter’s bedside, she sees a boy without any visible wounds. MeTro sealant has healed the incisions running along his wrists. The blood has been cleaned from his body. Ify knows that were she to run her fingers through Peter’s hair, she wouldn’t even find red flecks along his scalp. The bullet scar remains, however. Like it is as natural a part of him as his fingers and toes and the hair under his armpits.