“I’m here.” The voice is his, but it has come from behind me, and an icicle chill travels down my spine. I spin around and search for his face in the darkness. It floats there, barely above the floor, and he looks pitiful, like he may collapse onto it at any second. I breathe a sigh of relief and reach out with the facecloth, needing his touch as desperately as he needs mine.

“Hold me,” he pleads, and I begin to argue, to tell him that now is not the time, that I just can’t because, well… if I do, my back will be turned to the rest of the room, and I won’t be able to see them coming.

I try a compromise and shimmy into a position with my back flat against the floor and half-hold him with one outstretched arm. His skin is slick with fever sweat and reminds me of a fish. My first instinct is to recoil, but when I feel him quivering I reluctantly turn on my side and pull him close. He smells… not like Ryan at all but of something alien. In a flash of awareness I know it’s too late. I’ve spent my life running from it… from them. Jumping continents and time zones in a vain attempt to escape, but I was marked a long time ago. The game has been played for far too long, and a victor must be crowned. They’ve got me.

SUDDENLY I’M dragged away from Ryan who wasn’t really Ryan at all and sucked into a blinding light beneath our bed. It’s all too familiar and yet I’m shaken with fear and with grief, it’s only just beginning again.

The first time I was three years old, and the implant went in the sole of my foot. Quite an inspired place when one considers it, nearly the last place one would look. After rounds of consultations and recommendations by medical professionals of every sort from pediatric to orthopedic, one finally stepped up to the table to perform the surgery when I was thirteen. The math states plainly I was tracked for a decade. The surgeon was South African. How bitterly appropriate I’m now to be chipped again on his native land.

I watched. On a monitor and under local anesthetic as he sliced the skin on the bottom of my left foot, right above the tendon that led to my big toe. There was some fear I wouldn’t walk again if he cut too deep. Thankfully he didn’t. Funny that. To sit and watch as a team of medical professionals cut you open. Flipping back the skin, gouging out an alien substance and plopping it from between tweezers into a jar, and then rapidly stitching it up again with a fishhook and thread. I was on crutches for a month. We never received an analysis for what was cut out.