And so we did. Mags walked me around the rest of the floor, and back down to my room, telling me about the AM all the while. I think she meant it when she said it was okay for me to be up there, but I also think she walked with me to keep an eye on me, make sure I wasn’t sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. Because as it turns out, the AM has a lot of things going on that not even employees know about.

“Experiments?” I asked as Mags finished telling me about all the different things they did in this building. “What do you mean by experiments?”

“I mean, I’m not a scientist,” she said lightly. “But I think it’s mostly building off of the research they’re already doing with patients. We know a lot about Atypicals—a lot more than we did even a decade ago—but we’re still so secret to everyone, you know?”

I nodded.

“So regular, state-sponsored experiments are hard to pull off,” she continued. “But we need to focus on Atypical healthcare. A lot of problems can be handled by regular doctors—broken bones for instance,” she added, looking knowingly at me.

“Right.” I blushed, looking down at my arm. You would never know that anything had ever been wrong with it.

“But for anything that intertwines with an Atypical ability … like, take a shapeshifter, for instance.”

“You get a lot of those around here?” I asked, thinking of Marco.

“A fair few,” she said simply, like that’s not extremely fucking cool. “If a shapeshifter gets a broken bone, that’s something a regular doctor isn’t going to be able to handle.”

“Because a shapeshifter could affect their own bones?” I asked.

“A really in-control and powerful one could, absolutely,” she said. “It’s all about the way a person’s ability affects their biology and vice versa. It’s all intertwined and most of modern medicine has been focused on non-Atypical humans so it just kind of … ignores that.”

“So an Atypical could need different treatment than a non-Atypical for the same thing…” I thought aloud.

“Exactly,” she said. “After all, your unplanned trips into unconsciousness needed to be addressed differently than they would be in a non-Atypical patient.”

“Oh yeah, I guess that’s true,” I said. We had arrived back at the patient dormitories and Mags had started her “oh look, what a convenient surprise” routine that was clearly meant to get me back in my room, but I was barely listening, my mind moving a million miles a minute.