“Do yourself a favor. Stay away from that asshole.”

Grey went downstairs and got to work. It wasn’t until later, running a scrub brush around a toilet bowl on L4, that he thought of the question he’d meant to ask.

What is he so afraid of?

What is everyone so afraid of?

They were calling him Number Twelve. Not Carter or Anthony or Tone, though he was so sick now, lying alone in the dark, that those names and the person they referred to seemed like somebody else, not him. A person who had died, leaving only this sick, writhing form in his place.

The sickness felt like forever. That’s the word it made him think of. Not that it would last forever; more that he was sick with time itself. Like the idea of time was inside him, in each cell of his body, and time wasn’t an ocean, like somebody had told him once, but a million tiny wicks of flame that would never be extinguished. The worst feeling in the world. Someone had told him he’d be feeling better soon, much better. He’d held on to those words for a while. But now he knew they were a lie.

He was aware, dimly, of movements around him, the comings and goings, the pokings and prickings of the men in the space suits. He wanted water, just a sip of water, to slake his thirst, but when he asked for this, he heard no sound from his lips, nothing except the roaring and ringing in his ears. They’d taken a lot of his blood. It felt like whole gallons of it. The man named Anthony had sold his blood from time to time; he’d squeeze the ball and watch the bag fill up with it, amazed at its density, its rich red color, how alive it looked. Never more than a pint before they gave him the cookies and the folded bills and sent him on his way. But now the men in the suits filled bag after bag, and the blood was different, though he couldn’t say just how. The blood in his body was alive but he didn’t think it was only his own anymore; it belonged to someone, something, else.

It would have been good to die about now.

Mrs. Wood, she’d known that. And not just about herself but about Anthony too, and when he thought this, for a second he was Anthony again. It was good to die. There was a lightness in it, a letting go, like love.