I didn’t answer right away.
I reached down, took the coarse hospital bedsheet between my fingers, and pulled it back.
Underneath the cotton gown, the dressing over my left lower quadrant was not an expansive, sixteen-centimeter subcostal chevron incision. There was no deep, agonizing visceral ache of a harvested renal unit; no transected ureter screaming against an internal surgical clip; no muscle-splitting laparotomy that leaves a donor gasping for air when they try to sit up.
Across my left flank sat three tiny, two-centimeter puncture dressings—the neat, bloodless triangular footprints of a routine diagnostic laparoscopy.
Beside them, painted directly onto my pale skin in deep violet surgical marker, was a six-digit hexadecimal alphanumeric tracking string:
`BIO-AUTH: 1944-NAV-ADM-0914-A`
`SPECIMEN: REJECTED // CLASS IV CONTAMINATION`
`CUSTODY: ARMED FORCES PATHOLOGY INSTITUTE`
I swung my legs over the side of the electric bed.
The cold vinyl floor sent an electric jolt through my heels, grounding me in reality. My hands did not tremble. When you are the biological granddaughter of Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior—the man who mapped the subterranean fault lines and naval defense arteries beneath the North American continent—you do not tremble before men whose family fortune was accumulated by selling velvet-lined cedar boxes to grieving widows.
