The Medical Sector did not look like a place where people died. It looked like the inside of a microchip that had dreamed of becoming a cathedral.

  And it had the wrong kind of quiet.

  Christine knew hospital silence… the 3 AM hush between crises, the held breath before a code blue. This wasn't that. This was absence. No monitors. No ventilators. No call bells.

  She stepped through the archway and stopped, her breath catching in her throat.

  It was a cathedral of light. The ward rose in impossible terraces, each level suspended without support, spiraling upward into a crystalline ceiling that showed the stars. There were no beds, only platforms of solid, amber light that hovered inches above the floor. Ribbons of luminescence twisted above the patients, blue to gold to green, data streams that hung in the air like aurora borealis.

  It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  "Coming through! Make a hole!"

  The shout shattered the awe. A chrome blur whipped past her on the floating walkway, banked hard against nothing, and spun to a stop.

  "Nailed it." Callum grinned from his hovering chair, strapped into the complex harness, his hair wild from velocity. The sensor at his collar blinked green. "You should see your face, Red. Mouth's open."

  "You're going to crash into someone," Christine said, blinking the dazzle out of her eyes.

  "Working on it." Callum’s chair drifted beside her as she walked deeper into the room. "Wild, right? The platforms adjust temperature, firmness, angle… everything. It reads what the body needs and just... provides."

  A silver drone zipped past, no bigger than her fist.

  "Those little bastards are incredible," Callum continued, tracking it with his eyes. "They can see down to the cellular level. They can manipulate tissue like we'd move puzzle pieces. Watch…” The word died in his throat.

  A sharp gasp cut him off.

  Christine's body moved before her mind engaged. Years of muscle memory guided her. Three beds down. A woman, young, maybe twenty-five. Hispanic. Her left arm was fused to her ribcage, the flesh running in one continuous, angry sweep from wrist to torso.

  The drone hovered over her, threading a hair-thin beam of light along the seam.

  The woman's back arched. Her free hand clawed air. She cried out, the laser was hurting her.

  "Hey… " Christine reached for her, then stopped. No gloves. No protocol. The woman writhed.

  Another scream tore out of her, raw and wet. Desperate.

  "Jesus," Callum breathed.

  Christine grabbed the woman's shoulder. "I'm here, look at me. Look at me."

  Dark eyes found hers, pupils blown. The woman's chest heaved. Rabbit breaths. Along the fusion line, the flesh was... moving. Separating. The drone was peeling her apart cell by cell, like unzipping meat.

  "Hurts," the woman gasped. "Hurts… God… "

  Her pulse hammered visibly at her throat. Too fast. Christine pressed two fingers to the woman's carotid. One-forty, maybe more. Skin clammy.

  "Stop." Christine shoved herself between the drone and the patient. "Stop the procedure."

  The drone's light went amber. It chirped… crystalline notes that meant nothing.

  "She's going into shock." Christine kept her hand on the woman's pulse. "Heart rate over 150. Diaphoretic. If you continue, she'll die."

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  "Cellular reconstruction within acceptable parameters," the drone replied in flat English.

  "Your parameters are wrong!"

  Callum's chair hummed closer. "It doesn't understand, Red. They don't have pain. It's just data to them."

  The woman whimpered. The flesh kept separating, raw underneath.

  Christine grabbed the drone. It was warm, lighter than air, trying to recalibrate around her grip.

  "Interference detected. Release medical apparatus."

  "No."

  "Red…" Callum warned.

  She squeezed harder. The drone's light flickered, cycling through colors with no names.

  "Release apparatus or security protocol will engage."

  "Then engage it." Christine didn't let go. "She needs morphine. Fentanyl. Anything. You're torturing her."

  "Chemical unknown."

  "I know." Christine's voice cracked. "I know you don't have our drugs. So stop. Stop hurting her until you figure it out."

  The drone went still in her hands. Silent. Processing. Above them, through the transparent ceiling, the obsidian spire pulsed with activity. The Hive, thinking.

  "They're talking to each other," Callum said quietly. "All of them. Billions of them, trying to understand."

  The woman's breathing went shallow. Her pulse under Christine's fingers turned thready.

  "Please," Christine said to the drone, to the Hive, to whoever was listening. "Just stop."

  The light winked out.

  The woman's body went limp, no longer arching against invisible knives. She sobbed once, hard, then curled into herself.

  "Procedure suspended." The drone pulled free from Christine's grip, hovering just out of reach. "Awaiting chemical formula."

  Christine's legs shook. She lowered herself to sit on the edge of the platform, her hand finding the woman's.

  "You're okay," she lied. "You're okay now."

  The woman squeezed back, her grip desperate. Her arm was still fused to her ribs, the separation incomplete, raw edges weeping clear fluid where the drone had been working.

  "What's your name?" Christine asked.

  "Maria." Barely a whisper.

  "Okay, Maria. I'm Christine. This is Dr. Hartley. We're going to figure this out."

  Callum maneuvered his chair closer, his face grim. "We need a chemist. Someone who knows molecular structures. The aliens can move atoms around, reorganize matter, but they need blueprints. They need to know what morphine looks like at the atomic level."

  "Do we have anyone?"

  "Maybe. There's a professor in the dome somewhere. Chemistry department. But Red..." He looked at Maria, then back at Christine. "There are dozens like her. The fused ones. And they're all going to need the same procedures. Some sooner than others for organ repair, or they will die."

  A shadow fell across them. P-TR33K stood there, nine feet of translucent flesh pulsing with blue light. His head tilted at an angle that wasn't quite human.

  "Explain," it said.

  Christine met those depthless eyes. "You can fix our bodies. But if you don't understand pain, you'll break our minds in the process. We need our medications. Our chemicals. Without them, your medicine is torture."

  The Avatar processed this. His light pulsed slower. "We find organic pain... inefficient."

  "Everything about us is inefficient." Christine looked down at Maria, who had finally stopped shaking. "But we still feel it. Every cut. Every repair. Every cell you move screams at us. And we can't turn it off."

  "Cannot synthesize unknown compounds," P-TR33K said. "Require molecular structure data."

  "Then we'll get it for you." Callum spun his chair to face the Avatar directly. "Give us time. Let us find our chemists, our pharmacists. Hell, we probably have someone here who cooked meth. They'll know the structures."

  "Acceptable," it finally said. "All cellular reconstruction suspended pending pharmaceutical database compilation. Priority adjusted."

  "Thank you, Patrick," Callum called after him as he turned to leave.

  The Avatar paused mid-glide.

  Christine looked at Callum. "Patrick?"

  Callum grinned slightly. "Look at his designation when he shows it to you. The patterns, the symbols they use. If you squint, it kinda looks like a P, then like a TR, some 3s... P-TR-three-three-K. Patrick."

  Christine just nodded, accepting it. Alien names from visual patterns. Sure. Why not. Everything else was impossible here too.

  P-TR33K… Patrick… resumed his glide away, his movement too smooth, missing the little imperfections that made walking human.

  Maria's breathing had steadied. The raw edges of her wound were already beginning to crust over... the alien platform doing something to accelerate clotting.

  "Rest," Christine told her. "Just rest. When we start again, it won't hurt like that."

  She hoped she wasn't lying.

  Callum's chair hummed beside her as she finally let go of Maria's hand. "You just told an alien collective consciousness to stop practicing medicine."

  "I told them to stop torturing people."

  "Same thing, from their perspective." Callum checked his collar sensor.

  She looked around the ward… at the miraculous technology, the impossible architecture, the patients suspended in light. All of it useless without understanding the simple fact that humans hurt.

  "We're the software," she said quietly. "They built the hardware, but we have to teach them how to use it."

  "Then we better find that chemistry professor," Callum said, already spinning his chair toward the exit. "Because we've got hundreds of people here who need unfusing, and I don't think Maria wants to be the test subject for whether we got the morphine formula right."

  Christine followed, forcing her legs to keep pace with Callum’s gliding chair. Behind them, the ward remained suspended in that terrible, suffocating silence. It was monitoring. Watching. It was still the wrong kind of quiet, but for the first time since she arrived, Christine wasn't afraid to make some noise.