Turning off her sense of smell and taste had been the only way to stop the retching. Five of the kids stood around watching her as Althea stuffed another handful of moldy, rotting food into her mouth.

  “What is she doing?”

  Betty, bless her heart, stood and said,

  “Joey’s sick. Althea is going to make medicine for him. I think.”

  Althea nodded while her esophagus and diaphragm tried to rebel against the mass she shoved down her gullet.

  “Tell me this will work, Pontikos.”

  “The first few phases are easy enough. Getting the antibiotics out of you will be harder than getting the rotten food in.”

  Cringing in her AR space and in reality, she forced herself to swallow.

  Pontikos said,

  “When penicillin was discovered, they needed weeks to culture enough to use for medicine.”

  “We don’t have weeks, tell me this is not a waste of time.”

  Pontikos shook her head and said,

  “We don’t need weeks. But there will be some problems…”

  “I don’t care what happens to me, just tell me we can do something to help Joseph.”

  Pontikos said,

  “We can use your gastric and liver implants to speed the process along. The drug should collect in your kidneys, I will direct it to the right one.”

  “Oh gods, how do we get it out?”

  As soon as she asked the question, her stomach rebelled against the toxic food she had shoved into it. Althea moaned as she doubled over and clutched at her belly.

  Pontikos waited and said,

  “That is an excellent question. If you excrete it, the sample will be useless. We will have to extract the kidney.”

  “Oh shit, why didn’t you tell me that?”

  Pontikos held her hands up and said,

  “You ordered me to find a way to synthesize the antibiotics. I don’t have any other viable options. Even as it is, the process will take another day.”

  Turning over as she listened to her AI, Althea regarded Joseph with dread. The lines on his back had started to turn a dark red and swell. Gerry, the greeter boy, had stopped by after the rain stopped, Althea and the others scared him off for the time being, but considering who she had at her disposal, Althea suspected she would need him too.

  “Betty, take two of the others and go look for Gerry.” Althea tensed and coughed as her stomach clenched again, “Bring him with you. And get me more water.”

  Pontikos drew on a board nearby, sketching out chemical formulae as she whistled.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I don’t think I can speed the process up with what we have here.”

  She tapped at her board using the rod in her hand and added,

  “We should see if Gerry has other supplies anyway.”

  Althea held her stomach while Gerry cowered in front of her. Betty and Rory, one of Althea’s six kids, held a plasma pistol and SKS rifle on the boy while he groveled.

  Before Althea could ask a question, he wailed,

  “Tobias said he would kill us all.” Gerry’s shaking gave Althea a view of scars across his back. She said, “how did he treat your wounds?”

  Gerry’s hand instinctively went to his shoulder and he looked up at Althea with wonder. Then he returned his gaze to the ground and said,

  “He didn’t.”

  Althea put her other hand to her mouth. As much pain as she felt in her abdomen at the time, had Tobias been present, she would have stood and kicked him in the mouth.

  “Fine, did you ever help him with the butchering?”

  With the final words, Althea saw Gerry tense as if tremors rocked his body. Then, as if the passing of the horror left the boy empty, he turned slack and nodded, whispering,

  “He made us. Almost all of…”

  Gerry stopped supporting his body with his hands and fell to the ground with his face covered. He could not have been older than fifteen, maybe younger.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Tears streaked down his face as he shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.”

  If she kept grinding her teeth like this, she would end up with nubs.

  “Fine, go bring me the butchering gear.” Althea pointed to her guards, “Betty and Rory, make sure he comes back.”

  Gerry sobbed as the other two kids led him away. Althea gave little thought to the boy’s sorrows. She needed tools right then and she needed to make further modifications to her Persona. His shaking and terror had almost turned Althea away from her goal.

  When Gerry returned with bloody, filthy blades, his skin looked ashen and pale. Betty and Rory walked behind him with angry sets to their jaws.

  “What happened?”

  Gerry stopped and both guards shoved their weapons into his back. He dropped the cutlery with and started to burble.

  Betty said,

  “He tried to run, so we put some shots close to him.”

  The matter of fact way Betty said the words, without so much as frowning, sent chills through Althea, even over the pain of her body incubating a mass of foreign fungi and moulds.

  Looking down at what they brought, Althea pointed to the first aid kit and said,

  “Clean those up and watch him.” She pointed to Betty and Gerry, “and I want you to watch me, we’re going to learn to perform surgery today.”

  Using Joseph as a body model, Althea installed the necessary skill sets and spent four agonizing hours showing Betty and Gerry how to find her kidney and how to remove it. Pontikos offered comment as they watched, suggesting excising the whole organ rather than trying to extract the antibiotics directly.

  The other kids seemed blissfuly unconcerned about their friend. When their play happened to bring them by, they spent time watching the others learn, but then they spiraled away as soon as they could, as if afraid the creeping illness slowly killing Joseph would infect them too.

  Althea felt exhausted by the time she considered Gerry’s skills “acceptable.” Betty took to the instructions better than the older boy, but Althea wanted her ready to shoot Gerry in case he tried something crazy with Althea unable to respond right away. Something crazy like stabbing her in the eye or just fleeing.

  Once the kids seemed to understand how to recognize the kidney and remove it without killing her, she had to show them how to navigate her specific anatomy. Althea’s combat chassis was military issue, she could remove part of the surface of the chassis and make the tissues covering her back easier to pierce, but she could not move her actual kidney or eject it. And she needed the kids to know how to disable the real dangers. Like most implants, those connected to her kidneys possessed tamper failsafes.

  Since these had not belonged to Althea in the first place, she worried that this might have been a problem, but Pontikos knew how to remove the whole organ without triggering the implant’s tamper protocols. Another four hours of discussion, note taking by scratching into metal and further demonstrations, Joseph had stopped stirring as much as he had at first.

  Althea could not be certain how much time had passed since the infection first set in. But over twenty hours had gone by since she found the kids and Joseph’s body showed signs of septicemia and sepsis. The thought that the boy’s chances of living dropped every hour made Althea’s pain fade into the background of her mind. As much pain she experienced right then, if Joseph had been awake, he would have been shrieking.