The Queen of All that Dies (The Fallen World Book 1) (16 page)

Chapter 20

Serenity

When I wake
up, the king is at the side of my bed. He’s smiling and holding my hand. Almost reflexively I smile back at him. It’s strange to feel this way about anyone. The fact that the king is the one who’s opened my heart is just proof that fate is a cruel bitch.

“How long have I been out?” I ask.

“Not long, although now the entire hospital knows you snore.”

I narrow my eyes. “I don’t snore.”

The king smiles slyly. “You’re not the one who has to fall asleep next to you each evening.”

“Most people bring their loved ones gifts; instead you bring your effortless charm.”

He squeezes my hand tighter, and he leans in until his lips are barely an inch from mine. “How do you think I came to rule the world?”

“You’re an asshole,” I say, staring into his eyes, “and as an asshole, you’ve done a lot of asshole-ish things—including marrying me.
That’s
how you came to rule the world.”

The king touches my cheek. “Hmm. I think I like your dirty mouth better in the bedroom,” he says, and then he closes the remaining distance between our lips.

My mouth moves against his, my tongue enjoying the taste of him. It’s frightening how right he feels pressed this close to me. He has the same dark soul I do; he knows and embraces my sins, and I’m learning to accept his. I know he is dangerous to be around—dangerous to love—but my heart doesn’t seem to care.

I lift a hand and run it through his hair, my fingers rubbing a strand of it together. This thing of my nightmares is just as human as I am.

Finally, he pulls away. “I have a meeting I’ve been putting off until you awakened.” He glances at the clock hanging in the room. I can’t put it off too much longer, but …”

My hand slides from his hair to his cheek. “Go. I’ll be waiting here for you to return.”

He stands, looking reluctant to leave.

“The sooner you leave, the sooner I’ll be out of this godforsaken place,” I say. The shudder that ripples through me is very real. My skin crawls even now at the smell of disinfectants and sickness that lingers in the room. An epidemic tore through this land years ago. I’m sure many people filed through these doors only to perish.

The king bends down and kisses my forehead. “Promise me you won’t shoot anyone until I get back,” he says.

My lips waver before they tug up at the corners. “I won’t make a promise I can’t keep.”

The King

It’s not until
the door to Serenity’s room clicks shut that I let the façade slip. I run a hand over my mouth and jaw, feeling my age even if I don’t look it. If my guards notice, they don’t say anything. Not if they want to continue getting their cushy paychecks.

She’s dying.
The phrase repeats over and over in my head. That’s what the doctors here seem to think. They aren’t the only ones to think this, either. The royal physician had also pulled me aside, shook his head, and murmured his fears. Nothing official—it was a concern, not a diagnosis.

But several of the world’s best doctors sharing the same fears? I’d be a damn fool not to take their words seriously.

I grapple with emotions I’ve never fully experienced before. I hadn’t realized the depth of them—hadn’t realized I even could feel this way about someone.

I’d wanted Serenity’s affection, her fire, even her love—I just hadn’t realized I’d give anything back in the process.

I rub the skin over my heart. The thought of losing her after I’ve only just gotten her makes it twinge.

Marco meets me at the end of the hall. “Your Majesty,” he says in Basque, as he often does when he wants privacy, “how’s the queen doing?”

“Fine.”

Marco peers at me. We’ve known each other—trusted each other—since we were kids. The man can read me like a book.

“You talked to the doctor then?” Marco guesses.

Of course Marco would piece it together. I nod.

“And?”

I rub my eyes. “Doctor said the cancer had spread. The Sleeper reversed the damage, but …” I take a deep breath. My hands tremble slightly, “we don’t have the knowledge to stop the mutated cells from continuing to replicate.” Which means the cancer is still, at this moment, producing more malignant tissue inside Serenity.

The Sleeper can fend it off so long as it doesn’t move to her brain. But it inevitably will, and as soon as it does, it was game over. Not even the Sleeper has the ability to replicate the intricacies of the mind.

“So she’s … ?”

“Yes, I believe so,” I say, before Marco can finish his thought. We’d bought Serenity time, but not much.

“Have you considered keeping our queen in the Sleeper until a cure’s been discovered?”

I hiss in a breath. That’s months—maybe even years—away.

My gaze snaps to him. “Of course I have. That’s a last resort.”

I’ve spent all this time pouring money into destroying healthy bodies and perfecting a body that isn’t broken. Scant few of my efforts have focused on fixing sick ones.

“Hasn’t it gotten to that point?” Marco asks. “She’s dying. This could halt the damage.”

Something thick lodges itself in my throat. It comes down to the Sleeper or death, and either option still takes her away from me. It’s been hard enough waiting out her recovery during the last few weeks.

“Since when do you care?” I give Marco a sharp look.

“Since you started to.”

Just like that, his words deflate my rising anger. I rub a hand over my mouth. “She might spend years asleep in it before we have the technology to remove the cancer forever.” My voice comes out strong and smooth; I can’t let even Marco, my oldest, closest friend, see how vulnerable I feel.

“Your Majesty,” Marco pauses, picking his words carefully, “if you want her to live for as long as you will, this might be the only way. ”

Serenity

I watch the
door for several minutes after the king leaves, making sure that he’s not going to double back to my room. When nothing happens, I fling the hospital sheets off of me, more than a little surprised that my body doesn’t scream at the movement. In fact, I feel fine—not at all like I’ve just woken from an operation.

I’m right in the middle of an Eastern Empire hospital, one of the most coveted and secretive places under the king’s control. It’s where cutting edge medical research takes place.

Now is my chance to find out what exactly that research is.

Before I leave my bed to go explore, I gather up my gown to take a look at the extent of my surgery. I don’t want to accidently reopen the wound and find myself a patient here for longer than absolutely necessary.

I lift the thin cotton fabric and reveal inch after inch of skin. I unveil my stomach, and a strange sort of disbelief twists inside my core. Just to be sure I’m seeing correctly, I run a hand over the smooth skin.

There are no surgical marks, no scars. Nothing. The only indication that something’s happened to me is that a dark freckle that should’ve lingered near my bellybutton has now vanished as though it never existed in the first place.

So what did they do?

I peer out
the door of my room.

“What are you doing, my queen?”

I yelp at the sound of the voice. A guard stands off to the side of the door. Of course the king left a guard outside my room. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to shake him.

“I need to talk to a nurse,” I say, slipping out the door and walking past him. Now that I’m up and about, I can feel my exhaustion after all. I’m not quite as fine as I assumed I was.

“Wait—my queen!” the guard calls from behind me. “You should not be out of bed.”

I ignore him and continue towards the main desk on this floor concocting a quick plan to ditch my extra shadow.

The nurse manning the desk glances up when she hears my guard and me coming. Her face lights with surprise—I’m now that recognizable—before falling back into a careful mask.

“Do you need anything, my queen?” She doesn’t demand to know why I’m out of bed, nor does she rush to get me back in my room.

Whatever operation was performed on me, she seems to feel I’m in good enough health to walk around.

“Can I speak with you in private?”

The nurse nods, her brow wrinkling. My guard still stands behind me, and I shoot him a look.

“I’ve been commanded to not let you out of my sight if you leave your room,” he explains.

I turn back to the nurse and lean in close. “I need to use the bathroom and I’d like to not be shadowed like a prisoner.”

The nurse’s gaze moves from me to the guard.

“Is there anyway you can make sure he stays out here?” I whisper.

The nurse mulls this over, then finally nods. “I think that’ll be just fine,” she says, her voice low. “Need anything else?”

“Just directions to the bathroom.”

“Down the hall and to your left.” The nurse nods in the appropriate direction.

Perfect. I’ll be out of the guard and the nurse’s line of sight.

“Thanks,” I say, flashing her a genuine smile.

I push away from the counter. My guard is now looking at me suspiciously. I brush past him. When he begins to follow me, the nurse clears her throat. “Sir, sir—yes
you
,” I hear from behind me.

I don’t wait to listen to the rest. I move down the corridor and turn left, just so that it looks like I’m going to the bathroom. At the end of this hall is a stairwell, and right before it, a storage closet hangs slightly open. I stop by it and peek in. Medical supplies and a spare pair of scrubs rest on the shelves. I grab the scrubs and change into them quickly, just in case whoever left the door open is about to come back.

As I unfold the soft material, a keycard slips out. I pick it up and glance at the face of the male nurse whom these scrubs belong to. On it is a barcode, probably to allow him access into restricted areas.

The whole thing could not have gone better had I planned it.

I finish changing and palm the keycard. Slipping out of the closet, I enter the stairwell and take it down. It takes me ten minutes to locate where the research labs are, and I’m sure I only have minutes before the guard sounds the alarm that I’m missing.

I enter the lowest basement of the hospital. My first glimpses of this subterranean floor aren’t promising. Paint peels from the walls and the exposed metal pipes I see. It smells like mildew and rot down here—not exactly the ideal atmosphere for cutting edge medical research.

Despite my misgivings, I begin to scrutinize the hall. The floor is abandoned.

A shiver races down my back. An epidemic preceded the king’s war, culling the Eastern Hemisphere’s population to little over a third of what it once was. I’d never noticed what exactly that looked like until this moment, when I stood in one of their understaffed hospitals.

I go for the first door I see. Locked. Damn. I place my head next to it; I can hear lugging noises on the other side. It must be a boiler room. The next door I come to is the morgue. I wrinkle my nose at the thought. As curious as I am to see if any of the research occurring in these hospitals has landed test subjects in here, I decide against it. Who knows if victims of biological warfare are in there? It would be a damn shame to survive cancer only to die of a virus.

The next door is unmarked. I try the handle. Just like the boiler room, this one is locked. Next to the handle, however, is a scanner. I lift the plastic card in my hand and hold it in front of the device. It beeps and a light flashes green next to it. I try the handle again and the door opens.

I slip into the room and flip on the lights. Whoever normally works here is gone for the time being. I glance around, almost afraid to touch anything. The counters are covered with racks of vials, strange machines, and data readouts.

I don’t know where to start or what I’m looking for. I never thought my problem would be making sense of the research I came across. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m in the right place.

I begin moving, my eyes scanning the papers strewn across the counters. I see numbers and percentages, but nothing that I recognize. Moving further into the room, I scan the counters, the machines, the spines of books that are sitting out.

I want to scream. Nothing here corroborates the Resistance’s sparse findings.

I’m about to leave when the title of a document catches my eye: “Recent Medical Advances in Memory Recall and Suppression.” It looks like an article from a medical journal, and the publication date printed below it is from a month ago. Recent. I read the abstract at the top of the page, which summarizes the content of the article.

There are more scientific terms than normal jargon, but from what I read, the topic seems to have to do with repressing long term and short term memories as well as reversing memory loss.

Those dazed technicians the Resistance had reported on when I’d been back in the WUN… they’d been in the king’s research labs. Could their predicament be related to this?

The very non-scientific wheels of my mind whir. Why
would
anyone want to repress a person’s memories? The answer is so simple that I’m embarrassed I asked the question in the first place.

Control.

The last things
I read are the news articles someone’s taped to the wall. They all have to do with biological warfare. Some discuss the pathogens involved, and some go over the cures the king doled out once a region fell.

Death and health were the stick and carrot the king regularly used to gain control of a new land on the eastern hemisphere. He still doesn’t seem to understand that repairing that which he broke doesn’t make it new again. It makes it scarred.

I try the other doors in the basement. All are locked, and none will open with the key card in my hand. It makes me think that I never entered the room where the real research is occurring. A simple nurse might not have that kind of clearance.

I’d like to explore the rest of the hospital, but I’ve already been gone too long. So I walk back to the closet, change into my hospital gown, and place the scrubs where I found them.

“Last time I checked, the bathroom was across the hall.”

I spin, only to come face-to-face with my guard. Despite his soft-spoken words, he’s angry.

My first instinct is to become defensive. So I do the opposite. “What does it matter to you? I’m the queen.”

He grabs my upper arm. “You need to get back to your room, now.” He begins leading me down the hall.

“I’m going to tell the king that you’re manhandling me,” I say, as I yank futilely against his grip. “He’s not going to like that.”

My guard chooses to ignore me. He opens the door to my room and pushes me inside.

“Hey—!” The door slams shut behind me.

What an ass.

I lean against the wall, not ready to get back in bed, and let my eyes drift around the room. They land on a calendar that hangs across from me.

I still. It says it is May, but it should still be April. I’m about to shrug it off when my hand goes to the smooth skin of my stomach.

What if some new technology was used on me—the same one that removed all traces of the king’s bullet wounds from his body?

Perhaps I’m being paranoid, reading into things that aren’t there, but that thought doesn’t stop me from reaching for the door handle next to me and slipping back out into the hall.

“Your Majesty,” the guard growls, blocking my exit. I feint to the right and duck under his arm, hurrying to the main desk.

“Can you tell me what day it is?” I ask, breathlessly to the nurse behind the desk, the same nurse who helped me earlier.

A moment later my guard comes to stand beside me, but he doesn’t drag me off like I worried he might. I guess threatening to narc on him was effective after all.

The nurse across from me looks baffled by my request—or maybe just the fact that I’m out here again. “Of course, my queen,” she says. She turns to the screen in front of her. “It’s May tenth.”

I do the math in my head. That would mean that it’s been almost three weeks since I married the king and over two weeks since I came here for the operation.

“Is something the matter, Your Majesty?” the nurse asks.

I shake my head, my mind still far away. The surgery should’ve taken hours, not days, and definitely not weeks. I’m not being paranoid after all. Something did happen to me.

“You’re sure that’s today’s date?” I ask.

The nurse glances from me to her screen again, looking uncomfortable. “Yep. May tenth.” She smiles warmly at me, but it falters a bit when she takes in my expression. “Would you like me to escort you back to your room?” The nurse eyes me and the guard at my side, missing nothing.

“I’m fine.” I back away from the main desk.

“I’ll have someone check in on you in five minutes,” the nurse says. She says it to comfort me, but I know her true motives are to make sure I’m okay before the king returns.

I walk back in a daze. Why would Montes not mention that I’d been out for weeks? And, more importantly, why
was
I out for that long?

Thirty minutes later
, I hear the click of expensive shoes on the hospital linoleum. The king is coming back to my room, and I’m ready for him.

As soon as the king takes up the doorway, his eyebrows raise. I’m sitting on top of my bed in my hospital gown, my forearms slung over my knees. In one of my hands I’m playing with a scalpel that I lifted from the nurse that checked on me.

“Where’d you get that?”

I narrow my eyes at the king. “You don’t seriously expect me to answer that question, do you?”

He smirks, totally at ease with the fact that I’m playing with a scalpel in his presence.

Behind him I see Marco and some of the king’s bodyguards flank the doorway. “He,” I jut my chin at Marco, “better make himself scarce, or else this scalpel is going to find itself lodged into his chest.”

King Lazuli saunters into the room. “There is no need for threats, my queen.”

My eyes shoot daggers at Marco.

“Marco and his guards are going to wait outside while I spend time with my recovering wife.” The king’s mouth curves up at the last word.

Marco opens his mouth to speak. As soon as he does so, my hand tightens around the knife, and I rearrange my grip for throwing it. Marco’s eyes flick to my hand, and his mouth closes. Without a further word, he slips out of the room.

“You need to stop threatening my men,” the king says.

“Or else what?” I ask insolently. “You’ll divorce me?”

He sighs. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Make me regret my decision to marry you?”

“Absolutely.” Gone for the moment are my blossoming feelings for the king. Instead I can’t help but feel deeply disturbed once more by the king and his science.

The king leans in close—close enough for me to stab him if I desire it. He knows this too. I can see him daring me with his eyes.

“If I wanted to punish you for threatening my men, I’d find something infinitely more creative than divorce.”

I flip the scalpel around in my hand several times, a small smile forming on my lips. “You’re right. Divorce would hardly be punishment.”

Montes’s fingers touch my jaw, angling it to better face him. “Why are you so angry?”

“What have you done to me?”

The king’s brows lift. “This is about your surgery?”

“See, there’s where you’ve got it wrong,” I say. “Surgeries require this—” I raise the scalpel, “—and they leave scars. Most importantly of all, they don’t take
two weeks
.”

“My doctors have access to the latest technology. You were placed in a device called the Sleeper. It removed the cancer and regenerated healthy tissue.”

The king has equipment that can do that?

Before I can respond, the king wraps his hand around the base of the knife and tries to pull it from me.

“Hey—” I can tell I’m about to lose the scalpel, so I give it a good yank and slide it against the king’s skin.