CHAPTER 58: BACK AWAY

Three days flew by like a breeze, and during those days, the soldiers moved into the temporarily closed hospital, carried the broken chairs and tables out, and loaded them into a long, heavy truck. On the fourth day, Gray and Wang walked into the building and through the door that had the emergency tapes crossed on it.

They scanned the room for a while, then walked toward the stoned figure, tilted it slightly, and placed it on the cleared floor. Gray pulled a folded rubber, spread it on the ground, and unzipped it. Then they raised the stone figure and placed it inside the rubber, zipping it.

He stopped when the zip reached the chin of the stoned figure, stared at it for a minute, and sighed, then zipped it, covering it. He wrapped his arms around the shoulder while Wang held on to the legs as they carried it out of the room and into the huge building where the lab was. The soldiers walking by opened the lab door, letting them enter with the wrapped body.

After placing the body on the large laboratory workbench, a lady with a mask covering her mouth and safety glasses walked out of the black door inside the lab and walked toward the workbench. A few minutes after unzipping the blue rubber, Ryo walked out of the same door, unfolding the folded sleeves of his shirt.

He walked until reaching the lady, stopped by her side, lowered himself, opened the drawer at the side of the workbench, and pulled out a kit containing lots of sharp metals. He handed them to the lady, then walked back to the black door and entered without saying a word or two to either Gray or Wang, who had folded their arms on their chests and were standing at the lab’s entrance.

"Did you say the boy did this?" a male-like voice echoed in the room as the lady shoveling through the kit turned toward Gray and Wang.

"Yes," Gray said, his voice slightly cracking. He began moving the moment his words ended and stopped an inch from the lady.

Though she had a female structure, her voice alone made her have the look and posture of a male rather than that of a lady.

The lab technician stopped shoveling through the kit when her fingers, covered in a glove, touched a tungsten. She raised it, then moved it toward the forehead of the figure. Tiny dust curled into the air while she carved out a hair-thin precise flake, and when she pulled it, a darker shade pulsed once, as if something still lived within the petrified skin.

Both Gray and Wang moved forward, their breath caught.

"Did you see that?" Gray whispered.

The technician didn’t answer; she just stared at the little mess she’d made, and when he leaned closer to the flake she’d carved out, her eyes shifted slightly behind the glare of the safety lenses. The tungsten trembled faintly in her grip as she scraped again, slower this time. This time, a faint cracking sound answered her.

"It’s not completely fossilized," she murmured, her tone sounding clinical.

"The density keeps changing," she pointed with the tip of the tungsten toward the area where the faint dark pulse had flashed.

Gray took a step forward, closing the gap. "You mean she’s..."

"I mean," the technician cut in, cracking her arm slightly, "whatever turned her this way wasn’t complete."

Wang unwrapped his arms from his chest and walked toward the technician, halfway frowning. "It’s been two days since she became petrified. I doubt she is still alive; no human can go two days straight with hardened skin and not breathe."

The technician set the tungsten blade aside and pulled another tool, a small cylindrical scanner with a faint blue light band that pulsed when she pressed its edge to the stone. At the impact of both the tool and the stone, a soft hum filled the silence.

The lab light dimmed slightly as the scanner fed its glow across the body, making lines of data form in the air, projected from the side of the device onto a transparent screen.

"Can this be reversed?" Gray asked, squeezing his eyes as he stared at the hands of the technician.

She didn’t reply; she just continued moving the device up, scanning and watching the data fluctuate. Red bands flickered through the blue projection, spiking. The reaction alone made her pause at the chest. The tungsten edge still resting against the forehead, vibrated on its own, followed by a metallic ring the moment green gas erupted from the area she had scratched.

"What the hell was that?" Wang said, taking a pace back.

The technician froze, staring at the tungsten as it quivered like it was reacting to either the gas or something hidden beneath the stone figure.

"Back away," she said, her voice dropping lower, no longer flat but cautious as she ordered them.

Gray and Wang exchanged glances as they stepped back slowly while the technician leaned over the body, her hair unwrapping itself and brushing on the chest of the stoned body.

Slowly, they opened the lab door and walked out, both of them turning to the left as they shut the door behind them and stood in the hallway.

...

As the afternoon sun shone bright at the forecourt, casting shadows on the walls and the floor, Kai and the nurse walked calmly in the hallway like mother and son. He remained in the loop of tilting his gaze toward all the faces coming and moving past him.

When they reached the office with Gray’s name carved on it, the nurse knocked three times, but after not hearing anything at the third knock, she placed her right hand on the door handle and swung it open.

Kai resisted entering when he saw two men standing in the room at first, but finally entered when the nurse pulled him in.

Seeing the cold and warm faces of the two men, one sitting calmly while the other kept shifting his gaze from the nurse to the boy as if he were looking at a living nuclear reactor.

"How is he doing now?" Gray said, standing from the chair and walking toward the nurse and the kid. But when he neared the kid, he became dissatisfied when the boy shook his head and brushed Gray’s hand away when he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

A strange smile tore on the nurse’s lips as Gray turned toward her and sighed.

"Did he do anything strange under your care, Clara?" Gray said, placing a hand on the nurse’s cheek and teasingly squeezing her, which made the nurse hold Gray’s arm, forcefully pulling it away while grinning with her white teeth.

"Why do you always want to bully me?" Clara said, finally brushing off Gray’s hand, moving toward the window after making Kai sit in one of the chairs placed beside the wall.

Wang turned the chair he was in, stared at Kai, shook his head, and closed his eyes. Though he didn’t utter a word, the reaction alone was strong enough to make Kai stop staring back at him.

When Gray joined Clara at the window, he romantically brushed his hand on her waist, tracing the line of her spine to the back of her neck, then turned her head slightly, letting her stare at him eye to eye.

"What’s the way forward for the boy, since he still hasn’t fully recovered from his memory loss?"