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The elevator opened on the clinic floor.
Ren stepped out first. Rhea stepped out after him, hair still displaced from the tackle, her sleeves faintly damp.
She stopped. The small intake of breath, the half-step back.
Is she going to run, he thought.
The walls were black: the pure light-absorbing black that the System had installed and refused to remove. The white tile floor ran beneath it, grout lines dark, the contrast too precise.
Along the walls and up toward the ceiling, the veins ran: thick, branching, green and red, pulsing with a rhythm that had no medical explanation. The reception desk was black. The chairs were black. The hallway stretched toward the examination room and beyond it the grafting room, its far end glowing faintly red.
"Hmm," she said, from the elevator doorway.
Ren waited.
"Mister." She stepped fully into the clinic, turning slowly to take it in. "Can I say something?"
"Yes."
"Aren't clinics supposed to be, like..." She gestured broadly at the room. "White? Clean? Kind of sterile? Maybe with a plant somewhere?"
"Generally."
"So what," she said, tilting her head at the nearest vein, "is going on here. Like specifically. What is going on with this."
"It's an aesthetic choice."
Rhea turned to look at him.
"An aesthetic choice," she repeated.
"Yes."
"The veins are an aesthetic choice."
"They're also apparently load-bearing."
Another pause.
"Mister," she said, "do you have patients."
"I do."
"Real ones? Who come in on purpose?"
"Yes."
"And they see..." She gestured again, a wider sweep this time, encompassing the entire room. "This."
"I give them a warning in the intake form."
"A warning." She turned back to the nearest wall and leaned in to look at a vein. Then stepped back. "Okay. Okay, I have to be honest with you. I'm shocked. Like actually shocked. This is not what I expected when I pictured a doctor's office."
"What did you picture."
"I don't know, something with a poster about handwashing. Maybe a skeleton model. Normal things." She looked at the hallway leading back toward the grafting room. "What's the red glow."
"Treatment room. Don't go back there."
"Is it scarier than this?"
"Different kind of scary."
She turned back to face him, one hand on her hip. "And you thought this was a good look for a medical practice."
"I didn't design it."
"Who designed it."
"It's complicated."
Rhea looked at the clinic, then at him, then back at the clinic.
"Mister." Her voice settled into something more real. "I'm shocked. Genuinely. But I kind of expected something weird was coming from the moment we met." She smiled, small and certain. "You're messed up in an interesting way. I decided that early."
Ren looked at her.
"Maybe," she said.
"Maybe," he repeated.
"Fifty percent compliment. Fifty percent diagnosis."
He exhaled through his nose. "Well." He turned and led her toward the reception area. As they passed the storage closet, a sound came from inside: a heavy metallic clang, once, then silence.
Rhea stopped walking.
"Mister. What was that."
"A monster," Ren said, without looking back.
"In the closet."
"His name is Bone Saw."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Haha," she said. "You really know how to set a mood."
"I'm not joking."
"Sure, mister."
He did not clarify further. He sat on the reception sofa. Rhea sat beside him, then shifted sideways and laid down with her head on his lap without warning.
"What are you doing," he said.
"Pamper me." She looked up at him from this angle. "You made me sad. Now pamper me."
"I made you—"
"Forty-four calls, mister. You owe me a lap at minimum."
He looked at the ceiling.
She looked up at his face from below. Her expression changed.
"Mister."
"What."
"From this angle you have a double chin."
"Anyone would have a double chin from that angle."
"It's cute."
"It's geometry."
She laughed, quiet and genuine, and settled more comfortably. The clinic was quiet around them. Outside, the city was going on. The convention center district was two days ago.
. . .
The quiet held for a while.
Then: "Mister."
"Hm."
"Can I tell you something?"
He looked down at her. She was still looking at the ceiling, not at him.
"I don't even know your real name," she said. "I've been calling you mister for months. I don't know your name."
"You've never asked."
"I'm asking now." She paused. "But I want to share something first. So we're even."
He waited.
"The reason I was on that train platform," she said.
He had never asked. She had never offered. He had always understood it was hers.
"My parents died," she said. "Both of them. Around the same time — different reasons, doesn't matter. They left behind three million dollars in debt."
She was quiet for a second.
"I was twenty. Night classes, two jobs, trying to hold everything together. The debt landed and I couldn't."
She looked at the ceiling.
"I dropped out the week before we met. Lost the apartment the same day. I took my cat to a shelter first." A pause. "That part was the hardest. That was what I kept thinking about."
Ren said nothing.
"I had done the math," she said. "On the platform. Very methodically. That's a Rhea Jensen thing." She smiled at the ceiling, small and strange. "And then a very strange man pulled me back from the edge of the platform before the train arrived," she said. "He just reached out. As if I was worth doing that for."
"I cried at him. I yelled at him. I told him I hated him." A small pause. "He just sat there and took it."
She turned her head and looked up at him.
"I calmed down eventually. I offered him a cigarette outside a convenience store and he didn't ask a single question about any of it." She smiled. "He didn't ask. He just sat there. He was my prince and he didn't even know it."
"A prince," Ren said.
"My prince," she corrected. "The one that showed up when I needed someone."
"And now I'm lying on his lap in a clinic that has veins in the walls," she said.
"How do you feel about that."
"I feel good about it." "The clinic is alarming. The rest is good."
She reached up and touched his face, lightly, as she had on the steps, and then looked at him.
He understood.
The clinic was quiet. The veins pulsed. Down the hall the grafting room held its red glow.
He stood up, gently, and she sat up to let him.
He turned to face her.
"My name," he said, "is Ren Hector."
He focused.
The transformation moved outward: skin shifting to void-black, darkness spreading from the center to his fingers and up to his jaw. His head changed last: not changed, but opened. The skull split and folded back and from it ten blood-red tentacles bloomed outward like a flower, each one unfurling in sequence until where his head had been was only this: ten limbs of deep red radiating from the collar of his coat. Ten more rose from his back, spreading behind him.
The clinic's veins pulsed once, brighter than usual.
"And I am a monster," he said.
Rhea sat on the black reception sofa and looked at him.
For one full second she went completely still.
Then she smiled.
"Hi, monster," she said. "I'm Rhea."