“Agreed.” She shook her head. “But we are taking on too much. I think we need to accept that we can’t be involved in every case the same way. What that looks like, I don’t know.”
“We’re engineers,” he said morosely. “We should be where the data is.”
Nick patted his hand. “We’ll find a solution. So, are we agreed, though? We don’t need another patient right now?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Jacob looked at his copy of the printout.
“Don’t go all bleeding heart on me,” his friend warned him.
“You’re one to talk. Also, we…kind of run a company that rehabilitates people. The bleeding heart is a feature, not a bug.”
“Okay,” Nick grinned. “But if you keep losing weight like this, you only have a few weeks left before a stiff breeze can blow you away.”
“Fair. We’ll think of something.” Jacob waved his hands. “In the meantime—mmf.”
Amber had inserted a piece of a donut into his open mouth. Jacob stared at her and she shrugged. He grimaced, chewed, swallowed, and took the rest of it off her plate.
“As I was saying, I would say this case is about twenty-five percent bleeding heart and seventy-five percent rabid curiosity.”
“So we’re doing this?” Nick asked Amber. “We’re doing the stupid thing and taking on more work?”
“Well, I…” She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Have we ever done the smart thing?”
“Fair.” He pivoted to where the other man pinned pieces of paper onto a corkboard. “I guess we’re doing this. At least it’s an interesting case.”
They were all interesting cases. That was what made it so difficult to say no to new applicants even when there was no hope in hell that the pods would help them. Not only were the variety of conditions interesting, the families had inevitably gone through an endless parade of specialists who hadn’t been able to help and they were desperate.
Even when Nick knew he couldn’t help, he hated sending the form letters to tell people so. He secretly thought it was the piece of the job that weighed most heavily on his friend. It was the ICU costs for his grandmother that had inspired them to use the pods for this in the first place, and he seemed to care about each potential case as if they were his own family.
Jacob had pinned a picture on the board—a girl with wavy dark hair and a small mouth, clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera as well as in her collared shirt and blazer, which looked like part of a school uniform.
Next to her, he pinned a picture of a boy with the same dark hair and eyes but otherwise, a very different face. Hers was a pale oval while his seemed to be all angles and planes.
“Taigan and Jamie Mattis,” he announced.
“I thought they were twins.”
“Not all twins are identical,” Amber pointed out. “And…well, a boy and a girl won’t be.”
“I suppose so.” Nick frowned.
“Taigan has a condition that literally has no name,” Jacob said. “Since she was four years old, she’s fallen into coma-like states. They vary in length between a couple of days and a few weeks, usually, although right now, she’s in one that has gone on for five months.”
Amber shook her head. “Those poor parents.”
“Those poor siblings,” Nick said.
“Her siblings?” She looked at him. “I guess. When I was little, I think I’d have given almost anything to have my brothers shut up for a couple of weeks.” She paused. “Too dark? Are we allowed to joke about this?”
“I’ll give it a pass,” Jacob said wryly, “but I have a famously bad sense of humor so don’t take my word for it.”
“I merely mean,” Nick said and drew their attention to him again, “that it’s hard to be the sibling everyone forgets about. And she has a twin, so it’s probably worse for him than it would be for a normal sibling. But don’t they also have an older sister?”
“Yes.” Amber flipped through the information and searched for the name. “Emilia. She’s nineteen.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s supposed to be in college, spreading her wings, and I bet when she calls home, all she hears about is her sister. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s as resentful as hell.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” She chewed her lip.
“Yeah,” Jacob said, “but that’s also not something we can fix.”
“I’m merely pointing it out.” Nick scanned the notes. “I have to say, they don’t seem very hopeful.”
“At this point, why would they be?” the other man countered. “But I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the twin heard about this and suggested it to them. He’s a seventeen-year-old boy and probably the most likely one in the family to do more research on PIVOT. And if he wants to get involved—”
“What about the older sister?” Nick asked.
“Yeah, it could have been her, too.” He shrugged. “Or maybe the mom or dad saw one of the interviews. We had a shit-ton of publicity. I merely…” He looked at the board. “The twin thing.”
His partners exchanged a look.
“I think the twins might be a key to each other,” Jacob said. “On the face of it, this isn’t something we can expect to fix, right? It’s a chronic condition. But this has been five months and she isn’t coming out. Even if it’s getting worse, even if we can’t fix it, we can give them a way to communicate with her and her a way to not be locked in. And if—” He shut his mouth with a snap.
“Okay.” Nick leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I want to be clear on something before we go any further.”
“Yeah?” Jacob knew him well enough to be wary.
“We modified PIVOT to help with immediate, chronic, trauma-related incidents,” he said. “People like Justin, who had trauma-induced comas. People with strokes.”
The other man remained silent. His arms were folded and he looked tense.
“We aren’t doctors,” Nick said. “We are merely people introducing a new technology for doctors to use, and no doctors have said they can help Taigan.”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “But it’s not like this is pumping her full of some experimental drug. We do a trial run and see if she integrates with the world.”
“Yeah, I know.” Nick leaned back in his chair and regarded him firmly. “But you want to fix her.”
“I can’t fix her,” the other man said instantly.
“Yeah, that’s the smart answer. That’s the right answer. But what I said was that you want to fix her, and I think I’m right about that.” He raised his eyebrows and pressed his palms together. “What you said about the twin thing—you think you can develop a plotline with Jamie to pull Taigan out of this coma and then somehow, she’ll never fall into one again.”
Amber looked from one to the other. She didn’t say anything.
Jacob’s shoulders hunched. He didn’t look at either of them and simply waited for this to blow over.