Chapter 330

A long time later, Isaac looked down at his own wound, now a ragged mess, with a face full of regret for the choice he’d made. After wiping the sweat off his soaked forehead, he glared at Anna.

“As I promised, your stitching is garbage.”

“I warned you.”

Gritting her teeth, Anna yanked off her blood-soaked latex gloves and threw them aside as she asked,

“When does the anesthesia wear off?”

Isaac rolled his arm, checking the movement in his shoulder, and answered flatly.

“He should’ve woken up by now, but he isn’t.”

Anna’s mood, which hadn’t been terrible until a moment ago, sank straight into the mud.

“What do you mean he isn’t waking up? Didn’t you give him too much?”

“The anesthesia has nothing to do with it. I used the bare minimum—so little it wouldn’t have been strange if he woke up during surgery.”

“Are you insane? Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s not the anesthesia, and it’s not the gunshot wound.”

“Then why won’t he—”

Cutting her off, Isaac said,

“That kid has a problem. A chronic genetic disorder where a Hyperaroused State repeats irregularly.”

Thrown by the unexpected explanation, Anna stared at Isaac blankly.

“What is that?”

Isaac set a wide gauze pad over the sutured shoulder wound and explained Type-X Syndrome. The hypothesis was that in exchange for physical capabilities beyond a normal Alpha’s, a Hyperaroused State repeats irregularly, and for reasons that remain unknown, the subject suffers Sudden Death. The sample size was so small that no one could definitively pin down the disease’s base mechanisms or progression, but Isaac said that some of the cases he’d seen had ultimately ended in Sudden Death.

Lewis, who had been under extreme stress, had effectively shut down from the moment they escaped the underground tunnel until right before the surgery, like a vegetable barely maintaining spontaneous breathing. In Isaac’s view, Lewis’s abnormal state was not wholly unrelated to his chronic illness.

As she listened in silence, Anna felt her expression harden by degrees. Her only family could have his life cut off at any moment—so unstable, so precarious. She wondered why life had to be this cruel to her. As if kicking despair away, Anna snapped viciously,

“That’s bullshit. You finished the surgery just fine. He’ll get up when he wakes up.”

Isaac nodded as if stepping back.

“Yeah. Let’s hope he wakes up soon.”

There wasn’t a trace of sincerity in him—more like he was dealing with an annoying cleanup task. Anna’s whole body trembled with despair and humiliation. With her face flushed and veins standing out, she spat,

“I’m taking him to a hospital right now.”

“How?”

“Give me that Ford Van you drove. If you don’t, I’ll kill you!”

“Kill? Who?”

At the sudden sound of a familiar voice, Anna jerked and whipped her head around. On the operating table, Lewis was groping at his bandaged abdomen as if swatting at the air.

“Lewis!”

“Where are we. Ah, n-no. What is this.”

His target was the bandage compressing his abdomen, but his half-awake hands only flailed through empty space. Pain, though, seemed razor-sharp; he let out a groan choked with it. When he finally planted his hand over the surgical site, he mindlessly stroked the spot that hurt and slowly scanned his surroundings.

A filthy shower room. A pathetic operating table. Blood stains smeared everywhere. After sweeping the scene in slow motion, Lewis stared blankly at Anna.

“What the hell is... happening right now? ...Did you... sell my organs or something?”

He tossed out the weak joke and laughed limply. With the anesthesia still clinging to him, it was like neither his mind nor his body could clear up the questions he carried. Worried he might be shocked, Anna spoke carefully.

“You were hurt, so we had to operate fast. It wasn’t a big surgery.”

“...Why was I hurt?”

“You got shot.”

“I did?”

“It’s already resolved. So you don’t need to be shocked.”

“Why did I get sh—”

All at once, the blank haze vanished from Lewis’s face. The memories that had been floating indistinctly sharpened, and understanding rushed in like a torrent. Like the torrent that had nearly swept them away—no, like the muddy surge of the Nathan River that had swallowed countless Alphas and turned reality into a landscape of hell.

Not everyone in Hybris had been a devil. There had been innocent people who tried to hold the line. But Isaac had punished them all without exception for the single reason that they were Alphas. A merciless massacre, as if he actually held the right to judge.

In an instant, Lewis’s eyes reddened and filled with tears. His gaze snapped straight onto Isaac. Using only his arms, Lewis pushed himself upright on the blood-soaked operating table, tried to stand, and lost his balance—crashing to the floor with a thud.

Barely bracing himself against the table, Lewis fumbled along its edge with his fingertips and grabbed a scalpel. But with his lower body unable to move, there was nothing he could do. All he managed was to crawl toward Isaac and swing his arm at him.

Watching Lewis’s madness with a deathly pale face, Anna hurriedly rummaged through her gear. There was still a syringe-type tranquilizer round in the magazine. She pulled one out, moved in behind Lewis, squeezed her eyes shut, and drove it into his right upper arm.

The purple ampoule emptied into Lewis in an instant, triggering an immediate reaction. Lewis collapsed, face down on the floor, breathing hard.

“...Anna, ...pl...ease.”

“I’m sorry. Fuck, I didn’t have a choice.”

Anna forced out a miserable excuse to Lewis, who was panting like an animal that had swallowed poison.

“You can’t get stressed right now. Your body can’t handle it.”

But she couldn’t tell if her words even reached him. Lewis was already slipping out of consciousness.

“If you sleep and wake up, you’ll feel better. So please... forget everything.”

Staring down at Lewis, limp like a wet rag, Anna muttered in a drained voice. Even after that, she couldn’t take her eyes off him for a long time. But there was no time left to sink into sentiment.

While Lewis lay sprawled on the floor, barely breathing, Isaac cleaned up around them without a word. He gathered scattered gauze, wrappers, and bloodied scraps of cloth into a pile and removed them, then washed away the blood that had spread across the floor with water.

Soon, Isaac scooped Lewis up and slung him over his back. Without speaking, the two of them left the shower room and walked toward where the bus was parked.

As they neared the bus, an unexpected smell stabbed at Anna’s nose. Grilled meat. Rachel had wiped down a barbecue grille that had been left abandoned at the campsite, lit a fire, and was preparing lunch. With the barbecue scent riding the wind, Anna realized belatedly that she was starving, like her stomach had been hollowed out.

Without thinking, she looked at Isaac. Carrying Lewis, he didn’t even glance toward the grille—he went straight into the bus.

“Did the surgery go well?”

Rachel approached holding tongs, asking with a bright face. Anna swallowed down her gloom by force and nodded.

“Yes.”

“Good. You hungry? Since the rendezvous point was a campsite, I bought some meat on the way. We can’t keep starving.”

Rachel trailed off and smiled as if making excuses for herself, then flicked her gaze toward the bus and added,

“Is that man vegan, by any chance? Sausage okay? Like, is he sensitive to sulfites, or does he have a pork or beef allergy?”

“No way. He’d chew leather if you gave it to him.”

“Thank God. But Siron and Baekgyeong... I guess they can’t really eat, can they?”

“Huh? What do you mean they can’t eat?”

Rachel hesitated, unable to speak.

“What is it? Why [N O V E L I G H T] are you dragging it out?”

“Well... you know.”

Rachel rose onto her toes, leaned close to Anna’s ear, and whispered,

“I think they’re in Rut. I went down to the lower site and I heard moaning.”

“Ah, fuck.”

“Hm?”

“No, it’s nothing.”

With a bitter smile, Anna followed Isaac into the bus. Maybe because the Hostages were all outside, the interior was empty, and in the space where seats had been removed for the camper conversion, a crooked wooden frame had been slapped together as a temporary structure.

Isaac was laying Lewis down on the plywood they’d put in place of a mattress. He adjusted Lewis’s posture carefully so he wouldn’t touch the sutured area. On Lewis’s filthy face, where blood and dust were caked together, tear tracks had carved long lines. The two of them watched Lewis sleep with his brow furrowed—without exchanging a single word—then went back outside.

Outside, the meal was in full swing. Rachel and a few others were busy grilling meat and handing it out to people in line. Anna and Isaac naturally joined the end and received plates piled high with food. Without either of them saying so, they walked away from the others and dropped to the ground, starting to eat.

A carefree atmosphere settled over the campsite, like a party in someone’s backyard. Laughter drifted over now and then. Maybe because it had been so long since they’d eaten outside—and filled their stomachs with charcoal-grilled meat—the rigid tension in people’s faces eased, as if they’d regained a slice of ordinary life. When most of them had eaten enough, Rachel came over to Anna.

“Anna, the license plate lookup you asked for came back.”

At first, Anna didn’t understand what Rachel meant. Then she remembered asking for a license plate check at dawn—on the sedan Isaac had spotted near the Psychological Health Center, the one suspected of carrying the Designer. Since Rachel couldn’t come in to work today, she’d asked a coworker to run it, and the result had just come in.

“The owner of the vehicle was the governor.”

“Richard Brown?”

“Yeah. It was him. That plate you checked... it really is connected to Hybris, right?”

“Yes. It is, but...”

Anna glanced sideways at Isaac. He was listening to them while wiping his mouth with a tissue.

“So the governor is deeply involved in all of this?”

“Yes. That’s certain.”

It wasn’t a matter of involvement. The hypothesis that the governor was the Designer rose up as the closest thing to the truth.

For some reason, Anna felt deflated. She didn’t know why, but somewhere inside her, she’d apparently been expecting a completely new figure to be at the center of it all. Instead, it was an old, short, potbellied politician who stood at the heart of these crimes.

“Now I know who the Designer is.”

“That... ah! He had a voice that sounded like he’d be handsome.”

Anna suddenly remembered what Siron had said—about meeting the Designer. Siron had said the Designer’s voice made him think of a handsome man, but Governor Brown’s voice was a mosquito-like whine you couldn’t call good even as a joke.

And besides, even if the governor already had so much and was merely profiting in exchange for shielding crimes, it was hard to believe he would take on the risk of operating Hybris directly.