Chapter 13: Four in the Morning

I peeled the sticky note off the desk and logged in before anybody could change their mind.

The folder had four thousand photos in it.

I opened the first one.

A chest X-ray, clipped to a window, with a parking lot showing through the ribs.

I opened the second.

Film on a metal desk, shot from the side, so the lungs looked squeezed.

By the fortieth one, the lab had gone quiet around me.

Nobody talked to me.

A girl with a nose ring kept looking over, then looking away when I caught her.

At seven, they all packed up and left.

Nolan left last.

He stopped behind my chair and looked at my screen.

"You're still on the photos."

"I'm learning what's wrong with them."

"Everything's wrong with them. That's the problem."

He put on his coat.

I worked until two.

I slept four hours in my dorm and came back at eight on Friday.

The angles were the easy part.

Every X-ray film is a rectangle.

In a crooked photo, the rectangle turns into a lopsided shape.

I wrote the part that found the four corners and pulled them square again.

It was the same thing I'd done to the curved labels, just flatter.

By Friday night, the crooked photos read clean.

The glare didn't.

A white smear on a lung still looked like a white smear on a lung.

I tried twelve things on Saturday.

Every one of them made Lantern worse.

I put my head down on the desk for a minute.

When I lifted it, the clock on the wall said 3:56.

The door opened.

Nolan came in with earbuds in and two coffees in a cardboard tray.

He stopped when he saw me.

"You're still here."

"You brought two coffees."

"I thought the night guard might want one."

"Did he?"

"He's asleep."

He set one down next to my keyboard anyway.

He pulled out the chair from the next desk and sat on it backward.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Future Self Called to Save My Ruined Life from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.