Chapter 110: Blood Test

Astrid Vale

I didn’t know how many days I’d been down here. And I hated how I was getting comfortable with it.

Maximus found me not long after breakfast and told me, in that same easy tone he used for everything, that he wanted me to have a medical examination.

I stiffened immediately. "Why?"

"You arrived here unconscious," he said. "We simply want to confirm you’re physically well. Nothing more."

It sounded reasonable enough, and I hated that it did, because agreeing meant walking further into his world on his terms. But refusing would have meant admitting how much the idea frightened me, and I wasn’t ready to give him that. "Fine," I said.

He led me somewhere different this time, away from the streets and market stalls I’d already grown vaguely familiar with, into a section of the settlement that felt colder, more sterile, the walls whiter and the air sharper with something antiseptic. It looked like an actual clinic, organized and clean in a way the rest of the town, for all its normalcy, hadn’t quite managed.

Dr Audrey was already waiting inside, and I recognized her instantly. The same woman who’d bandaged my wrists that first day, the one who’d looked horrified by a few shallow scratches while I was still chained to a bed. If I remembered clearly, her name was Audrey.

"Astrid," she said, offering a small, careful smile. "Please, sit."

I sat on the edge of the examination table, watching her hands as she moved through the room gathering what she needed.

"How have you been feeling?" Audrey asked. "Any dizziness? Headaches?"

"A little tired," I admitted. "Nothing serious."

"Any pain?"

"No."

She checked my pulse, my temperature, asked me to follow her finger with my eyes, tested the strength in my grip. Everything about it felt entirely ordinary, the kind of routine check I might have gotten at Moonshade’s own infirmary if I’d ever bothered going. I felt myself relaxing slightly despite everything, the tension in my shoulders easing as the examination continued without producing anything alarming.

"I’ll need a small blood sample," she said eventually, reaching for a thin needle and a vial.

"Is that necessary?" I asked.

"Standard procedure," she said. "It helps us rule out anything that wouldn’t show up otherwise."

I let her draw it, watching the thin line of red fill the vial. For a moment, nothing happened. She capped it, turned toward the small table behind her to label it.

Then she stopped.

She held the vial up slightly, tilting it toward the light, her expression shifting into something I couldn’t immediately place. Her mouth tightened. Her fingers curled more carefully around the glass, like she’d suddenly remembered it was fragile in a way it hadn’t been a second ago.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

"No," she said too quickly, setting the vial down and turning her back slightly, angling her body between me and whatever she was doing with it. "Nothing at all."

I didn’t believe her. Maximus, who’d been standing near the doorway through all of this, stepped forward smoothly.

"The equipment down here is older than what you’re likely used to," he said. "Sometimes the readings look strange before they settle. It’s nothing to be concerned about."

I looked between the two of them. His explanation was calm, reasonable, delivered without a flicker of hesitation. But Dr Audrey still hadn’t turned back around, and when she finally did, her expression had smoothed itself into something careful and practiced that didn’t match the raw surprise I’d caught a moment ago.

I noticed then that the sample wasn’t going where the rest of the medical supplies were being organized. Instead, another attendant appeared from a side door and took the vial from her hands directly, cradling it like something valuable rather than routine.

"Where is that going?" I asked.

"Processing," Dr Audrey said simply.

"Why does it need to go somewhere separate?"

"All samples do," she said. "It’s simply how our facility is organized."

I let a beat pass before asking, as casually as I could manage, "Do you take blood from everyone who comes from the surface?"

"When it’s warranted," Maximus said, before Dr Audrey could answer at all.

"And it was warranted for me because...?"

"Because you arrived here unconscious and injured," he said smoothly. "We’d be poor hosts if we didn’t make sure nothing was seriously wrong."

It was a good answer. It was almost too good, delivered without the smallest crack in his composure, and that bothered me more than if he’d stumbled over it even slightly. I asked one more question, something small about how long results usually took, and he answered that too, easily, without giving me anything solid enough to hold onto.

I left the clinic with nothing I could actually point to as proof. Just a doctor’s face going pale for half a second over a vial of ordinary blood, and an explanation smooth enough that arguing with it would have made me sound paranoid even to myself.

As they led me back through the corridor, I thought about everything else that had happened since I’d arrived here. The old woman at the market asking if I ever got seriously injured, if I healed differently than most people. The way certain townspeople stared a beat too long before looking away. The scream that had torn through the corridor two days ago, a scream I could still feel the shape of in my chest even though the actual sound had slipped completely out of reach no matter how hard I tried to grab it back.

And now this. A sample of my own blood, treated like it mattered more than blood should.

I didn’t let myself leap to any conclusions. I didn’t know what any of it meant, whether it connected to some larger purpose or was simply the paranoid pattern-matching of someone who’d been kidnapped and was desperate to find danger in every small interaction. Maybe Dr Audrey really had just seen something odd in an old machine. Maybe the staring really was simple curiosity about a surface-dweller none of them had ever met before.

But I decided, walking back toward my room with Maximus at my side making idle conversation I barely heard, that I was going to start paying much closer attention to everything happening around me. Every glance, every question, every small inconsistency that didn’t quite fit the story I was being told.

I looked back once before the clinic disappeared around the corner behind us, watching the door swing shut on whatever was happening to that vial of my blood inside.

For the first time since I’d woken up in that white room, someone had looked at me like I was something unusual.

I had absolutely no idea why.