I go for the first door I see. Locked. Damn. I place my head next to it; I can hear lugging noises on the other side. It must be a boiler room. The next door I come to is the morgue. I wrinkle my nose at the thought. As curious as I am to see if any of the research occurring in these hospitals has landed test subjects in here, I decide against it. Who knows if victims of biological warfare are in there? It would be a damn shame to survive cancer only to die of a virus.

The next door is unmarked. I try the handle. Just like the boiler room, this one is locked. Next to the handle, however, is a scanner. I lift the plastic card in my hand and hold it in front of the device. It beeps and a light flashes green next to it. I try the handle again and the door opens.

I slip into the room and flip on the lights. Whoever normally works here is gone for the time being. I glance around, almost afraid to touch anything. The counters are covered with racks of vials, strange machines, and data readouts.

I don’t know where to start or what I’m looking for. I never thought my problem would be making sense of the research I came across. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m in the right place.

I begin moving, my eyes scanning the papers strewn across the counters. I see numbers and percentages, but nothing that I recognize. Moving further into the room, I scan the counters, the machines, the spines of books that are sitting out.

I want to scream. Nothing here corroborates the Resistance’s sparse findings.

I’m about to leave when the title of a document catches my eye: “Recent Medical Advances in Memory Recall and Suppression.” It looks like an article from a medical journal, and the publication date printed below it is from a month ago. Recent. I read the abstract at the top of the page, which summarizes the content of the article.

There are more scientific terms than normal jargon, but from what I read, the topic seems to have to do with repressing long term and short term memories as well as reversing memory loss.

Those dazed technicians the Resistance had reported on when I’d been back in the WUN… they’d been in the king’s research labs. Could their predicament be related to this?

The very non-scientific wheels of my mind whir. Why would anyone want to repress a person’s memories? The answer is so simple that I’m embarrassed I asked the question in the first place.

Control.

The last things I read are the news articles someone’s taped to the wall. They all have to do with biological warfare. Some discuss the pathogens involved, and some go over the cures the king doled out once a region fell.

Death and health were the stick and carrot the king regularly used to gain control of a new land on the eastern hemisphere. He still doesn’t seem to understand that repairing that which he broke doesn’t make it new again. It makes it scarred.

I try the other doors in the basement. All are locked, and none will open with the key card in my hand. It makes me think that I never entered the room where the real research is occurring. A simple nurse might not have that kind of clearance.

I’d like to explore the rest of the hospital, but I’ve already been gone too long. So I walk back to the closet, change into my hospital gown, and place the scrubs where I found them.

“Last time I checked, the bathroom was across the hall.”

I spin, only to come face-to-face with my guard. Despite his soft-spoken words, he’s angry.

My first instinct is to become defensive. So I do the opposite. “What does it matter to you? I’m the queen.”

He grabs my upper arm. “You need to get back to your room, now.” He begins leading me down the hall.

“I’m going to tell the king that you’re manhandling me,” I say, as I yank futilely against his grip. “He’s not going to like that.”

My guard chooses to ignore me. He opens the door to my room and pushes me inside.

“Hey—!” The door slams shut behind me.

What an ass.

I lean against the wall, not ready to get back in bed, and let my eyes drift around the room. They land on a calendar that hangs across from me.

I still. It says it is May, but it should still be April. I’m about to shrug it off when my hand goes to the smooth skin of my stomach.

What if some new technology was used on me—the same one that removed all traces of the king’s bullet wounds from his body?

Perhaps I’m being paranoid, reading into things that aren’t there, but that thought doesn’t stop me from reaching for the door handle next to me and slipping back out into the hall.

“Your Majesty,” the guard growls, blocking my exit. I feint to the right and duck under his arm, hurrying to the main desk.

“Can you tell me what day it is?” I ask, breathlessly to the nurse behind the desk, the same nurse who helped me earlier.

A moment later my guard comes to stand beside me, but he doesn’t drag me off like I worried he might. I guess threatening to narc on him was effective after all.

The nurse across from me looks baffled by my request—or maybe just the fact that I’m out here again. “Of course, my queen,” she says. She turns to the screen in front of her. “It’s May tenth.”

I do the math in my head. That would mean that it’s been almost three weeks since I married the king and over two weeks since I came here for the operation.

“Is something the matter, Your Majesty?” the nurse asks.

I shake my head, my mind still far away. The surgery should’ve taken hours, not days, and definitely not weeks. I’m not being paranoid after all. Something did happen to me.

“You’re sure that’s today’s date?” I ask.

The nurse glances from me to her screen again, looking uncomfortable. “Yep. May tenth.” She smiles warmly at me, but it falters a bit when she takes in my expression. “Would you like me to escort you back to your room?” The nurse eyes me and the guard at my side, missing nothing.

“I’m fine.” I back away from the main desk.

“I’ll have someone check in on you in five minutes,” the nurse says. She says it to comfort me, but I know her true motives are to make sure I’m okay before the king returns.

I walk back in a daze. Why would Montes not mention that I’d been out for weeks? And, more importantly, why was I out for that long?

Thirty minutes later, I hear the click of expensive shoes on the hospital linoleum. The king is coming back to my room, and I’m ready for him.