Beneath the Courage

Chances

Callem-

The next morning was hectic. Hice was up before anyone, which meant that everyone awoke soon after he came back inside. I had no doubt that he had been watching Fri from the side of the pool in between swimming off his frustration. 

When I walked into the living room, Oliver was being shaken awake by Hice. It was clear that he hadn't slept well, but Oliver rarely slept these days. He took a minute to come around, but as soon as he seemed remembered what was going on, he turned his attention to Fri. 

"Before I fell asleep last night I took a few samples from the bruising spot on his arm and called in a favor from one of my colleagues to come pick them up and run them." He said as he pulled out his phone, clearly reading through a message. 

"What a sick bastard." 

Oliver's words drew my eyebrows up and halted Parker and Jayson in the doorway to the hall. 

"What does it say?" Hice asked after an awkward silence. He was sitting close to Fri, one arm resting against the sofa, just barely touching the other mer's pale hand. 

"The results for the tests... the director injected Fri with a cocktail of chemicals, but the main one was formaldehyde." 

Frowning, I looked to Parker for an explanation, but he just looked very sick all of a sudden. Turning my attention to Fri, I noted the spreading black and blue skin along his upper arm. 

"It's a chemical used to preserve dead animals." Oliver explained as he loaded something into a syringe from a vile he took from his bag. 

"What are you doing?" Hice asked, his hand now gripping Fri's wrist tightly, his eyes on the syringe. 

Oliver flicked the tip of the needle, then moved to kneel next to Fri. "I'm going to give him something to hopefully fight the chemicals, but if my guess is correct, this isn't a one time occurrence." 

It isn't? 

"You mean that the director had put that chemical in him before?" Hice growled, eyes narrowing on the needle as Oliver carefully slid it into Fri's skin and pushed the end piece. "My coworker found patches of irregular cells."

Seeing Hice's growing frustration, Oliver hurried to explain further. "The drug is used to preserve dead things, but when exposed to living tissue, it can cause cells to multiply uncontrollably."

Parker and Jayson both stared at each other for a moment before finally walking into the room and sitting near Fri and Oliver. "That's what's wrong with him." Parker said, his voice having gone eerily quiet. 

"Wait... so you know what's wrong with him? So you can help him?" Hice asked, his voice raising with a faint hint of hope. 

"The cancer he has is extremely hard to treat." All eyes turned to Micah as he stepped into the room. The dark circles that had been below his eyes seemed to have grown in size, and he looked even more pale than he had when I'd brought him here. 

Hice actually looked like a puppy that had been kicked after the doctor had spoken. Mellac probably would have been the one who kicked it.

Micah took a seat on one of the folding chairs we'd brought in from the lanai. He almost looked like he'd fallen asleep right then and there, but after a few shallow breaths, he opened his eyes and looked at Oliver. 

"The director had ordered me to do tests on him since his capture. He didn't consider him strong enough to be worth passing on his genetics, so he was used as a study subject to try and get as much information as we could on mers. I didn't inject the preservative into his system, but I saw the director leaving the room his cell was in with an empty syringe more times than I could count. He must have been doing it this whole time... which means that he could easily be the cause of Fri's current state."