Page 72 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
“What happened?” he asked, rubbing his chest. He half expected to find a deep, bleeding gash there. It didn’t hurt anymore, but the memory was still fresh. And even if he wasn’t dead, he was sure something had gone very,verywrong.
“Mite redundancy has reached a hundred percent.” Nori beamed, motioning towards her laptop. The contents of her med-kit lay strewn on the floor beside it.
“No. It can’t be. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Vir. Look.”
She turned the screen towards him, and he glanced at it for all of two seconds before shaking his head in disbelief.
“But the pain,” he said. “It felt like I was dying. I was certain I was.”
“About that…” Nori bit her lip, a spike of guilt poking through her happy swirls. “There was a small possibility… a tiny one. Of something like this happening. I should’ve warned you, I’m sorry.”
“Possibility ofwhathappening?”
“Think of a building’s power switching to mains after it’s been operating on a generator for a while,” she explained. “Well, not exactly, but I can’t think of a better comparison right now. It wasn’tsupposedto hurt. But when the last of the mites shut off, and your heart and the chip fully took over, knowing your body’s not going to reject them anymore, there was supposed to be asmalljolt of shock. The only possibility of it being painful was if your heart was overloaded at the time because of high stress levels or if you were in the middle of a strenuous workout, like two of my mice who—uh—anyway. I should’ve warned you. I’m sorry.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in.
“So, you’re telling me—” he asked, amused at her mood flickering rapidly between guilty and overjoyed, “—that it wouldn’t have hurt if I hadn’t been running with you in my arms?”
Nori nodded, mouthing, “sorry” again.
“Well, it wasn’tthatbad. I’d do it again.” He shrugged.
“Really?”
“I’m joking. Please don’t shock me again.”
Nori laughed, and he pulled her to him.
“What are you doing?” She asked with her face smushed into his chest as he gently stroked her hair.
“Something I regretted not doing enough of when I thought I was dead.” And he pressed his lips to her brow, with a whispered, “I love you.”
Nori
Nori hummed a tune under herbreath while she waited for the juice bar lady to return with her order. It was a habit she’d picked from Vir. She turned to look at him standing on the other side of the road beside their rental bike.
He waved at her, and she waved back.
It had taken her a week to finish all her papers and reports after the mite redundancy had hit a hundred percent. And ever since then, she’d been sneakily buying time, rephrasing a sentence here, fixing a typo there. At one point she switched the font to comic sans in every single file and then switched it back the next day.
She didn’t want to go back just yet, even though she no longer had a plausible reason to keep Vir away from Delhi. It was embarrassing to admit. But maybe he already knew, because he hadn’t confronted her about it.
She paid for the juice, turned around with the chilled takeout tumblers, and froze.
Vir was busy squinting at a flickering streetlamp in the distance when a man approached him from behind and pressed something to his back.
Tumblers dropped; Nori was across the street with the creep pinned to the sidewalk before Vir was even done raising his hands. Holding the man’s head glued to the pavement with her knee, and his arm twisted behind him, she scanned their surroundings for the knife.
“Call the cops!” She yelled at Vir, pressing down on the man’s skull. She swore she’d make sure he had the lovely zig-zag pavers indented permanently on his face.
HOW DARE HE—
“No, no, NO! Nori, he’s not—” Vir knelt beside her, trying to pry her fingers off the guy’s twisted wrist, his face a strange mixture of terrified and amused.
“Stay back!” She shoved him off. She still couldn’t locate the weapon and didn’t want him within stabbing range of the pig she was about to slaughter if Vir didn’t make the call soon. “I’ve got this. Call the cops NOW.”
