Pearl

Chapter Twenty-Three: A Really Bad Idea

"What do you mean you've found nothing?" a tall man in a plain but well-made suit shouted, spittle forming at the edges of his lips. He stalked over to the one-way mirror that crowned the small meeting room that held himself, agent O'Lane, and the head of the agency's medical team.

On the other side of the window Lyly, in a borrowed grey sweatsuit, jogged lightly on a treadmill. She had a spring in her step and maintained her pace with a long, easy stride. She was otherwise unencumbered—they had tried to fit her with a face mask to measure her Vo2 max, but she had smacked it to the ground before they got close to putting it on her. The same had happened with the heart-rate monitors they had approached her (much more carefully) with, but with equal lack of success.

Next to Lyly stood a female medical examiner who also wore a set of baggy grey sweats. As with the mask, they had learned very early on that Lyly did not take well to the sight of white medical coats.

The man in the suit waved a hand at the scene through the one-way glass, jabbing an accusatory finger at the bouncing figure on the treadmill.

"She has been running like that for four hours now, and you're trying to tell me you haven't found any useful data on her?"

O'Lane clenched his jaw, both arms crossed firmly in front of his chest as he leaned against the back wall. He did his best to keep the small wooden conference table between them, although that put him directly behind the seated medic. For what it was worth the medic seemed too preoccupied with the folders of charts and data they had managed to compile on Lyly in the last 48 hours to notice the agent hovering behind him outside of his line of sight.

O'Lane had barely managed to meet Emma—current alias Lyly—before a suit from the agency had arrived in a blatant power-grab.

After all, this wasn't the "anonymous agent" type of suit. This was the "big mahogany desk" type of suit. O'Lane was somewhere in between in the hierarchy, which is why he bit back his instinctive lashing retort.

"It is indisputable that her stamina is astounding," the medic spoke up, pushing his glasses higher on his face as he looked over the papers spread out before him. "It appears simply that she does not get tired, at least not it the way we might understand it. And she is significantly heavier than we might project from her stature. But in regard to speed or strength, or any other physical manifestation of alteration there is nothing we can find. She is utterly uninterested in our tests, and our only potential measurement of her strength comes from material analysis of the medical instruments she seems to enjoy breaking. Even then, that only gives us at best a ballpark idea of what she can do."

"And it doesn't help that we can't do any sort of MRI or x-ray on her," O'Lane chimed in. "The instant she sees any of that stuff she becomes completely uncooperative, bordering hostile."

"Hence the materials we can analyze to estimate her strength," the medic confirmed. He turned his head to share a wry look with O'Lane. 

"Then figure out a different way to test her," the man in the suit said through clenched teeth.

"We've tried everything we can think of. Physical exams, endurance trials like this one, hell—we even tried to disguise some EEG sensors as kids stickers and run a quick scan, but some weird...electrical pulse broke the machine as soon as the scan initiated," O'Lane elaborated.

He sighed. The stickers had been his idea.

"This is unacceptable," the suit tried again. He swung around to face them, resting his back against the glass window. "If for no other reason than her massive retrograde amnesia, we need an MRI on her."