Ultramarine | The Darkest Minds Fanfic

Chapter 16, Sheena

Cole's room looked exactly the same as the one he had in HQ. Unlike Cate, he doesn't personalize his room. Other than the picture of his sister and mother on the nightstand, there was almost no evidence suggesting that this room was inhabited.

　　Maybe it really wasn't. For all I know, he might have spent all his nights in Alban's office since we got here. His bed looked otherwise untouched, and the copy of Project Snowfall lay on his desk exactly the way I left it.

　　I sank down in the make-shift chair—a wooden crate I found in the storage room—and started flipping through the papers again. For the moment, the info I gathered is that the mutations happened to our brains, in Blues' and Greens' case, in the cerebral cortex, but in other cases, it might be in the limbic system, even the brainstem.

　　But this information really gets us nowhere. Even if I somehow managed to identify the mutated brain area in every color, I wouldn't know how to fix it—I don't have that information here, not the nature of the mutation, nor the proposed treatment or the dosage.

　　I need help. That much is clear. Just as I was thinking about asking Cole to...I don't know, get me a doctor here or something—I wish like hell Dr. Thorne is here—the door opened.

　　It was Liam, holding a chair, for some reason. "Oh, hi, Sheena. Sorry to barge in." He said, "I didn't know you'd be here. I should've knocked."

　　"It's okay." I said.

　　"I'm just here to get Cole this..." He came in, and propped the chair down beside me, "I noticed this room was lacking one of these yesterday, and I just happened to find some in the garage—"

　　"Thanks." I said. Actually, his intention was to help his brother, not me, which made me even more sad that he wasn't here to receive this. But then again, maybe they'll just have another fight. It had seemed like whenever I tried to talk to Cole about Liam, he'd snap.

　　"How's the garage coming along?" I asked. "Do you need help?"

　　"It's okay. You have other things to attend to, anyway." He leaned over to check on the paper. "You're still working on that, huh? Got anything yet?"

　　"No." I sighed. "Well, actually, I did get something. It suggests that the mutations are the result of anomalies in different brain areas, most noticeably in cerebral cortex, but also the thalamus, pineal body, and, I suspect, part of medulla oblongata and interventricular foramen—"

　　"Was that English?" Liam asked. "Because I don't think I understand any of it. Well, maybe besides 'different brain areas'."

　　I almost laughed. "Sorry, I got a little carried away. That was a very pretentious way to say that the mutations have something to do with our brain."

　　"Hmm, figures." He said, and I did laugh this time. Liam has this distinctive kind of warm about him. Very different from that of his brother's fire.

　　"You know what? I think Chubs would be very interested in all these." He continued after I was done laughing, "He is the only person I know that could possibly understand all those medical mumble jumble—"

　　"Really?" I asked. "How? Did he receive special training at any point?"

　　"No, he sort of...trained himself." He said, "His dad is a doctor, and on top of that, he's a huge nerd. He reads medical textbooks as bedtime readings."

　　That is kind of impressive. I always assumed that most people would fallen into utter idleness if given no purpose to learn or work, but apparently that's not Chubs. Even if he would probably never become a proper medical doctor, he still educated himself as much as he could just for the heck of it.