Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus by Mira Grant Read Free Book Online

of fashions.
    “Will she live?”
    Jill bit her lip, worrying it for a moment between her teeth before she said, “I’ll be honest: I don’t know. We’ve got her set up on a saline drip for the dehydration, and we can set up a feeding tube if she doesn’t wake up soon, but if she doesn’t get some body mass back, she’s not going to pull through. Even if she does…the withdrawal from the drugs she’s been taking would be hard on someone twice her size. As skinny and malnourished as she is, they could easily kill her.”
    Well, crap. “Can we synthesize something that will take the edge off? I don’t mind playing methadone clinic if it gets us a healthy person at the other end.”
    “Why?” Jill frowned. “I know you like a mystery, but there’s such a thing as going too far. We didn’t invite her here. Make her comfortable, provide palliative care, and if she dies, she dies. She didn’t become our responsibility just because she collapsed in front of you. If you’d taken Joe out an hour later, she would have died and risen, and you wouldn’t be trying to save her. And did you forget the part where she tried to shoot your dog? Shit. You’d fire half the staff for raising their voices to Joe. Why do you want to save someone who tried to hurt him?”
    “I’d fire the staff—including you, Jill—for raising their voices to an animal that they know is friendly, well-trained, and not a threat,” I said. “This woman didn’t know any of those things. A giant carnivore came bounding through the woods, and she reacted like someone who enjoyed being among the living. I can’t fault people for trying to stay alive. Not when everything we teach them is focused on survival. As for the rest…I was a doctor before I became anything else. The first rule we were taught in medical school was ‘Do no harm.’”
    That wasn’t quite true. The first rule we were taught in medical school was “A cadaver is not a toy.” Even though the bodies we used for practice were pickled and sterilized to the point of becoming virtually useless for any fine diagnostic work, they had still started out as living people, and they deserved our respect. That was what separated us from the zombies. We could still show respect for the things that shared our world. Even if sometimes that respect took the form of a clean death.
    “So?”
    “So if we let her die just because we didn’t invite her over for popcorn and a movie, we’re doing harm. This is an opportunity to practice medicine. Not mad science, not virology research, just medicine. The old-fashioned kind, where you start off with someone who’s sick, and you finish up with someone who’s well.”
    Jill’s eyes narrowed. “Sorry, boss, but I know you too well to believe this degree of altruism. What’s the real deal?”
    “The real deal is, she found us somehow. Someone told her that we were here to find, and that if she wanted drugs, she should come looking.” I felt my expression harden. I made no effort to soften it. Jill had seen me at my worst, and she hadn’t run screaming into the night. She wasn’t going to run now. “I need her alive, and I need her lucid enough to tell me what brought her to our doorstep, because whatever it is, it’s not going to happen again. Do you understand? Now, keep running those blood tests, and whatever sort of methadone clinic we have to become, that’s what we’re going to be. We’re going to save her life if it kills her.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” said Jill, and twisted back around to her computer. The conversation was over. I had my information, and she had her orders. Now all we had to do was save a life.
    4.
    Mystery girl was still unconscious when I returned to the viewing area, Joe sticking by my side like a happy, tail-wagging shadow. Not-Daisy jumped at the sound of my footsteps, and jumped again when she saw Joe. I frowned at her.
    “You may want to think about taking up yoga,” I said. “It’s very calming, and