"They aren't supposed to feel," Dr. Daas' annoyed voice says just a few feet from Forty's head, the woman scribbling something harshly onto her notepad. "She isn't supposed to feel guilt."

"Forty has never been a standard specimen," Dr. Zapata points out, warmth radiating from his palm where it holds a puff of gauze on Forty's head.

"This ruins so much of the trials. How do we get her to eat?" Daas pushes. She sulks for a split second, then goes ram-rod straight and begins frantically cleaning up the successful part of the experiment. "If she doesn't eat, we can't examine how blood processes in her."

"Just give her something dead already," Jane says from her position in the rolling chair next to Forty's hospital bed. "You know she hates killing things."

"That doesn't exactly replicate the conditions of infection, does it Dr. Garcia?" Dr. Daas grits out, stacking a box of unused microscope slides.

"You aren't going to get it any other way," Jane retorts, running an absent couple of fingers through Forty's hair. It feels comforting, Forty realizes, to have someone touch her when she feels down. Even if that person is Jane, who only recently learned to be kind to her.

Dr. Daas looks extremely frustrated for a moment, fingers clenching harshly onto a stack of papers. Forty can practically hear the gears running in her head. Like a timer signaling an oven is done, she clicks her tongue, dark eyes rising to stare at Forty. "Maybe we don't have to get her to eat," she begins, a small smirk stretching the wrinkles around her mouth. "If my theory is correct, she shouldn't even have to eat anything. What will it matter if she filters the blood like the others? That means nothing to me." She clammers over to the cluttered desk in the opposite corner of the room, quickly scribbling a note to herself. "All that matters is if she can fight off the virus."

"You want to infect her again?" Dr. Zapata asks incredulously, pausing his ministrations on Forty's forehead. "The virus mutates too quickly, and she already shows the gene. That will just make her sick for a couple of days."

"No!" Dr. Daas says matter of factly, excitement shining in her usually dull eyes. "That's where you're wrong. Sure, she shows the gene, but look at her! Look at how she eats, heals, acts. She isn't normal."

"We've known that," Jane says. "But is it worth risking her, our only specimen displaying these characteristics, for a theory?"

"Well, I guess I shouldn't have called it a theory," Dr. Daas says icily. "It's more than that. We've been running trials on the rats, the pigs. It shouldn't kill her."

"Aren't the rats and the pigs enough? We're talking about knowingly infecting her with the Chupa virus."

"The virus she already has," Dr. Daas practically spits. "Stop acting like she's human and think about us." She waves her hand around the room, holds her palms up towards the intercom. "Think about what will happen if she's able to cycle the virus."

"Forty could be a living, breathing vaccine," Dr. Zapata says, voice barely above a whisper.

Silence falls across all three monitors, each looking away from each other as if afraid to find what lay in their eyes. Forty still feels a little woozy from banging her head against the cage, but she's awake enough to realize that the coming days will be difficult. She has a feeling that she will see Dr. Daas a lot more, and be subject to her scalpel with an increasing severity.

"But..." Jane begins, voice small. "We must consider the ethical dilemmas."

Dr. Daas rounds on her. "What ethical dilemma?" she yells. She points at Forty. "That is not a human. This is the same as animal testing. It's for the betterment of ourselves."

Though these mighty beasts are a force to be reckoned with, they are no match for the intelligence of man!

That's right, all along Forty was mistaken. She has spent way too much time equating herself to humans, finding solace in their similarity to herself, that she forgot what would always pop up on her blood tests: Chupa. No matter how much she resisted human blood, no matter how long she could go without eating, she would always be a Chupa. She could go a whole lifetime without drinking water, could heal from a deep bullet wound in a matter of weeks, could bring down a full-sized buck on her own, and that means that she will never be human. Forty is an animal, one that may wear the skin of a person, but inside she is sustained by blood that isn't her own.

The look Jane gives her when her dark eyes land on Forty's face sends a chill down Forty's spine. They're wide, glassy, and she looks at Forty without really seeing her. The soothing hand in her hair turns harsher, more frantic, as if she hopes her fingers will tangle in the strands and become inseparable. Jane parts her lips to speak, but falters and looks away instead, perhaps seeing all her fears and anxieties reflected in the expression on Forty's face.

"We have to try," Dr. Daas says. "For everyone."

"For yourself," Jane spits, then sends the chair she sits in reeling backwards and slams the door behind her. Forty lays her head back on the table, experimentally running sore fingers through her flaxen hair. One part of her wants to cry out for Jane, but the other is more realistic. This side of her has always known that despite what momentary kindness Jane sprouts, her brash personality and want to be right will eventually override it.

"Joseph, take her back to her domicile please. She's getting distressed," Dr. Daas says, more than a little annoyed.

Forty looks down by her toes to see the mussed sheet where she's been struggling against the binds holding her ankles to the examination table. Her hips and abdomen are sore from where she's been twisting, aggravating her bruised back in her subconscious attempt to escape. She feels numb, but disturbingly there is an undertone of acceptance. What is Forty, but a vessel to understand and study? Her fate is to be picked apart, and no sudden love from Jane or new friendship from Forty-Five or a display of strength against Thirty-Seven will ever change that. Being a specimen has always been Forty's occupation, the one thing she is useful for, but in the quiet moments between Dr. Daas' muttering and the gentle hands of Dr. Zapata lifting her from the table, Forty only feels a bone-deep terror. She wants to thrash in Dr. Zapata's grip, tear at his face with her broken claws, then leap across the room and silence Dr. Daas. Instead, she remains catatonic in the large man's arms, both feeling nothing and everything at the same time.

When Dr. Zapata carries her through the hallway, Forty watches as the LED lights flicker by. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven panels pass over her head. She hears a whoosh of air, then looks up to see one of the scent filtering vents, one much larger than at the beginning of the gray floor. Except, the whir of air passing through sounds different, as if the gust is traveling from this floor into the next. Distantly, Forty wonders where it leads.

Zapata places her down on her bed when he gets to her domicile, tucking the black sheets over her. He stands at her side for a moment, eyes running over her face as if trying to discern her emotions, but she remains blank as a slate. "Call me if you need anything," Zapata says, then unclips a strange black device from his belt and tucks it into the gap between Forty's mattress and bed frame. He does it as gently as a man his size can, barely making a noise as his body blocks the view of the camera in the corner of the room.

When he leaves, the absence of breath and the space left by his large form seem to shimmer, a mere mirage. Forty questions if he was ever even there, if he really did just hide a monitor tool away in her bed. She doesn't look at the offending corner, too tired and dazed to care very much, and tugs the sheets roughly over her scraped shoulders to hide them from the cool air.

"You came back," Forty-Five says quietly, her voice a little shaky. "You came back."

"Yes. For now," Forty tells her, blinking her eyes against the rays from the afternoon sun.

"For now?"

"I think one day they will kill me," Forty says, turning onto her back to stare up at the gray ceiling. "I think I have done something right, finally, and they will kill me for it."

"What did you do right?"

"They think I have some sort of cure for a sickness. I don't know medicine, though, so how could I? But they think I do, and that's enough."

Towards her feet, she hears the clanging of Thirty-Seven beating on his door, his feral screams echoing off the metal walls. "He'th been like that thince they took you back there," Forty-Five says. Forty hears the soft whisper of skin against grass as she settles against the window. She makes no move to join her.

The sounds Thirty-Seven makes are primal, angry. Forty can practically feel his claws in her skin, the itch of his fangs begging to pierce her throat. She knows that the concept of revenge is far from foreign to humans, and she never suspected it would be so ingrained in Thirty-Seven who avidly hates them. He wants a piece of her, a matching hole in her throat, claw scars across her torso. She wonders if it took him long to heal, if he even really felt much pain, if he was scared for a moment that she would sink her teeth in deeper and finish him. Did he fear death? Surely he did, what with the way he fought so violently to cling to it, to let everyone within the vicinity of his cage know he was alive.

"You've never heard of anyone being tested for a cure?"

"You athk a lot of quethionth," Forty-Five says, the smirk palpable in her voice. "But again the anther is no, ath long ath I can remember."

"So it's a possibility?"

"Yeth. There alwayth ith."

Forty's mind traverses to the empty domicile near the doorway, trying to picture a specimen just like her inhabiting those walls. Maybe that's why no one lived there anymore, because that specimen too had outlived her usefulness. Did she take the sentencing silent and grave like Forty, or had she pounded away at the glass walls of her cage like Thirty-Seven, demanding her way?

"Is a cure important?" Forty asks, this time turning on her side to try and catch Forty-Five's expression.

She looks pensive, her brows a little knotted up, a pink tongue flashing out to lick a dry tooth. "Who careth if thomething ith important. What do you want?"

Forty turns the question over in her head for a moment, but the answer has always been clear. She never asked to be born, to watch VCR tapes of humans hunting lions, to eat putrid blood, to follow an exact routine and then have it ripped away from her, to fall in line with the monitors' insults, to go up to this godforsaken floor, to get attacked by Thirty-Seven, to bite him. She never asked for any of it, so what does a cure for these humans matter to her? "I don't want to help them," she says, tone clearer than before.

"Good," Forty-Five says, her voice tinged with relief. "Tho don't be a puthover."

Thirty-Seven's infernal screeching continues, but this time instead of clamping her hands over her ears, Forty practically jumps out of bed to press her hands against her side of the plexiglass wall. Here, his yelling is louder, more coherent. Get me out, get me out, GET ME OUT! When he pauses to take a breath or perhaps nurse the assuredly bruised knuckles he sports, Forty slaps her hand against the glass pane, relishing in the dull echo that travels around the domicile. She does it again, this time with a fist, then her feet, and soon it turns to an all out assault on the doorway. When she opens her mouth to breathe, a guttural growl comes out instead, and soon she joins in Thirty-Seven's cries. She shouts about her anxieties, about all she has kept buried inside, and the words leave her like vomit. She's practically howling, more animal than human, and when she pauses to collect herself she realizes Forty-Five is doing the same, and Thirty-Seven has redoubled his efforts.

The product is a cacophony of sound. Sometimes, they produce a word, and the effect is a melancholic reminder of their humanity. Most of the time, they scream. They cry, screech, toss their heads back and curse the cameras watching them from the corner of the room. Sweat beads off of them, dashes the mirrored walls a murky opal, and Forty feels tears in her eyes, sanguine and salty. Finally letting out everything she has pent up feels similar to sinking her teeth in Thirty-Seven's neck. It feels right, like this is something she has always meant to do but never got around to, and perhaps that is the truth. After all this time, Forty is not content. She had been simply observing the world around her, allowing curiosity to be the forefront emotion in her mind to hide away all the uglier ones.

While the humans may see a cure in Forty's veins, all she sees is the blood of others, a reminder that she is not human, and will never be.