Chapter 8: The Harvest

Before any of the rest of it could happen, they needed Cissy’s own cells first — a fact Dr. Li explained to both children with the same plain care she’d used for everything else, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded.

“Before we give you the strongest medicine yet, we’re going to take some of your own blood-making cells out first and keep them safe,” she said. “Think of it like putting good seeds away in a jar before a big storm. Once the storm’s passed, we plant them back, and they grow you a whole new, healthy set.”

“How do you get them out?” Cissy asked.

“Through a machine, not a needle in your bones this time. Your blood goes out one tube, through the machine, which picks out the cells we need, and the rest goes right back in through another tube. You’ll be hooked up to it for a few hours, but it doesn’t hurt. Mostly it’s just boring.”

“I can handle boring,” Cissy declared, with the weary authority of a girl who’d handled a great deal worse than boring by now.

Liam sat through the entire apheresis session cross-legged at the foot of the bed, unusually quiet, watching the tubing with open fascination rather than worry — the machine, for once, wasn’t hurting her at all, and something in that seemed to relax him in a way none of the other procedures had.

“It’s kind of amazing,” he murmured, at one point, mostly to himself. “You’re basically lending yourself to yourself. Future-you gets to use past-you’s cells.”

“That’s a very good way to put it,” Dr. Li said, looking up from the machine’s readout with something like genuine surprise. “Better than the seed jar, honestly.”

Surgery

The surgery to remove what remained of the tumor came four days later, once imaging confirmed the induction chemo had shrunk it as much as it was going to. It was, by every measure Dr. Li gave them beforehand, the most serious procedure Cissy had faced yet — hours rather than minutes, a real recovery afterward, real risk attached to it in a way the biopsies hadn’t carried.

“I won’t pretend this one’s small,” Dr. Li admitted to Bea and Étaín the morning of, with Liam listening from his usual chair. “It’s a real surgery, several hours, and she’ll need real recovery time after. But the imaging looks good. I’m optimistic going in.”

“Define optimistic,” Bea pressed.

“I think we get it all,” Dr. Li replied. “I won’t know for certain until we’re in there. But I like our odds today more than I’ve liked them at any point so far.”

Liam didn’t grip the gurney rail this time, the way he had for the biopsy months before. He’d learned, by now, that the fight wasn’t worth the energy it cost him, and that Walt’s system — first call, not last — had never once failed him yet.

“Same deal?” he asked Walt, resigned to it already.

“Same deal,” Walt said. “Coloring, waiting, first call. You’ve got the routine down better than some of my coworkers.”

The surgery ran just over five hours, and it was, for most of that stretch, uneventful in the way that meant nothing had gone wrong rather than nothing was happening. Liam sat through most of it steadier than he had for any procedure before — no wincing, no hand pressed to his own side, nothing.

“That’s good, right?” Bea asked him at the four-hour mark, unable to keep the question in any longer. “You’re not feeling anything bad?”

“She’s asleep the whole deep way,” Liam said. “Like the biopsy. Quiet. I only feel the big stuff when she’s more awake than this.”

It held true. The surgeon came out just past the five-hour mark, still masked, pulling it down as she crossed the waiting room toward them, and Étaín read the set of her shoulders before a word was said.