The Brokenhearted by Amelia Kahaney

my voice scraping my throat. Again I notice the tight, tingly hum in my chest, the whirring sensation.
    Jax interrupts. “The river was ice-cold. Your heart stopped. Ford tried mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late. You were . . . clinically dead. Until we brought you back, of course.”
    “Brought me back how?” I whisper, putting a hand onto the metal table to steady myself. The lab animals. The scalpels. The—oh, God . The walls . The blood spattered across them. I begin to shake so violently that my body rustles the paper on the gurney.
    “Maybe you should lie back down for a minute?” Jax says, her lips pursed with concern. She presses two fingers against her wrist, on top of the heart tattoo. “You’re still extremely weak. I’ll need to keep you for observation for at least a couple more days—”
    “I’m fine,” I lie, my throat constricting, my larynx strangled by a crushing fist of dread. “Just tell me what you did.”
    Jax nods. “I dabble in a lot of different sciences. Chemistry, biology, genetics, a bit of physics—” She titters nervously. “I was actually the youngest professor ever hired in the bioengineering department of Bedlam University, before a couple of experiments got away from me and they raided my lab.” Her expression grows stormy.
    “Total mad scientist, in other words,” Ford interrupts. “She’s wanted by the feds, which is why she never leaves this lab. I do her errands, buy her equipment, that kind of thing.”
    Jax scowls and perches on a rolling metal stool, her face now level with mine. “Yes, Ford, I don’t know what I’d do without you. But enough about me, right?” More nervous laughter spills from her mouth, and she stops abruptly, growing serious again. “After three minutes without a heartbeat, a person is pronounced clinically dead. Your heart stopped for approximately forty minutes, but because of the lake, you were also experiencing hypothermia, which is very good for a dead person. The river may have saved your life every bit as much as the surgery.”
    Surgery. I feel bile rise in my throat and swallow it down. “I hooked you up to the ventilator for a while.” Jax waves her hand toward a huge, hulking machine with accordions encased in glass tubing above six rusty dials. “But your heart refused to restart on its own. So I intervened.”
    “You intervened,” I repeat dumbly.
    “See those sweet little guys?” Jax points to the corner of the room. I force myself to look at the table with the cages, where the rats are frantically racing on their creaky wheels. “Maybe we should go take a closer look at them, if you think you’re strong enough to get there.”
    I nod, sliding carefully off the metal table and following Jax and Ford toward the cages, careful not to move too far from the IV pole still dripping pink fluid into my veins. We stand side by side and watch them run. They’re moving so fast in their exercise wheel that their feet are just a white blur.
    “About a year ago, I used recombinant technology to culture stem cells from a hummingbird and grow a powerful chimeric heart. These little speed demons each have one.”
    I stare at the furry blurs of motion, transfixed by their speed. Their little legs move as rapidly as hummingbird wings. “Chimeric? As in a chimera?” I think back to Greek mythology and flash on the sculpture in our foyer, his eagle head, his lion body. “Like a griffin?”
    “Like a griffin, yes . . . in that their hearts are formed from a combination of more than one species.”
    “And . . . how does that relate to me?”
    Jax turns to me, her expression delighted. “Well, now you have one, too.”
    I watch her mouth move as she goes on excitedly, spirals of her silver hair bouncing as she talks, her eyes dancing. But all I hear is the whirring, louder now that I know its terrifying source. So loud it’s thudding inside my head. I start to feel faint, the room stretching out like a funhouse