Thinking back on it now, Jonah had been keeping a very close eye on her.
He'd kept turning his head to see if Mai Mingle was keeping up. Whenever she hesitated, he'd urge her to keep moving. Even for a kind young man, he seemed a little too concerned with her safety—not only did he refuse the Illusion, but he was even willing to abandon the search for his companion for her sake.
Of course, these were all just Mai Mingle's realizations in hindsight.
"You're that confident?"
Jonah's voice was still very quiet. Though no longer a whisper, it was as if he didn't want anything else to hear him.
"This is your first time in the Nest. How could you be so sure that ringing the bell would make a resident appear? What if a resident didn't go? Or what if one went, saw they couldn't beat the others, and decided not to enter the room at all?
"If I really were just a Hunter who was caught escaping and thrown into a hospital ward, wouldn't your suspicion be costing you a powerful ally for no reason?"
"...So are you?" Mai Mingle asked quietly.
Jonah licked his dry lips, thought for a moment, and smiled.
"...I'm not."
Before the two words had even faded, Mai Mingle kicked a chair, sending it flying straight at Jonah.
Without waiting to see if it hit, she immediately turned and ran. A loud CLANG echoed as the chair seemed to strike something hard, the sound reverberating with a heart-stopping echo through the empty, silent waiting hall.
It didn't sound like it had hit a person, but Mai Mingle had no time to look back and see what happened. She burst out of the nurse's station, sprinted across the hall, and charged toward the corridor she'd come from. She remembered several exam rooms there with their doors ajar. If she could get into one and lock it, she might be able to hold Jonah off.
A sharp whistle sounded behind her, followed by Jonah's shout. "Come!"
'What is he calling for?'
Mai Mingle forced herself to run even faster. She twisted her body and darted into the silent corridor. Strangely, there wasn't a single footstep behind her. It was as if Jonah hadn't given chase at all.
Unable to contain her confusion, she risked a quick glance over her shoulder.
The corridor was empty, the pale light soaking everything in a desolate silence.
'Jonah really didn't follow me.'
'Forget why he didn't chase me; I've run so far already. Even if he started now, he probably couldn't catch up, right?'
'Should I still duck into an exam room?'
The question flashed through Mai Mingle's mind, and she made her decision instantly: 'Yes.'
She knew nothing about Saint Louis Hospital within the Nest. Running around blindly could lead her into unknown dangers. She had at least gotten a look inside the exam rooms as she passed them, so they weren't completely unfamiliar.
The first exam room door was locked tight. She tried the handle and found it wouldn't turn, so she immediately dashed to the next room, whose door was halfway open. It was a heavy, steel-plated sliding door. The moment Mai Mingle saw what it was, she cursed under her breath and kept running.
Thankfully, the next exam room wasn't far, and its door was also ajar, leaving a crack. She hastily pushed it, only to find it wouldn't budge past a fist-sized gap, as if something was jamming it.
"Why didn't you go into that last room?" Jonah's voice asked.
Mai Mingle's heart skipped a beat.
She slowly raised her head, her gaze following the sound. There, in the corner where the ceiling met the wall, she saw a human face hanging upside down.
'Of course... Jonah had climbed the walls before. He must have crawled along them to get here. No wonder I didn't hear any footsteps.'
Jonah's abdomen faced the ceiling, his hands and feet clinging firmly to the plaster wall like a giant reptile. She had no idea when he had gotten above her, or how he was holding himself there without falling.
His neck was bent downward, his eyes rolled back in their sockets to stare at Mai Mingle, revealing large swathes of white. He reminded her of a certain kind of doll, the kind whose eyes open and close with gravity. Whenever you held one, it always felt like a living thing pretending to be lifeless.
She also understood why the door was stuck.
One of Jonah's hands wasn't on the wall. Instead, it was reaching through the crack in the door, firmly gripping the edge and holding it in place, preventing her from pushing or pulling it.
"Don't be in such a hurry. Just wait a little,"
Just as the question arose in Mai Mingle's mind, Jonah opened his mouth, his inverted top row of teeth flashing between his lips. "My child will be here soon. And it's going to need you to finally reach its mature form."
'What child?'
Mai Mingle took a large step back from under Jonah and quickly glanced down the corridor.
A small shadow rounded the corner. If it weren't skittering toward her with a faint rustling sound, Mai Mingle might not have even realized it was alive.
At first, it looked like a ball or a crumpled plastic bag. But after a few seconds, she saw it clearly. It was about the size of two fists, a wrinkled mass of fleshy-pink meat. On either side of this mass, numerous thin legs scuttled forward, blurring into a shadowy flutter.
'What the hell is that thing?'
The thought had barely crossed her mind when she felt a sudden chill on her cheeks. Two hands had dropped from the ceiling, their fingers like iron claws, and seized her head in a firm grip.
Startled, Mai Mingle began to struggle desperately. Her fists hammered against his rock-hard arms, making dull THUDDING sounds, but they failed to loosen his grip in the slightest. The man's hands dug into her cheeks, pinching her jaw and forcing her mouth open.
The wrinkled, pink ball of flesh seemed to grow excited, scuttling faster. Its numerous, tentacle-like legs began to crawl up her pajama pants.
Never before had she so desperately wished for a weapon—anything, even a metal pipe. But earlier tonight, she had just been a bedridden old woman, bare-handed save for the clothes on her back.
"Don't be afraid," Jonah's voice said soothingly. "See? I'm perfectly fine now, aren't I? As long as memories continue, a person isn't truly dead. After I entered Jonah, his memories as 'Jonah' continued on, which means 'Jonah' is still alive... He just has a symbiote now, that's all."
'No wonder the round-headed man's blood didn't work on him. The blood was on Jonah's body, not on the actual resident.'
Mai Mingle frantically swatted at her body, trying to knock the thing off, but the ball of flesh was as nimble as a cockroach. Its legs skittered with swift, light movements, repeatedly dodging her palms and continuing its advance toward her head.
"You could try covering your mouth, like Jonah did," the Jonah above her said.
'Why is he giving me such phony advice?'
'Now that he's said that, I don't know if I should cover my mouth or not. Is that the effect he was going for?'
'Mai Mingle truly regretted ringing the bell four times. Ever since she'd fallen out of bed, it had been one perilous situation after another, each one more loathsome than the last.'
In her moment of hesitation, the thing had already climbed onto her chest. Up close, it looked like a cross between a brain and an insect. A raw, fishy, cold stench wafted up from it. Five or six thin legs stepped over her collarbone, and a slimy, ugly thing of wrinkled, overlapping flesh appeared in her line of sight.
Mai Mingle fought the instinct to raise her hands. Instead, she twisted her head desperately to avoid the creature while quickly shrugging off her pajama top. The older one gets, the more one feels the cold, and she was no exception, having worn several layers to bed. The buttons on the outermost layer were undone, so she could yank it off in one go.
Two long, thin legs had already probed into her mouth, causing a nauseating, unbearably itchy-painful sensation.
Mai Mingle forced her gaze upward, took aim, and swung the pajama top with all her might. With a sharp WHAP, it struck Jonah right in the eyes.
'Since it's using a human body, it must be subject to human weaknesses, right?'
'Who could get hit in the eye and remain perfectly still?'
As she'd hoped, Jonah let out an involuntary cry of pain, and his grip on her head loosened slightly.
The moment she felt his grip slacken, she ducked, wrenching her head free from his grasp. Simultaneously, she wrapped the pajama top around her hand, grabbed the thing crawling into her mouth, and ripped it out.
Thankfully, the lanky patient from before had left her with nothing left to vomit. Otherwise, the sight of the writhing ball of flesh, its limbs trembling before her face, would have made her sick all over again.
Mai Mingle wrapped the creature in the pajama top, clutched the nauseating bundle in her hand, and ran.
She couldn't be picky this time. When she found herself back in front of the steel-plated sliding door, an idea struck her. She charged inside and immediately spun around. Sure enough, on the ceiling, a contorted-faced Jonah was rapidly crawling toward her, his eyes half-closed and bloodshot.
"You slippery old hag—"
Mai Mingle's face was grim as she grabbed the door with one hand.
'These residents...'
"I told you I'm not an old lady," she muttered, tossing the ball of flesh onto the floor, right in the door's track. She yanked the sliding door hard, sending it rolling toward the creature.
Jonah's shriek sounded like it would tear his throat apart. "No, wait!"
The heavy, lead-lined, steel-plated sliding door slammed down on the wrinkled ball of flesh, which had just landed and hadn't yet found its footing. It burst without a sound, splattering foul blood and shredded meat in all directions. In an instant, only the largest, flattened piece of flesh remained jammed between the door and the frame, its thin legs still twitching.
Before she could kick the remains away and shut the door completely, a hand, its veins bulging, shot out and THWACKED against the door's edge.
Through the gap, Jonah's face was barely recognizable as human. His nostrils flared wildly, like a pair of bellows pumping on his face.
"My child!" he shrieked.
Mai Mingle threw her weight against the door, not daring to let him pull it open. At the same time, her eyes darted around the dim interior, and she couldn't help but sigh inwardly.
Just as she'd suspected, it was a medical imaging room.
Rooms for X-ray scans require radiation shielding in the walls and doors. Very few hospitals install windows in their X-ray rooms—not because special shielded windows don't exist, but because they're too expensive to be practical. In other words, being chased into an X-ray room meant you were trapped like a rat, with no way out.
This was why Mai Mingle hadn't entered the room when she first passed it. If she had gone into a normal exam room and locked the door, she could have escaped through a window. But that was impossible in an X-ray room.
"Does a thing like you really need to reproduce?" Mai Mingle said through her teeth, straining against the door. "We're in the Nest. You can probably skip the whole 'procreation' thing, don't you think?"
"Once I kill you," Jonah hissed, his words slurring together, "your body will dissolve in the Nest. I will rebuild my child from your constituent elements..."
"You mean you'll use my flesh and blood to rebuild your child?"
Mai Mingle leaned against the wall, bracing the door with her hands and feet. Her muscles trembled with the effort, but she still couldn't force the sliding door completely shut. As she scanned the room for a potential weapon, she stalled for time. "I'm afraid my flesh and blood isn't nearly disgusting enough for that."
Jonah suddenly burst into laughter.
"Flesh and blood? I have no use for your old, withered flesh and blood! As long as you have ever considered the act of 'childbirth', your mind and body bear its mark. The 'you' who considered it is still a part of you now. All I need is to take that part—"
Mai Mingle froze.
She never expected, here and now, to be flooded with memories from years ago: the anxiety over her dwindling fertility, the confusion over what choice to make, the unease about her future in old age...
Unconsciously, the pressure she was applying to the door slackened.
Jonah seized the opportunity.
The sliding door was suddenly shoved with immense force. Before she could react, a red-haired head forced its way through the gap.