They walked through a maze of corridors to the intensive care unit. Daniel's room was filled with machines—monitors beeping, IV pumps clicking, ventilator whooshing. He looked tiny in the hospital bed, pale and fragile with wires and tubes connecting him to various pieces of equipment.
But even unconscious, even sedated, Sarah could see that something was different about him. His eyes were moving rapidly beneath his closed lids, like he was in the deepest, most active REM sleep possible. His fingers twitched occasionally, as if he was typing on an invisible keyboard.
"What's he doing?" she whispered.
"We're not sure. The REM activity suggests he's dreaming, but the patterns are more complex than anything we normally see. It's almost like his brain is... processing information. Lots of information."
Dr. Martinez showed her more readouts on his tablet. "See these spikes? This is his neural activity over the past four hours. These bursts of activity correspond with increased metabolic demand—his brain literally burning through energy reserves at an unprecedented rate."
"Is it hurting him?"
"We don't think so. Pain responses would show up differently on the monitors. If anything, he seems to be in a state of deep, active sleep. But Sarah..." Dr. Martinez turned to face her. "His body can't sustain this indefinitely. He's burning through nutrients and energy faster than we can replace them, even with IV supplementation."
"What happens if you can't keep up?"
The doctor's expression was grim. "Organ failure. Brain damage. Death."
Sarah sank into the chair beside Daniel's bed. "How long does he have?"
"If his metabolic rate doesn't decrease? Maybe 48 hours. Less if his brain activity continues to increase."
Forty-eight hours. After everything they'd been through, after surviving Mom's death and Dad's abandonment and three years of barely scraping by, Daniel was going to die from a drug overdose in a hospital bed.
"There has to be something you can do," she said desperately.
"We're trying everything we can think of. Metabolic suppressants, anti-seizure medications, experimental treatments for hyperthermia. But honestly, Sarah, we're working blind here. We don't understand what's happening to him."
Sarah reached out and took Daniel's hand. His skin was warm but not burning like it had been earlier. His fingers continued their subtle twitching, and she wondered what invisible keyboards he was typing on in his drug-induced dreams.
"He's all I have left," she whispered.
Dr. Martinez put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "We're going to do everything possible to bring him back to you. But you should prepare yourself for the possibility that even if he survives, he might not be the same person he was before."
The same person he was before. Sarah almost laughed. Daniel hadn't been the same person since Mom died. The sweet, smart kid she'd grown up with had disappeared, replaced by someone angry and desperate and determined to destroy himself with whatever chemicals he could find.
Maybe if this brain damage or whatever was happening to him could bring back even a piece of the brother she remembered, it would be worth it.
But as she sat there watching the monitors track Daniel's impossible neural activity, Sarah couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was happening to her brother was bigger than drugs or overdoses or anything the doctors had words for.
His brain was processing information at superhuman speeds, burning through energy like a biological supercomputer. The question was: what information? And where was it coming from?
What did you take, Danny? she thought, squeezing his twitching hand. What did you do to yourself?
On the monitors around them, Daniel's brain continued its relentless, impossible work, consuming energy and oxygen at rates that should have killed him hours ago. But somehow, impossibly, he held on—lost in dreams that might have been nightmares, or visions, or something else entirely.
The machines beeped and clicked and whooshed, marking time until answers came or Daniel's overtaxed system finally gave out.
In the pocket of Sarah's jacket, her phone buzzed with a text from her manager at the diner, asking where she was. She turned it off without responding.
Some things were more important than minimum-wage jobs. Some things—like the possibility that she might be about to lose the last family she had left—demanded her full attention.
So she sat in that uncomfortable hospital chair and held her brother's hand and watched his brain burn itself out with information she couldn't understand, while outside the window, the world continued spinning toward a future that neither of them was prepared for.
The clock on the wall read 11:47 PM when Daniel's neural activity suddenly spiked to levels that made all the machines in the room start alarming at once.
Sarah was about to lose her mind.