I had to take her. I had no choice. They would never have let me experiment on her, so I had to take matters into my own hands. I had to.


Her name is Emily. She’s eight years old, and her ashen hair has been falling out for weeks now. She hardly has any left. Her eyes, her bright, obsidian eyes, have fallen too. There’s no luster left in them, no light. Only dull, black shade. Her rosy, healthy cheeks have become sunken and waxy. Her rosebud lips have shriveled. Her wit has hidden itself away. She barely speaks anymore.


That’s what cancer does.


They’d let her die. They would just let her. Allowing me to operate? To cure her? To restore her youth and intelligence? Never. They’d never consider it.


I waited until the babysitter looked away. It wasn’t that difficult, seeing as she was a fifteen year old, boy smitten girl awaiting a special phone call. Gasping as she ran inside, attending to her crush became much more important than trying to occupy a dying child’s attention.


The mother had been glued to her daughter’s side for months. I had almost given up the abduction, fearing that Sunny would never left alone. After all, she was to die at home. The hospitals were packed enough without having to worry about cancer. They had stopped housing cancer patients a long time ago. The occasional radiation treatment was all Emily ever received. She had no hope of surviving on her own.


But her mother had to run an errand one day and left her cancer-ridden daughter with a boy-crazy teen. That’s where I came in.


It was almost too easy to swoop in and steal the little girl. I was silent and cunning, and what better characters for a kidnapper than those? Emily figured out something was wrong about the same time I locked her in my car. But I’d prepared well; the car was soundproof. I didn’t bother to console her, she’d understand soon enough. I was her cure. Not her mother. Not the ignorant doctors. Me. And I was the only one who could hear her scream. I was the only one who had ever been able to really hear her scream.


One injection of a sedative and she was as limp as a ragdoll. I scooped her cancer infested body into my arms and carried her inside to my lab. I laid her onto the operating table, and looked down at her admiringly. In a few short hours, she’d be free of the trespassing sickness, and I’d be a hero.


I opened the white wardrobe in the corner of the room. Raking my eyes along the shelves, I found the jar labeled “Emily.” If I didn’t know better, I would have believed it was her real head afloat inside the jar. I’d done a good job; her doppelganger was identical to her, and better yet, it was absolutely cancer-free.


I removed the jar from the shelf, and closed the doors.


I strung her up to an IV, and hooked her up to morphine drip. I had no idea how painful this would be on a human. I’d only ever done it on animals, and they hadn’t found it particularly pleasant.


I unscrewed the lid of the jar, setting it on the table, and gently removed Emily’s new head from inside. It was beautiful. The dirty blonde strands were wet, but they were exactly how Emily would look after taking a bath. The new Emily’s skin was white, not yet aglow with the warmth of blood running through her veins. Not until then would the New Emily come to life.


The brain inside the New Emily’s skull was ready and blank, like a brand new hard drive ready to be loaded. Once I had the cerebral cortex from Emily’s old brain, I could transfer the information between the two. Normally, it takes a couple days for the brain’s neurons to create new paths, but with my shots of artificial electrodes, the copy/paste would only take an hour. She would feel exactly the same as always, but she’d be healthy.


It was the perfect plan. Absolutely flawless. Doctor’s had fumbled too many times. It was time to take cancer into my own hands. And so I did, and my plan was a genius one.


Taking the scalpel, I raised the blade to Emily’s throat. If I was going to give my sister a new head, I was going to have to remove the old one first.