The scan took eleven minutes. The technician was efficient and said very little, which Fen appreciated. She lay on the table and looked at the ceiling and tried not to anticipate.
The results came up on the screen beside the table, not as a body but as a map: a topographical rendering, like elevation data, showing the marks by intensity and location. The technician walked her through it in the flat, professional register of someone who had done this many times and knew to give the patient room to respond as they needed to.
The sternum first. A dense cluster, marks layered over marks, the earliest ones deepest. Names from childhood. She could not identify all of them individually from the density, but she recognized the pattern: her parents' names for her, good and otherwise. Her grandmother's name for her, which had been a word in a language Fen no longer spoke fluently, a word that meant something like small bird. That mark was still visible, separate from the rest.
A horizontal band across both forearms, faded now at the edges but still present: the years of a specific classroom, a specific group of girls who had called her by a shortened version of her name that she had never given them permission to use. She had not thought about those years in a long time. The marks had apparently not forgotten.
Across her shoulders and upper back: a scattering of smaller marks, lighter, from her twenties. Friends. A professor who had called her by her last name in a way that somehow felt like respect. A woman she had been in love with for three years who had, toward the end, stopped using her name much at all.
"There's one more I want to show you," the technician said. She enlarged a section of the lower back, dead center, between the shoulder blades. A single mark, smaller than Fen would have expected, but darker than anything else on the map. Deep. Settled.
"Do you know this one?" the technician asked.
Fen turned her head to look at the screen. She looked at the location, the depth, the particular quality of the mark. She knew immediately. She had known it the moment the technician pointed to it, before she had even processed what she was seeing.
Her brother had been dead for six years. He had been the only one who called her by a nickname he had invented when they were children, a small distortion of her name that existed nowhere else in the world. He had used it until the week he died. She had not heard it since.
She had been avoiding knowing it was there.
"Yes," she said. "I know it."
The technician made a note and said nothing else. Fen sat up slowly. She put on her shirt. She thanked the technician and collected her things and walked out into the hallway.
She stood there for a moment, one hand pressed flat against her lower back, palm between her shoulder blades, feeling for the place she could not reach.