Chapter 1: Thursday, Four O'Clock
Patient presents at 16:07. Seven minutes late. Laceration to left forearm, superficial, untreated. Patient states, quote, "It's nothing, it was a very small Wanderer." Resting heart rate on arrival: 74.
You can tell exactly how annoyed he is by how quietly he closes the door.
Most doctors at Akso let their doors swing. The nurses kick theirs open with a hip, arms full of charts. Dr. Zayne closes his the way he does everything, with total control, the latch clicking into place so softly you almost miss it. The softer the click, the worse the lecture. Today it's practically silent.
"You're bleeding on my examination table," he says.
"I put a tissue down."
He looks at the tissue. It is not doing very much. He looks at you over the top of his glasses, which is a thing he's very good at, and you feel exactly as small as he wants you to feel for about one second before you remember you spent the morning wrist-deep in a Protofield rift on the east side of the city and don't have to take this from anyone.
"It was barely a scratch when it happened," you tell him. "It got bigger on the train."
"Wounds don't grow on public transport."
"This one did. It was a very ambitious scratch."
He doesn't laugh. Zayne doesn't laugh, as a general rule; you've known him a year and you've seen it happen twice, and both times you weren't sure it was a laugh and not a cough. But the corner of his mouth does something very brief, and he turns away to the cabinet to get the antiseptic so you can't see it finish.
You've been coming to this office every Thursday at four for a year now. You know the room by heart. White walls, a window over the Akso gardens where the cherry trees are just starting to come out, a single framed diploma he clearly hung only because administration made him, and a desk so clean it looks unused. There is never anything personal on it. There is never anything out of place. There is a mug sometimes, black coffee, half drunk and long cold, because he gets called into surgery between sips and forgets it exists.
"I read the Association's incident report," he says, with his back to you, uncapping a bottle. "From the harbor rift on Monday."
"Why are you reading Association incident reports?"
"Because my patient files them." He turns. "You wrote that you 'engaged the target at close range due to time constraints.'"
"That's standard phrasing."
"It's a euphemism for running at something with teeth." He sets the bottle down with a small, precise click. "I'm a cardiac surgeon. I know what adrenaline does to an irregular rhythm. I'd prefer you engaged your targets at a range that doesn't end with me reading about it."
"You'd prefer," you repeat. "Is that a medical opinion?"
He pauses, very briefly. "Yes," he says, which is the kind of pause that means no.
He comes back with gauze and pulls his chair close and takes your arm.
His hands are always cool. Not cold, not unpleasant. Just a few degrees lower than you expect, like a glass of water left on a windowsill overnight. You've never asked if it's his Evol or just him. He cleans the cut with quick, sure movements, and you watch his face instead of your arm, because his face is the more interesting of the two.
He has a small crease between his eyebrows when he concentrates. His eyelashes are absurdly long for someone who never sleeps. There's a very faint ink stain on the side of his right middle finger from that silver fountain pen he insists on using even though Akso went fully digital three years ago.
"You're staring," he says, without looking up.
"You're bandaging."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." He tapes the gauze down, smooth and neat, and lets go of your arm, and you're annoyed at yourself for noticing the exact moment his fingers leave your skin. "Shirt."
You unbutton the top of your shirt. You've done this fifty times. It is a perfectly routine medical procedure, and there is no reason at all for your pulse to pick up as he hooks the stethoscope into his ears and leans in.
The bell is cold. You flinch. He says, "Breathe normally," and you breathe in a way that is as normal as you can manage, which is not very. You can smell him this close, something clean and sharp under the hospital disinfectant, like cedar and snow. You fix your eyes on the window behind his head. A cherry petal drifts past the glass.
He's quiet for a long time.
You know what he's hearing, because you've seen it in his notes. A rhythm that's almost normal and then isn't. A beat that skips, and doubles, and settles. Under your sternum, in the place you can't see, the hard little knot of crystal that the Association scanners call a core and that nobody, not even him, has managed to explain, sends out its slow ache like a struck bell.
"Hm," he says.
"Don't 'hm.' I hate 'hm.'"
"Your heart rate's elevated."
"I just took a train across town while bleeding."
"It was seventy-four when you sat down." He takes the earpieces out and looks at the monitor clipped to your finger, then back at you. "It's a hundred and eight now."
You look at the monitor too. It says one hundred and eight. As you watch, it ticks up to one hundred and eleven.
"Maybe your stethoscope's too cold," you say.
"Maybe." He doesn't sound like he believes it. He reaches into his breast pocket for the fountain pen and pulls your file across the desk, and writes. You've tried, on several occasions, to read his notes upside down. His handwriting is beautiful and completely illegible, a row of elegant hooks like frost on a window.
"What are you writing?"
"Observations."
"About my heart?"
He pauses. Just for a second, the nib of the pen hovering above the page.
"Etiology unclear," he says, and keeps writing.
It happens while you're doing up your buttons.
It always comes without warning. One second you're fine, fumbling with the third button, and the next it feels like someone's driven a cold chisel straight into the center of your chest. Your breath goes. The room tilts. Your hand comes up of its own accord and presses flat over your sternum, and under it the core is pulsing, hard and hot and wrong, light seeping out between your fingers in a faint, sick blue.
"Zayne," you manage.
He's already there. You don't see him move. One moment he's at the desk and the next his hand is over yours, his other arm braced across your back to stop you sliding off the table, and his voice is close and very calm in your ear.
"Look at me."
You can't. You squeeze your eyes shut.
"Look at me," he says again, sharper, and you open them, and his face is right there, his glasses slightly crooked, his eyes fixed on yours. "Breathe with me. In. Hold. Out. Again."
You breathe. It hurts. He doesn't let go.
Then you feel it. Cold, spreading out from his palm. Not the gentle coolness of his hands on a normal day but real cold, deep and clean, sinking through your skin and your ribs and wrapping around the burning knot of the core like snow packed around a wound. You hear a faint crackle and look down and see frost blooming across the back of his hand, white ferns of it creeping over his knuckles and onto yours.
The pain recedes. Slowly. Like a tide going out.
When it's gone, you're slumped forward with your forehead against his shoulder and his arm still around you, and you're both breathing hard. Neither of you moves for a moment. His heart is right under your ear, behind the starched cotton of his coat.
It's going very fast.
"You don't use your Evol at work," you say into his coat. Your voice is a croak. "You said it was unprofessional."
"I said it was unregulated." He sounds strange. Unsteady. "Those aren't the same."
He sits you up gently. He takes his hand off your chest and the frost on his knuckles is already melting into droplets. He doesn't look at you. He takes his glasses off, cleans them on the hem of his coat, which you've never seen him do, and puts them back on, and then he goes and sits back at his desk and picks up the pen again and writes several lines very fast.
"That's the third episode this month," he says to the page. "I want a full panel. Imaging, bloodwork, a resonance scan from the Association. Next Thursday, four o'clock. Don't be late."
"I'm never late."
He looks at you over his glasses.
"I'm rarely late," you amend, "for reasons of public safety."
That time, the corner of his mouth definitely moves.
You're halfway down the corridor before you realize you've left your Hunter's badge on his desk. You turn around and walk back, and the door, for once, hasn't latched behind you. It's open a hand's width.
You don't mean to look. You lift your hand to knock and see him through the gap and stop.
He's sitting at his desk with his coat off and the stethoscope back in his ears. The bell isn't pressed to a patient. It's pressed to his own chest, under his shirt, flat over his heart, and he's staring at the second hand of his wristwatch with a frown you've only ever seen him wear over your scans.
He holds it there for a full minute. Then he takes the stethoscope out, very slowly, and picks up the silver pen, and pulls a second file from his drawer. It's thinner than yours. It has no patient name on the tab.
He writes a single line in it, looks at it for a long moment, and puts his face in his hands.