Chapter 2: Referral
The message arrives on Tuesday night while you're eating noodles out of the carton on your balcony, and it is four lines long.
Akso Hospital, Department of Cardiology. Please be advised that, effective this week, your ongoing care will be managed by Dr. M. Haldane. Your Thursday appointment time is unchanged. We thank you for your understanding.
You read it three times. Then you put the noodles down and call his office line, which goes to voicemail, and his work phone, which goes to voicemail, and then, because you are a grown woman with a Hunter's license and no shame, the main switchboard.
"Dr. Zayne is in surgery," the night operator tells you.
"Until when?"
"Dr. Zayne," says the operator, with the weariness of someone who has been asked this question many times by many people, "is always in surgery."
You spend Wednesday being very professional about it. You take two contracts from the Association, a low-level rift by the harbor and a nuisance Wanderer nesting in a substation, and you close both of them faster than your handler has ever seen. She asks if you're alright. You say you're excellent. You go home and reread the four lines again and notice, for the first time, that they're signed by the department and not by him. He didn't even write it himself. A year of Thursdays, and he let a template say goodbye.
On Thursday, at four o'clock exactly, you are not on the cardiology floor. You are on the surgical floor, two levels up, sitting in a plastic chair outside the operating theaters with your arms folded and your boots planted, because the board on the wall says ZAYNE / OR 3 / IN PROGRESS and you have decided you will wait.
A nurse brings you a cup of water at half past four. At five, a different nurse asks whether you're family. You say you're a patient. She looks at you with deep pity and goes away.
At twenty past five, a woman in squeaky sneakers comes around the corner, stops, and puts her hands on her hips.
"You must be my four o'clock," she says.
She's shorter than you, somewhere past forty, with cropped hair going gray at the temples and a pair of reading glasses pushed up into it. Her coat pockets bulge. She pulls out a wrapped candy, unwraps it, puts it in her mouth, and offers you one. You take it, because it seems rude not to.
"Mira Haldane," she says. "I've been sitting in an empty exam room for twenty minutes reading your file. It's a very thick file. He writes a lot."
"He's not supposed to have handed it over."
"No," she agrees, rolling the candy around. "He isn't. I asked him why he did. He said, and I'm quoting, 'Conflict of clinical judgment.' Then he walked off into surgery before I could ask what that meant. In fifteen years I've never seen Zayne walk away from a question. He usually stays to make sure you know how wrong you were to ask it."
You look at the board. OR 3. IN PROGRESS.
"Is it me?" you ask. "Did I do something?"
Dr. Haldane studies you for a long moment. Something in her face softens.
"Oh, honey," she says. "I think you did something. I don't think it's the something you're worried about."
You don't get a chance to ask what she means, because that's when the floor shakes.
You know the feeling before the alarms go off. Every Hunter does. There's a pressure change, like the air before a storm, and a thin high whine at the edge of your hearing that isn't really a sound. Your core gives one sharp, warning pulse under your ribs. Then the emergency lights flip to amber and the speakers start up with the flat recorded voice you've heard a hundred times across the city: Protofield anomaly detected. Please proceed calmly to the nearest exit.
"Where?" you ask Haldane.
She's already pulling up something on her tablet, face gone sharp and professional. "Sublevel two. Parking garage. Right under the ORs."
Right under OR 3. Right under the board that says IN PROGRESS.
You're moving before she can say anything else.
The stairwell is full of people going up. You go down, shouldering past orderlies and visitors, pulling your weapon out of its holster as you go, feeling for the familiar hum of your own Evol rising to meet the threat. Sublevel two is dark except for the emergency strips along the floor, and the air there tastes metallic and wrong. Halfway across the garage, between a row of parked ambulances, the rift is hanging in midair like a tear in black paper, and something is coming out of it.
It's not big, as Wanderers go. Spidery, glassy, the size of a car, with too many joints and a sound like breaking ice when it moves. It's pulling itself out of the rift one leg at a time, and every time it touches the concrete the ground shudders, and above you somewhere, behind the ceiling, is an operating theater where a man is holding someone's heart in his hands.
"Not today," you tell it, and run.
It's a good fight. It's an ugly fight. You take a leg off with your first strike and it screams, high and splintering, and swings at you with another one, and you go down hard on the concrete and roll under an ambulance. Your core is singing in your chest, hot and loud, not pain exactly but something close to it. You come up on the other side and put two rounds into the joint where its body meets its legs, and it staggers. It lunges. Something glassy and sharp scores a line of fire across your shoulder. You ignore it. You plant your feet and pour everything you have into the last strike, and the Wanderer shatters like a windshield, and the rift behind it folds in on itself and is gone.
The silence afterward is enormous. Car alarms. Dripping water. Your own breath.
You sit down on the bumper of an ambulance, because your legs have decided to stop cooperating, and look at your shoulder. It's bleeding quite a lot. You think, distantly, that he's going to be so annoyed about this.
The stairwell door bangs open.
He's still in scrubs. His surgical cap is gone, his hair is wild, and his glasses are missing, and he's running, which you have never seen him do, not once, not even when the hospital was on fire during the Wanderer incident last spring. He crosses the garage in long strides and stops in front of you and just looks at you. His chest is heaving.
"Hi," you say. "Your patient upstairs okay?"
"My patient," says Zayne, in a voice so cold it practically steams, "is in recovery and doing well. I closed in record time. Haldane called the OR and told me you'd gone down here alone." He kneels in front of you on the oily concrete and takes your arm and turns it to look at your shoulder, and you see his hands are shaking. Not much. Just enough. Frost is spreading out from his fingertips onto your sleeve without him seeming to notice. "You went down alone."
"I'm a Hunter. It's literally my job."
"You have an undiagnosed cardiac anomaly that flares under stress."
"I'm aware. I'm the one who has it."
"You could have..." He stops. His jaw works. He presses a fold of gauze from his pocket against your shoulder, too hard, and you hiss, and he loosens his grip at once. "You could have died in a parking garage while I was two floors up stitching someone else's aorta. And I wouldn't have known until someone came to tell me."
You've never heard him sound like this. Not angry. Frightened, under the anger, like ice over very deep water.
"Then why," you say quietly, "did you give my file to someone else?"
He goes still.
"You didn't even tell me. You sent a message. Four lines. 'We thank you for your understanding.'" Your voice is wobbling; you hate it. "I don't understand. I've been coming to you every week for a year. You're the only one who's ever made the pain stop. Did I do something? Am I too much work? Just tell me."
"No." It comes out of him almost violently. "No. It's not you."
"Then what is it?"
He looks at you for a long time, kneeling on the concrete with his hand pressed to your shoulder and the frost slowly creeping up your sleeve.
"A physician," he says carefully, "has to be objective. If he can't assess his patient without bias, he puts her at risk. He has an obligation to step back. That's the rule. I've never once had trouble following it."
"And now you do."
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. You can see it in his face, in his bare, unguarded eyes without the glasses to hide behind.
"I'll see you one more time," he says at last, very low. "Next Thursday. Four o'clock. I'll go over everything with you and with Dr. Haldane and make sure she has whatever she needs. And then I'm going to stop being your doctor."
He stands up, and holds out his hand to help you up, and when you take it his fingers are colder than you've ever felt them.
"Consider it," says Zayne, "your last appointment."