Chapter 8: The Doctor Is In

The sound stopped.

Milo kept his palm flat on the wired glass and waited for it to start again. It didn’t, and the not-starting was worse. A minute ago it had been a thing happening in a room. Now it was a thing in a room that had heard him.

“Her eyes are open,” Blood-Eye said.

“So?”

“Both of them. Wide. The corridor light just stuttered and nothing happened on her face. No squint. No turn. Light’s been landing on her for a while now and it’s landing nowhere.” A pause, the long one. “She’s blind.”

Milo looked again. The woman had her head up and her chin turned a few degrees off the door, and her hand went along the table rail and stopped and came back.

“Say it once more.”

“She’s blind. Which means the pit’s a paperweight. Your pit needs a target to look at you — that’s the whole mechanism. I put the picture up, they look, and while they’re looking they can’t move. She’s got nothing to look with.”

“Can she hear it?”

“She can hear you breathing through a wall. She’ll hear the pit open. She’ll hear it close. In between, she plays.”

“Then I don’t use the pit.”

“Then don’t go in.”

“You told me to open the door.”

“I told you that before I checked her eyes.” A pause. “I’d rather be wrong about a door than about you.”

“Two-fourteen,” Milo said. “That’s what’s stenciled inside the lid.”

“Two-fourteen, in a case with a keyboard in it, and the thing she plays sounds like it came out of a numbered book. That’s a hymn number. Nobody stencils a room number inside a suitcase.” Another pause. “I’m calling her the Hymn. The alternatives are worse.”

Milo put his forehead against the glass and did the math he’d already done twice upstairs.

“What’s in there I can use?”

“Nothing. Say it back to me.”

“Nothing.”

“Sound,” Blood-Eye said. “She plays, and it goes in through the ears and the jaw and works you from the inside out. Against that you’ve got a knife you can’t reach her with, five grade-one cores in your jacket, a slip of paper that ends your exam, and a skill that needs her to look at you. Nothing in the bag touches her.”

“Ninety-eight points.”

“Ninety-eight points.”

“Two hundred buys a skill.”

“Two hundred buys a skill,” Blood-Eye said, the way you agree with a man who’s already out on the roof.

“And there’s one of her,” Milo said. “One. On this floor, in this hallway, sitting on a table with her feet off the tile, and she thinks she has an appointment.”

“She’s high-grade. She’d be the strongest thing in this building by a wide margin. She would also kill you in under two seconds, and I want that on the record before you do what you’re going to do.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“No.” Then, before he could: “You’re not brave. You just can’t stand to leave a thing unopened.”

Milo walked two doors down to the pharmacy.

Somebody had been through it already. Cabinet doors hanging, a drawer face-down on the tile with its screws still in it, a little refrigerator humming away with nothing inside, keeping nothing cold for free. Milo took what was there. Two bottles of isopropyl. A box of syringes with half its paper still on. A bag of saline, gauze, gloves, a plastic tray with a lip.

He unscrewed one bottle and poured into his palm and put it on his neck, his wrists, the collar of his jacket, the backs of his hands. The smell came up around his face and stayed there.

“That’s a lot of alcohol,” Blood-Eye said.

“She’s a lot of ghost.”

“You smell like a clinic.”

“Good.”

“You smell like a clinic that’s been drinking.”

Milo capped the bottle and put it in his jacket. “One in nine,” he said. “Give me the number again or don’t.”

“One in nine she lets you finish a sentence before she plays. One in four she plays anyway.”

“Those don’t add up.”

“They’re not the same thing.”

He pulled up his totals.

CONTRACTS: 1 / 3
BREAK POINTS: 98

Ninety-eight. It had been ninety-eight since the corridor. Nothing he could do out here was going to move it, and ninety-eight wasn’t going to open that door.

He drew a syringe of saline, tapped the bubbles up the barrel the way he’d watched it done a hundred times in a hundred waiting rooms, and held it to the light to check for air he already knew wasn’t there. Then he laid it in the tray with the gauze and the gloves, and carried the tray into the corridor with both hands, like a man who didn’t want to spill anything.

He knocked twice on the door before he opened it. It seemed like a thing a doctor would do.

She didn’t turn her head. She put her hands on the keys and played one chord, and it wasn’t loud.

It went through him like a nail through a board.

His knees hit the tile before he knew they’d gone. The sound wasn’t in his ears. It was down in his jaw, at the roots, and it came up over his scalp and got in under the bone, and something in the middle of his head started screaming that it was being eaten.

She played again. This one had an edge on it, thin, like a wire pulled tight, and the wire went in behind his teeth. The tray went over. Steel rang on tile and kept ringing.

He tried to say the word and got air.

Then he got his mouth around it.

“I’m the doctor.”

The chord stopped like a switch.

He lay with his cheek on the tile and the whole floor going in and out under him like a slow tide, and he listened to her not breathe.

“Is that true?” she said.

Her voice was ordinary. That was the part that got him — ordinary, tired, a little annoyed, the voice of a woman who had been waiting in a room a long time.

Milo lifted his head. “Smell me.”

She tilted her head. Then she came off the table — her hand found the rail, then the cart, then the tray where it had fallen, hand over hand, unhurried, until she was close enough that he could see the scarring on her forearm, the skin pulled tight and shining, webbed where it had healed wrong. It climbed under the sleeve.

He held still. He lifted the syringe and let the needle click once against the edge of the tray.

Her nose moved.

“Alcohol,” she said. “And iodine. And the green soap.”

“Chlorhexidine.” He’d read the label thirty seconds ago.

She sat back on her heels. Something in her face came loose, and it looked like hope, and he had no idea what to do with hope.

“Where did all of you go,” she said. “They said six o’clock. I’ve been sitting here.”

“Staffing,” Milo said. “It’s a nightmare.”

“Can we do it now?”

“Yes.” He got his feet under him. His hands were shaking and he let them shake, down at his sides, out of sight. “Lie down on the table, please.”

She got up onto it by herself. She knew where the edge was. She lay back and put her burned hand down at her side with the palm up, and folded the other one over her stomach, and waited.

Milo went to the tray and moved things around in it. A hemostat against a scalpel. Two instruments against each other, twice. It wasn’t a real sound. It was the idea of one, and the idea was what she could use.

“Are you ready for the anesthetic?”

“Yes.”

“Little pinch,” he said, and looked down at her.

The gown was gray. Her arms were thin. The burns started at the wrist and went up under the sleeve, healed wrong, healed into a web, and where the surgery was going to be there was going to have to be a saw.

Her chest didn’t move.

He counted four seconds. It didn’t move.

She doesn’t know.

The thought arrived whole. He did nothing with it. She had decided he was the doctor, and the deciding was the only thing keeping him on his feet, and the door was behind him and she could play faster than he could run.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” she said.

Out in the east corridor, two examinees came up the last of the stairs with their weapons out and their backs half-turned to each other, one watching behind and one watching ahead. Neither of them had spoken above a whisper since the second floor.

Twenty feet short of SURGICAL 3, the corridor bent around a linen alcove. Dani stopped at the bend and sighted along the wall through the gap in the door.

“That’s a ghost,” she whispered.

“That’s a ghost,” Cole whispered back.

“Say a different thing than me, because I need to hear it from somebody else. He’s doing surgery. He’s standing in a room doing surgery on a ghost.”

Cole came up and looked over her shoulder through the gap. He didn’t say anything for a second. Then: “He’s not running.”

“No.”

“He’s got a tray. He’s got a whole tray of stuff, and the thing is lying there letting him.”

“That man is out of his mind.”

“That’s the play,” Cole said. “That’s what they told us. You don’t run from them. You go at them head-on and you’ve got a shot at binding one.”

“They also said most people die doing that.”

“Most people aren’t in there doing it.”

Dani stepped back from the gap and wiped her palm on her jeans. Her voice had come up, and Cole put a flat hand out at hip height, and she stopped, and they both stood still and listened, and nothing came down the corridor at them.

She was grinning. She was also a little gray around the mouth.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said, quiet again.

“Come on.”

“Where?”

“If it works for him, it works for us.” Cole was already moving, weapon up, eyes on the corridor ahead. “Find your own ghost.”

Out on the fire escape, the straw man hung in the wind with its burlap face turned toward that window.

“Good,” it said, in a voice like a paper bag folded flat, and there was nobody on the fire escape to hear it.

Inside, the needle came down.

A quarter inch of air stood between the steel and the inside of her wrist.