Chapter 60: The Operation

Chapter 60: Chapter 60: The Operation

At 2:50 in the morning, the fifth floor of Merridan General was as quiet as a church.

The procedure room at the end of the east corridor had a sign on its door that said CLOSED FOR DEEP CLEANING UNTIL 06:00, in Nurse Ruiz’s handwriting. Behind the door, everything was clean already. Ruiz had seen to that personally.

The family had taken their positions without being told.

Aveline stood outside the door with her back to it and her shield on her arm, as still as a statue. Marcus sat on the stairwell landing at the end of the corridor with his rifle across his knees and the Link open, watching every heartbeat on the floor. Tobin had set himself up on a plastic chair by the elevators with a thermos of broth and a stack of paper cups, in case anybody needed anything, which was his way of standing guard.

Inside, the room was white and bright and smelled of antiseptic. Ruiz stood by the monitor. Lena stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands to the elbow, and Hana stood at the sink beside her, doing exactly the same thing for exactly as long. It seemed they’d settled the hand-washing argument at last, by both being right.

Mira lay on the table in a hospital gown with an IV in her arm, the blue lines on her neck glowing in the cold light.

"You look like you’re about to throw up," she told Elias.

"I’m fine."

"You’re green."

"I’m fine, Mira."

She reached out and found his hand. Her fingers were cold. She squeezed anyway.

"Eli," she said. "Whatever happens—"

"Nothing’s going to happen."

"Whatever happens," she said firmly, "thank you. That’s all. I wanted to say it while I’m awake."

He couldn’t answer that. He just squeezed back.

Lena turned from the sink with her hands raised, dripping. "Ruiz."

Ruiz pushed the sedative Lena had named. Mira’s eyelids fluttered. She mumbled something that might have been you’re still green, and then she was asleep.

Hana came to the head of the table and laid two fingers at the side of Mira’s throat. Out of habit, she reached for the stopped watch on her apron.

Elias unbuckled his father’s watch and fastened it around her wrist.

"You’ll need it more than I do," he said.

Hana looked at the sweeping second hand and nodded.

The clock on the wall said 2:59. Then it said 3:00.

"Begin," said Lena.

Lena laid both palms flat on Mira’s chest, just below the collarbones.

A faint silver light rose in her eyes, like moonlight on water, and her gaze went distant, looking not at Mira but through her.

Then she pulled.

The first thread came up out of Mira’s left shoulder, thin as a hair and glowing the same cold blue as the lines on her skin. Lena drew it upward slowly, hand over hand, the way you’d draw a long stitch out of cloth, and it kept coming. Ten centimeters. Twenty. Half a meter. When the end finally slipped free, it hung in the air above the table for a moment, writhing, then broke apart into flakes of blue frost that melted before they reached the floor.

On Mira’s shoulder, one small branch of the glowing lines had gone dark.

"One," Lena said. "Two hundred and some to go."

Elias stopped counting after forty.

The hours went by in a way he’d never felt hours go before, too fast and too slow at once. Lena worked without speaking except to call what she was doing. Thread after thread came out of his sister, from her arms, her ribs, her throat, each one fighting a little harder than the last, and blue frost drifted down around the table like snow.

And Mira’s body fought back.

At 3:40, her blood pressure crashed. Ruiz called it out ("Seventy over forty. Sixty over thirty-five."), and Hana laid her hand on Mira’s sternum, and the numbers climbed back up as if someone had rewound a tape.

"One," Hana said.

At 4:05, Mira’s right lung collapsed. Hana rewound it. "Two." It collapsed again eight minutes later. "Three."

At 4:20, her kidneys started to fail. "Four." Her temperature spiked to forty-one. "Five." A vessel in her neck tore as Lena worked a deep thread loose, and blood bloomed under the skin. "Six."

Hana’s face had gone white. A thin line of blood ran from one nostril. She wiped it on her sleeve without looking away from Mira.

"Six," she said again, to Lena. "Two left."

Lena didn’t answer. Her hands had moved to the center of Mira’s chest, over the breastbone, and stopped.

The blue lines there were thicker than anywhere else, braided together like roots, and they all ran inward toward a single point. Elias could see it pulsing under the skin, in time with the monitor.

"There it is," Lena said quietly. "That’s where it started. Ten years ago."

She began on the roots.

The first came away slowly, a thick braid of blue, and Mira’s whole body arched on the table. The monitor shrieked.

Elias had heard that sound in films. He had never heard it in a room with his sister in it.

The green line on the screen twisted into chaos, then flattened.

"V-fib," Ruiz snapped. "She’s going to asystole—" She was already moving, locking her hands together the way twenty years of nursing had trained her, ready to start compressions.

"Wait," Hana said. "Don’t."

"She’s arrested—"

"I know." Hana’s eyes were on the watch on her wrist. "I need the last minute exactly as it was. Don’t change anything."

The second hand swept. Five seconds. Ten. Elias stood frozen at the head of the table with Mira’s hand in his, and it had gone completely limp.

Fifteen seconds.

Hana laid her palm flat over Mira’s heart and closed her eyes.

Something went backward. Elias felt it in the air. The monitor’s flat shriek turned inside out and unspooled. The line rose off the bottom of the screen, scrambled, then steadied into a rhythm. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Mira’s hand tightened, very faintly, around his fingers.

"Seven," Hana said. Blood was running freely from her nose now, dripping onto her grey sleeve. She didn’t wipe it.

Ruiz stared at her, then at the monitor. Then she crossed herself, quickly, and went back to her station without a word.

Lena hadn’t moved. Her hands had stayed on Mira’s chest the whole time, holding the half-pulled roots in place.

"One more," she said. Her voice was perfectly even. "The last root is wrapped around the heart itself, Hana. When I pull it, it will stop again. I can’t prevent that."

"I know."

"You have one left."

"I know," Hana said. She moved her fingers back to Mira’s throat and looked at the watch. "So pull it."

Lena took hold of the last root.

For the first time since Elias had known her, her hands shook. Only a tremor in the fingertips. Thirty years of hands that had never shaken, not under shellfire, not with the ceiling coming down, and now they trembled over a sixteen-year-old’s heart.

She breathed out, and they were still.

She pulled.

The root came up out of Mira’s chest like something dragged out of deep water, thick as a finger and blazing blue, and it fought. It coiled around Lena’s wrist and lashed at the air, and the cold coming off it was the same cold that had poured out of a red sky at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon ten years ago.

Lena didn’t let go. Hand over hand, she drew it out.

The monitor screamed and went flat.

"Asystole," Ruiz whispered.

Hana watched the watch. Elias watched Hana.

Ten seconds. The end of the root was still buried somewhere deep. Twenty. Lena’s teeth were gritted. Thirty.

"Hana," Elias said.

"Not yet." Her voice was barely a breath. "If I go now while it’s still holding on, her heart stops again, and I’ll have nothing left. Not yet."

Forty seconds. Fifty.

The end of the root tore free.

It hung in Lena’s fist above the table, the last of ten years, writhing. Then she closed her hand, and it burst into a cloud of blue frost that drifted down over all of them and melted.

[Extract and Graft: Extraction complete.]

[Removed: Gate Corruption. Duration: 10 years.]

"Now," Lena said.

Fifty-seven seconds. Hana laid both hands over Mira’s heart. Only the heart.

[Rewind: Heart restored to its state 59 seconds prior.]

Nothing happened.

One second. Two. The line stayed flat.

Then the monitor beeped. Once. Again. Then steady and strong and regular, a rhythm Elias had never once heard from his sister in ten years of sitting beside her bed.

Hana slid sideways off her stool. Elias caught her before she hit the floor. She was limp and bleeding from the nose, and smiling.

"Eight," she mumbled into his shoulder. "Told you. Faster."

Lena stepped back from the table and peeled off her gloves, one finger at a time.

On the table, Mira breathed.

And the blue lines on her neck were fading.

They went slowly, like frost on a window when the sun comes up, from the edges inward. Her collarbones. Her throat. The small branch along her jaw that had been there since she was six. One by one they dimmed to grey, then to nothing, until there was only skin. Pale, ordinary, warm skin.

Ruiz was crying openly at the monitor. Outside the door, Elias heard Aveline say something softly, and Tobin answer.

He knelt by the table with Hana still leaning against him and took his sister’s hand.

It was warm.