Mercy 6

The patient’s eyes were glassy, his skin moist and white. His left eyelid drooped from the local. Mendenhall pinched the top end of the wound, where the blood was thinnest. The patient registered no sensation. She punched the first staple, beginning near the eye, where she had to be most intricate, where the bleeding was heaviest. Pao Pao dabbed between staples. Mendenhall folded the skin carefully, slightly inward but only just enough, hope against the scar. She made sure the eyebrow was not affected, not crimped in any way.

She laid out orders as she worked. “Send him up to Two right after. They can rework my suture if needed. But they’ll have to measure his concussion first. He may have to go with my work. For a while.”

The last four staples were easiest, curling upward across the temple. Pao Pao’s dabs fell in sync with Mendenhall’s staples. She could hear the soft breath puffs inside the nurse’s mask, feel her shoulder pivoting firmly against her own but never pressing, steady.

Mendenhall could brace her intricate movements there.

She imagined the scar she was creating.

She doubled back to the guard. He reclined on his gurney, already mellowed from the pill. His eyes followed her, swam toward her edges. A nurse approached, and Mendenhall nodded for her to leave, all the while focused on the guard’s eyes. She took his pulse: 60. He worked out, an athlete. His uniform had a kind of piping along the pockets and cuffs, yellow.

“You’re not from here,” she said.

He just looked — at her face, at her hand on his wrist, back to her face.

“When did you come in?” she asked. “When did they bring you in?”

Someone approached the gurney, a shadow over her left shoulder.

“He’s DC.” It was Mullich’s voice. “They sent them in with some specialists. After Meeks was found.”

She stared at the guard’s shoulder, aimed. She resisted turning to Mullich.

“Them?”

“Six per floor.”

“That’s an army.”

“From how you treated him,” said Mullich, “that’s what they’ll need.”

“Do you have secret tunnels or something?”

“I’m not the one with secrets.”

She turned to Mullich, raised herself to his chin, pulled down her mask. She pulled off his, too.

“Doctors withhold,” she told him. “It’s proper medicine. We examine. We consider. We let one another do the same. We consult.

When ready. I have nothing ready for Claiborne.”

“Then for me.” His breath was clean and sharp, with tea or something, but cool. “We can go to the roof.”

“I have to tend to patients. Here. I need to get my floor back.”

“I’ll be up there,” he said. “Alone.”

She broke away first, leaving him with the high and wounded.

She moved to Kae Ng’s bed, the bullet wound who claimed to be twenty-three but was really fifteen. His latest readings indicated he was fine, could be released. Released into what? She pressed two fingers to his wrist. Her arrival had quickened his pulse. His hair was swept back, no longer hiding that one side of his expression.

Confidence was gone from his eyes, though they were clear. He was trying to form his usual sneer, but one corner of his mouth creased further downward.

She exposed his shoulder and removed the dressing. The bullet wound was sealed with a single staple, her own neat work, the scarring forced to the inside where it would never show. His creamy skin was hairless, the contours of his clavicle and shoulder sharp.

The final scar would look no bigger than a punctuation mark, a semicolon, no doubt a disappointment for him.

“Roll your shoulder twice.”

He hitched his shoulder. “I don’t feel it.”

“I’ll send you home with the X-ray.”

He nodded.

“Is it close to the heart?”

She found that strange, how he disconnected from himself.

Usually patients only did that when they were actually looking at the X-ray. “No,” she answered. “Not in medical terms. But, yes, it’ll look that way.”

“Instead I’m just gonna die from that.” He nodded toward the beds that were not hers, the hystericals across the bay, sent from Thorpe. They were all in recline, nurses and techs and visitors.

She pressed his forehead. It was cool and dry.

“Don’t even consider them,” she replied. “I don’t.”

She would say the same thing to Mullich.

32

The roof door was left ajar. She would not have to punch her key.

Mullich was letting her bypass Thorpe’s watch. She entered her key anyway, the red light blinking. She shut the door behind her. It was still night. The few stars had shifted, the sky deepened, the city quieted. A helicopter circled with a distant popping. The roof surface shone silvery, segmented into large rectangles. Mullich was not in his usual place by the telescope relic, his silhouette nowhere along the low wall.

“You’ve turned on me,” she called out. She scanned a far corner.

A red dot of light quivered on the lapel of her lab coat. She cupped it in her palm, then found him in the darkness of the opposite corner, a gray shadow in the black.

“I fear you,” he said.