An Emergency

The memo stank of barrel-printing ink and bad news. Oh, it began with the usual hurrahs, our boys victorious and finally coming home, but it ordered me to banish sixteen patients from my care by week's end. I didn't have ten men who were safe to send home to their families. This could not stand, and I'd tell Mathy to her face.

Green-tinged gaslight in the stairwell gave way to the lobby's white-gold aether lamps, and I suppressed a wince at the familiar prickle and whine of modern lighting. The clerk at reception waved me over, but I ignored the message slips in her hand.

"Have you seen Dr. Matheson?"

"Good evening, Dr. Singer. She left twenty minutes ago." She nodded her head leftwards.

Matheson had sent her memo late to escape before the news spread. She wouldn't be the one to send veterans home before they were ready. That responsibility was on me.

"You aren't the only one to ask." The clerk thrust messages into my hand. "They all left early. Department heads, board members ... It's a bad one this time, isn't it?"

"Mandatory patient discharge." My fingers barely grazed hers, but the old wound to her shoulder joint throbbed a dull red to my talent. My fingers itched to heal it. I drew away.

She curled message slips into tubes and slid them into labeled cubbies. "Well, it's to make room for the soldiers coming home, isn't it?"

It was. The war in Laneer was over, and as predicted, Laneer surrendered to Aeland's might. A happy event, to be sure. But when I thought about the fifty thousand soldiers on their way home, the chance they shared my patient's problems ... I ignored the sick feeling in my gut, stuffing the messages in my coat pocket beside the crumpled memo. "What about Robin?"

"Haven't seen her. The nurses are in a meeting."

This damn memo, and no Robin to commiserate. "Thank you. Have a quiet evening." I gave her a polite nod and headed for the exit, faltering as I pushed the heavy door open.

It's perfectly safe out there. I knew it, but I still had to scan the trees when I stepped through the hospital doors. Their branches bent heavy with ripening apples, not the weight of enemy snipers.

Perfectly safe. Laneer's everlasting summer and gunfire were an ocean away. I was home in Kingston, where carriage wheels and bicycle tires hissed along rain-dampened streets, the air crisp with a streak of winter. I patted my pockets, searching for cigarettes I didn't carry anymore. Maybe Robin would let me have one. Solace knew I needed one, after my day.

Brass carriage bells, trilling bicycle bells, and shouting sounded, not far away and coming closer. A carriage careened around the corner. Cyclists scattered like startled fish. The driver hauled on the reins, putting his weight against the carriage brake. "Emergency!" the driver cried, stilling his agitated horses.

Cold pooled in my gut. We weren't an emergency hospital. If they needed a surgeon, I'd have to take up the scalpels I hadn't touched since I came home from the war.

The coach door banged open, and a broad-shouldered gentleman leapt out, bearing a sick man in his arms. The patient's face rolled toward me, and my heart kicked against my chest. Not just sick; by the waxy look of his skin, this man was dying. He lifted his trembling hand to claw at my coat lapels.

I put my arms under the patient's shoulders and knees. "I'm Dr. Singer, sir. I'll take it from here."

"I found him in the street." Instead of letting go, the gentleman grasped my arms, and between us we made a carry chair. He nodded to me over the patient's head. "I'm Tristan Hunter."

He adjusted his grip on my sleeves and ran like we had to outpace a tin grenade. Where had he learned to move casualties like that?

The sick man groped for me again.

"Sir? Can you tell me your name?"

"Nick Elliot," the sick man said. "Help me, Starred One. I am murdered."

I stumbled. The gentleman glanced at me, wide-eyed.

"He's raving." My excuse was feeble.

We rushed past the crowd huddled around the lobby wireless, their faces pop-eyed and staring at us. A competence of nurses strode out of Audience Hall A. Robin — thank the Guardians — broke from their midst, following us to an empty treatment room. Mr. Hunter handled the turn and dump in the dark as competently as any medic I'd worked with in the war.

He stepped back to snap on the light. The harsh white glow of aether prickled over my scalp and blazed over Mr. Elliot's pale face, the bruised hollows around his eyes deep violet.

Robin stretched a pair of rubber gloves over her hands, but I didn't bother. She caught my overcoat as I shrugged it off, her hand already out for my bowler.

"Poison," he gasped. "In the tea. Please, Starred One. Help me."

Don't say that out loud. I tore his vomit-stained shirt open. Abalone shell buttons plinked on the tile floor. I planted my bare hand on his chest and choked down a gasp.

Mr. Elliot's aura was the green of new spring leaves. A stranger with a witch's aura, dying on my table? This was a disaster.

Robin handed me a stethoscope. Mr. Elliot's pulse tied a stone to my hope of saving him, his labored breathing an off-time rhythm shuddering in his skinny chest.

"Is there an intravenous kit left?"

Robin threw open supply drawers. "No."

"Find a kit. Find two. Run."

Robin dashed out of sight. I spread my fingers over the stranger's chest. The deep scarlet light of his heart faltered. Gray particles gathered in his stomach and kidneys: dull, but with a feeling of metal. He had been poisoned, and not by bad food or filthy water. I couldn't save this man without magic.

Tight muscles in my arms and legs quivered. I could save him. Then he would talk. Then I'd wind up in the asylum ... or worse, my family would save me from the asylum.

Mr. Elliot dragged in a tattered breath. "I got too close. They needed the souls. The war —"

He gagged and rolled away from me, retching. I held him steady. "Don't try to talk."

He dragged in ragged breaths and kept talking. "Find my murderer, Sir Christopher."

I froze. "I'm Dr. Singer."

He groped for my arm. "Promise me."

A crackling line of static rushed over me. Tendrils of green light shot from his fingers and twined up my arm. I fought his grip, but the vines held fast, stretching from his grasping fingers.

I lurched backward, trying to break free. He held on and toppled from the exam bed, landing on the tiles with a cry. The light-vines constricted, sinking under my skin.

Nick Elliot raised his head. He was on his last shreds of life, his grip on my arm trembling.

"Take it," he said. "Please. Use it to save them."

There was no time to ask who I was saving, or from what. The souls, he said. And he knew my real name.

"Please, Sir Christopher," he panted. "The soldiers ... they deserve the truth."

The truth about what? The war? I wasn't sure the soldiers in my ward could...