Page 54 of Chasing the Night

Seeing to him was one thing, getting him to the surgery, another matter entirely. Even trying to slide our hands beneath his body to lift was met with violent groaning and hissing.

“Leave. Me.” Demetri begged in a raspy tone. His respirations had taken on a wet sound and his color had waned drastically since I first laid eyes on him.

“It’s going to be ugly no matter how it happens, and I’m not sure how much time he has, you’re the surgeon… but he’s fucking gurgling.” I pointed out to Ender. “Run ahead and prepare your surgery.”

I didn’t wait for his answer. Part of me was terrified Isabella would leave and take Atticus’ show of mercy with her. I scooped, grappled, and hefted Demetri over my shoulder. His hands clawed and grabbed at my shoulders. He howled loudly and pitifully, but after the heft to my shoulder he was out again.

I carried him through the mountain’s hidden route, arriving unseen at the surgery. Ender already had the fire going and his utensils boiling over it. The table was prepped with fresh white linen, and everything smelled of the cleaning liquor.

“On the table with him, then?” I clarified, already on the move. A single nod of the head was all I received in response. Ender was so lost in drawing something into a syringe that he didn’t even bother looking back.

Ender

Some people say that the Fated Few have two places for evildoers. One is a place of sorrow. The other a place of torment for the truly profane. If you asked my brother, he would tell you I stole him from one, just to deliver us to another. I never understood what he meant, until I watched Atticus push the brass rings of destruction over his knuckles and turn them on my twin. The man I had idolized and aspired to someday be had kicked down the last of illusions and finally left me no choice but to acknowledge the monster beneath the mask.

He wasn’t a protector. He’d never gave a fuck about family. He was the simplest of creatures, ruled by self-indulgence and grandiose illusions that he would kill to keep.

Every moment of our tangled, torturous existence flashed before me. I could feel Demetri’s tears pouring over my arm, when they took our mother away. She was purchased and shipped to her new master right before our eyes. We were six then. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had been sold as a preventative measure.

It took over a decade for me to realize how calculated the slave house master was. Her sale was quickly followed by ours. We moved all of two blocks, but it might as well have been continents.

Demetri wheezed, ripping me back to the present for a moment. I moved on impulse alone, my mind still slipping back and forth to our harrowing journey. I couldn’t let it end like this. Not after everything. I’d spent my life trying and failing to prove Demetri wrong.

Fated Few, let this be the first time I found success.

I located the area beneath his broken rib and sought my instrument of choice. The flash of the scalpel took me roaring back. Literally, the sound of my own pulse roaring like the angry waves of the ocean against my eardrum.

I’d seen the overseers and those considering her purchase sliding into the side rooms with my mother. We had all heard the sounds of the newly arrived women being welcomed in properly over the years. But until it happened to me, I never thought that was something I had to worry about. Once we moved into the proprietor’s private address, he visited me nightly in the room I shared with Demetri.

He’d lay there as still as he is now, trying not to draw attention to himself while I was being hurt. When the dawn came, he blamed me for drawing the master’s eye and blamed me for killing the man, leaving us exposed and homeless. He blamed me for catching Atticus’ eye. He hadn’t said it, but I knew from the way he looked at me while he was spitting up blood, it was me he blamed.

Determination and the anxiety of it all caused my hands to shake. Messiah gave my shoulders a squeeze and laid his forehead in the center of them.

“You are the best surgeon south of the Inlet. If he has a chance, it’s with you,” Messiah whispered.

“And if I save him, only for him to find his end because of me, in some other way…?” I whispered, somehow finding the ability to work now that a distraction had been laid.

“There is no such thing as coincidence, Ender.” He sighed, pulling up a seat beside me. After a moment, he thought better of it and moved the stool to the opposite side of the table. “Everything in this life happens for a reason. Like those puzzles from the Forest people, the pieces fit together perfectly to form a much bigger picture. That is how our life is, and then the piece that is you fits with the piece that is me, which touches so many lives, just as yours does. So on and so on.”

Messiah’s voice could charm a crowd. It captivated me until Demetri was just another patient. Another body with a set of ribs and lungs. He knew without asking, just how much Nirvana Root to squirt on the rag and how long to hold it over the patient’s mouth.

That’s it. The patient. Just another patient. Fuck the fact that I was operating on an exact replica of myself. That the fate of my only known living relative literally lay in my hands.

Demetri groaned, and his head shifted toward Messiah. The rag was over his mouth before I could speak, and his head guided back into my prescribed position. I was getting into the thick of things. I needed to remove the displaced and damaged tissue of his lung and sew it shut.

The study of medicine had brought us far, but we still had a way to go. Nirvana Root was good for a quick tooth extraction, but I was dealing with his internal organs. This was no fifteen-minute procedure. The shakiness began again, and I started to feel anxious. Not just on edge, but an energy that vibrated inside of me, refusing to let me work out the nerves.

I couldn’t help it, despite my efforts to push forward, my eyes kept travelling to the narcotic soaked rag. At first Messiah didn’t notice, but after a while, he assumed I was concerned over Demetri. He held the rag over my twin’s lips until his chest scarcely moved at all.

“I don’t think I can give him much more, Ender…” he announced, catching my gaze drifting that way again. I averted my eyes at a speed that only guilt can inspire and was rewarded with the sharp intake of his breath. “Maybe… after you’ve finished, I could buy you a drink?”

“He doesn’t want a drink.” Chalice mused, her spiked slippers clicked over the tile floor, and she walked past me, draping her fingers against the back of my neck as she did so. Her hand settled atop Messiah’s before sliding the rag from beneath his palm and bringing it up to my face.

She pressed and removed it from my lips like a stolen kiss, leaving Messiah to stare. It was that look that could have made the Mountain itself quake. A silent ‘what the fuck’ that might as well have been bellowed.

“No one tells you how much to sip before you go burning women, so don’t worry over what he has to do to operate on his own fucking flesh and blood,” she sang, instantly causing a veil to fall over Messiah’s expression.

I groaned, and the rag and attention were quickly placed back where it belonged.