First day back.

 

6:14 a.m.

 

Absolutely freaking perfect.

 

Since my car was towed to the wrecker’s yard after the crash, Zeth volunteered Michael to get me to work. The poor guy drove like a madman, but still…even early morning traffic heading into Seattle is a bitch, and now I’m late.

 

Pre-Zeth Sloane would be losing her cool right now, but as I walk through the doors of St. Peter’s, the me that takes risks and does things that could possibly land a person in jail isn’t all that bothered. Fourteen minutes in the history of my career as a doctor. Fourteen minutes won’t kill anyone. The niggly Pippa voice tuts at the back of my head, airing out its disapproval—fourteen minutes could kill someone. If there was an accident and you were late to work, and there was no one available to treat—

 

I cut off the pointless narrative as I rifle through my locker and pluck out clean scrubs. Hair tie to pull back my hair, hand sanitizer in the pocket, flats changed over to sneakers, and this doctor is ready for work. I’m stuffing my clothes into my locker when I notice the orange envelope that’s half slipped in between my hairbrush and an emergency unopened can of Red Bull on the top shelf. Working at the hospital is a lot like high school in some respects—there’s plenty of drama and people sleeping with other people they shouldn’t be, and when we want to pass notes to each other, we shove them through the vents in each other’s lockers. Or rather other people shove notes into other people’s lockers. I have neither shoved nor been the shove-ee before. I collect up the envelope and stick it into the pocket of my pants. Maybe I’ll catch a moment to read it later, after I try to slip onto the emergency room floor without my tardiness being noted.

 

As it goes, no one makes any comments because the place is in uproar when I arrive. There’s a rapidly spreading pool of blood on the floor, and three nurses are trying to pin a patient—a young woman, vomiting said blood, who appears to be convulsing at the same time.

 

“Dr. Romera, if you’ve got a minute!” the male nurse calls, wrestling to keep the woman’s arms from flailing so wildly. If the woman is having a seizure, standard procedure is to the support the head and leave the limbs well alone, but this woman’s in a gurney. She could break her arm if she hits the rails.

 

I rush to the patient, reaching for my flashlight. When I shine the light into the woman’s eyes, the pinpricks of her irises tighten even farther.

 

“Has anyone taken bloodwork?” I ask.

 

“Doubt she’s got any left!” the nurse—it’s Paul, one of the longest serving members of staff at St. Peter’s—grunts out. “We’d have tried but we can’t get her still enough.”

 

“How long has she been seizing?”

 

An EMT appears in the scuffle, blood sprayed up her face. She looks like she’s in shock; a narrow yellow band across her right top pocket might look like a regular part of her uniform to a member of the public, but it tells me that she’s probationary. “Four minutes in the rig. She—she was complaining of stomach pains and then—I didn’t—there was so much blood!”

 

I look around for the girl’s partner, but there’s no one to be seen. “Where’s your senior paramedic?”

 

“I don’t—I don’t know. She ran to the bathroom as soon as we got the patient inside.”

 

A series of possibilities are forming inside my mind. “Okay, either way she’s been seizing too long. Push ten ccs Fosphenytoin. We need to move her to radiology. We need to see what’s going on inside her. Ma’am? Ma’am?” I get no response. Not that I really expected one. Still, I have to try. “Ma’am? Have you taken any medication?”

 

Nothing.

 

“What you got?” Oliver appears out of nowhere, relieving one of the nurses who was trying to get hold of the woman’s legs. An instant sense of relief floods me. It’s one thing being thrown into the deep end after being away from work, but it’s another thing entirely having someone die on you within the first three minutes of your shift.

 

“Vomiting blood. Grand mal seizures. Could be Wilson’s,” I tell him.

 

Another nurse returns with the Fosphenytoin and lifts the woman’s sleeve to find a vein. Shock races around the team working on her as we all see the liquid-filled blisters marking the woman’s skin.

 

“This isn’t Wilson’s,” I say, almost to myself. I lift her shirt from her stomach and the blisters are all over her belly, too. They’re everywhere. Practically forming right before my eyes. No, this isn’t Wilson’s disease. This is something much, much worse. “Everyone, get into hazmat. Right now,” I clip out. “She has chemical poisoning.”

 

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

 

The thing about chemical poisoning is that, ever since 9/11, whenever a case presents itself, a small part of your brain instantly starts screaming TERRORIST ATTACK! TERRORIST ATTACK! in giant capital letters. News reporters often tend to do the same.

 

There are four news vans outside St Peter’s by the time our patient dies. Nannette Richards was only twenty-six, just finished a masters in marine biology, and apparently on her way to the airport to go and visit her boyfriend in Florida when she dropped down on the ground and started seizing in a gas station three miles from the airport.

 

There would probably be less panic revolving around Nannette’s death if the EMT who brought her in and provided mouth to mouth resuscitation hadn’t immediately fallen sick and also started vomiting blood, too. Now it seems as though the whole hospital is falling apart. A lockdown order went out thirty minutes ago, at which point four nurses came around and confiscated our cell phones, to avoid ‘unnecessary panic to the public’ should we decide to tell our family members or loved ones something that might be taken out of context.

 

“My mom called me eight times earlier. She’s probably losing her shit right now. She’s totally going to think my face has melted off like that guy in The Rock,” Oliver informs me, as we stand on the peripheries of the ER floor. We’ve been observing the breakdown in civilization as patients try to leave and are subsequently told by security to return to their seats until the good doctors—my colleagues and I—can ascertain if they’ve all been infected with some violent and deadly strain of biological warfare. The guards don’t use those words, of course. The term, ‘for your own safety’ is bandied around a lot, as is ‘thank you for your patience.’

 

Oliver shifts, scrubbing his hands up and down his face. “Do you think we’ll be out of here by dinner? I have somewhere I need to be.”

 

“Hot date?” I ask. His frown grows significantly deeper.

 

“My sister’s in town. She’s supposed to be crashing at my apartment, but if she can’t get in…”

 

He looks pissed. Everyone is pissed. The patients, security, the nurses, the other doctors. Me. I’m pissed that something so absolutely and categorically unheard of would happen on my very first day back at work. Like I haven’t had enough drama over the past few weeks. “Sorry, Ol. Maybe she can book into a hotel for the night?”

 

Oliver scoffs at that. “You’ve clearly never met my sister. Hey.” He shoves an elbow into my ribs. “There’s Bochowitz.”

 

Sure enough, Bochowitz’s half-bald head, complete with wispy tufts of white hair rimming his skull, is visible across the emergency room. His lumbering, slightly off-kilter gait is bringing him straight for us. Bochowitz and I have a bit of a soft spot for one another; he taught me so much when I used to go and visit him down in the very bowels of the hospital, where the morgue is situated. And in return I used to keep him permanently stocked in nicotine replacement patches. If I didn’t bring him the patches, he’d be smoking a pack a day at least. The man’s usually obscenely happy, but today he gives me a grim smile as he reaches us.

 

He gets right to it. “It’s not a contagion. There was a laceration to the dermis at the back of her neck. That looks like the point of entry. There’s no evidence of any poison in her system whatsoever, but her symptoms before death indicate she was poisoned.”

 

“So what, it’s vanished from her body?” Oliver asks. He sounds a little disbelieving, like he’s been waiting for it to be Sarin or something really nasty. Something we can all get good and worried about. Dr. Bochowitz exhales impatiently.

 

“No. I’m saying I haven’t found it yet. It’s something highly sophisticated. Something that’s going to take longer than three hours to detect, Dr. Massey.”

 

“So we can open up the hospital again, then?”

 

“We can, but Chief Allison won’t. Not until I can figure out exactly what this is. Apparently it would be bad for relations if we were seen to be releasing patients without ascertaining the exact cause of Nanette’s death.” Most pathologists would refer to a patient as Ms. Richards, or something a little more formal, anyway, but not Bochowitz. She’s been Nannette to him ever since she was wheeled into his morgue. The way he talks to deceased patients used to freak me out just like it freaks everyone else in the hospital out, but I quickly realized that he doesn’t do it because he’s crazy. He does it as a kindness, so that when the bodies of the dead undergo their final, most invasive medical examination, they aren’t left alone with a stranger. They’re left to go through it with a friend. That was the first thing that made me love the man.

 

“The EMT is recovering,” Bochowitz continues, “so she obviously only came into contact with a negligible amount of the toxin, and that was through direct contact. Those of you who did touch the patient should have a blood test just to be sure, but I’m assuming you would have fallen sick and died by now if you were going to.”

 

Oliver shoves his hands into his pockets, raising his eyebrows at the mortician. “You’re a ray of sunshine, Bochowitz. Thank you for brightening my day.” He hurries off down the hallway toward the canteen, trying not to look like a man who is terrified of needles and is running from the prospect. Which is exactly what he is.

 

“I’ll take your blood for you if you like?” Dr. Bochowitz offers.

 

“Sure.” I follow him into an examination room, my body relaxing now that the threat of imminent death is off the table. Though I tense up pretty quickly when I see the look of concern on Bochwitz’s face. His expression, usually serene and unaffected by much, is drawn into a contemplative frown. He folds his arms across his chest as soon as I’ve sat down.

 

“What? What is it?”

 

“Did you get a good look at the girl’s abdomen?”

 

“What do you mean? I saw the blisters on her ribcage and I raised the alarm.”

 

“Nannette had something written on her side. I found it when I carried out the autopsy.”

 

A sinking feeling of dread twists through me. This something that he’s found written on her can’t possibly be good if he’s this stern about it. Dr. Bochowitz retrieves his cell phone from his pocket and tampers with the buttons until he finds what he’s looking for. He holds out the device for me to see and suddenly it feels like my whole stomach is trying to escape my body via my mouth.

 

Property of Dr. Sloane Romera.

 

The letters are drawn in a slanting, messy scrawl across pale skin in what looks like sharpie. How the fuck did I miss this? And why? Why would anyone have done that? My name? On my patient? In my hospital? Oh my god.

 

“It’s relatively fresh,” Bochowitz tells me. “Usually sweat or natural sloughing of the dermis means that things like this fade fairly quickly, but the ink on Nannette is still prominent, which means it happened very recently.”

 

“Was there…” I swallow, feeling bile rise at the back of my throat. “Was there anything else?”

 

Bochowitz’s mouth pulls to the side; he scratches at a tuft of hair on the side of his head. “Aside from the remarkably personal tag marking the victim as your personal property? No. No, so far I haven’t located any other clue as to why Nannette was targeted for this attack. Or anything to really confirm that it was an attack. I just saw the ink and thought I’d better tell you first, before I showed anyone else.”

 

I close my eyes, trying to get my head around this. A woman. A random woman off the street, dying. My head pounds as I consider the life of this woman. Her fiancé in Florida who still doesn’t know she’s dead; the children they might have had together; the career Nannette worked so hard for; whether she has parents who will be grief stricken by her death. I’m hit with each new thought like a succession of bombs going off inside my head. I know it with a sickening surety: her death is linked to my relationship with Zeth. It has to be. I never had any bodies addressed to me before I started spending time with him, that’s for sure. I draw as much air into my lungs as possible. “Have you passed this onto the cops yet?” I ask.

 

“Our systems are linked. I’ll have to go down and submit my findings now. There’s a lot of people waiting on this information, Sloane. I doubt it will be long before they come looking for you.”

 

I nod, eyes still closed.

 

“They’re going to want to question you, you realize?”

 

“I know.” I take in another deep breath. Open my eyes. Bochowitz’s face has softened with worry now. He reaches out and places his hand on my shoulder.

 

“It’s amazing what goings-on can be gleaned from my lowly basement vantage point,” he says softly. “I may be out of sight, Sloane, but I tend to see a lot of things. And I tend to hear a lot of things, too. You’ve been absent, but you’ve also been troubled. I have no idea what complications may be affecting your life, dear girl, but there are further complications on the horizon. I hope…” He sighs, sounding faintly regretful. As though everything is already lost. “I hope that you’re ready. And I hope that you are safe.”

 

Poor Bochowitz. I want to tell him I am, that everything is okay, but honestly, at this point, the last thing I’m feeling is safe.