Chapter 2: Rui (part 4 of 4)

  The Ranger, at first glance a muscular Sindhughat man, was strapped to a backboard and laid flat on the transport bed. He was intubated, collared, and had his upper body fully exposed. I noted the bandages on his head that had been removed and set aside temporarily, as well as additional heavy bandaging on his right forearm. Other than these, it seemed he only had minor cuts and abrasions elsewhere.

  The medical retinue that brought him in was made up of four people. A porter, one of our Aurum-sensitized support staff, stood at the head of the bed. On either side, the unconscious Ranger was flanked by a Triage nurse—likely Ignis-sensitized—looking after his breathing tube and a young surgeon dressed in a green theatre smock. Shuffling a few steps behind the main group was an elderly, slightly hunchbacked Huaxian man dressed in a lounge robe that looked overly large on him. I recognized him as one of the senior Neurologists. Judging from the lounge robe, he was likely called in by Dr Rivera as soon as the patient looked to be deteriorating. If that decision had been left up to the young duty Neurologist, I suspected she would have hesitated for much longer before making the call.

  While Shareef directed the patient toward the exam station and helped to position him, I received a handover from the duty Neurologist, whose name card read "Nancy Lim". She was likely near the end of her scheduled shift like me, but her shift looked to have just become much longer. There were bags under her eyes already but for the most part, she looked and sounded composed.

  "This is Mr Perera, 33-year-old Ranger. Party had to fend off a group of Jungle-hounds en route to their objective," at this, my eyes instinctively sought out Shareef. He had heard it too and we exchanged a look for a brief second. "One of them took a swipe at Mr Perera, who was on horseback at the time. Patient blocked the attack with his arm but was knocked off his mount by the impact, hit the back of his head against a rock, naked. Reported symptoms of concussion at the scene but otherwise stable during the six-hour transport to hospital. In Triage, coma scale declined rapidly and decision was made to intubate. He's also got some nasty wounds on the right forearm but we've already referred that to Plastics. Nil other neurological history. Nil other significant injury."

  "Thank you. I'll need to do a head scan, as well as a look at the vertebrae to clear spinal precautions."

  "Please."

  I turned to the exam station and got to work. The ranger had been naked—without any defensive buffs—at the time of the incident, meaning he likely didn't expect to be the target of an attack. In that condition, hitting your head while falling from a height was just as dangerous as if he didn't have the training and abilities of an adventurer. Time was of the essence.

  Mr Perera had already been transferred onto our specialized examination table, directly beneath a large, central lantern. On the floor, to the patient's right, sat a magnet source that Shareef had prepared for me in advance. At the Central, we used a block of magnetite, which had been mined and transported under adventurer protection then cut and sanded into a smooth cube roughly the size of a watermelon. Shareef stood a few paces away from the table, next to the projectors he had set up with fresh vellum scrolls and ferrite powder at the ready. The other staff members all took a step back to give me more room, with the Triage nurse on the breathing tube the last to do so. I stood on the patient's right side with the magnet source at my feet, and commenced Induction.

  The walk home from school. A familiar route passing through a secluded alleyway. He sees them again. Three older boys standing in a circle. They surround a younger one, crouched on the ground and crying. The same scene, the same taunts, the same helpless sobs. A familiar figure passing through the same scene, again and again. No more. Not today. Today, Ruihong Tao balls up his fists and shouts in a trembling voice...

  I felt the familiar vibrations as bones throughout my body shifted minutely against their joints. I raised my left hand over the table and beside me, the block of magnet floated into the air. I guided it upward and let it hover an arm's length above Mr Perera's head. Now, to activate Reduction.

  It hadn't seemed real. It hadn't made sense. Until the whole family dressed in black and hiked atop Tin Hill. Around them rows and rows of stone, people's names and parting words carved into them. Mother and auntie hold each other and wail, a ghastly sound that makes his hairs stand on end. Then, they stop in front of one of the stones, this one bearing a familiar name. "Go on, pay your respects to Nai Nai." Father says in a shaking voice. His voice never shook. It doesn't make sense. Ruihong Tao kneels in the dirt...

  This time, I winced slightly as flashes of pain shot through my outstretched arm, like tiny lightning bolts landing inside my bones. The pain was gone in an instant and the magnet started spinning rapidly in a wide circle, going under the table then coming back up, round and round. As it did, I guided it such that the arc of the spins covered an area starting from the tip of Mr Perera's head down to the base of the cervical collar around his neck.

  I closed my eyes and sensed. Immediately, the picture of Mr Perera's head on the exam table was replaced by another image, one formed by magnetic waves bouncing back from the infinitesimal building blocks of Mr Perera's body, in response to the amplified magnetic signals spinning around them. To be precise, it wasn't just one image; rather, they were myriad shifting images that showed me different sides, planes, and depths depending on the location of the magnet source and where my sensing was focused on. Taken together, I was able to form in my mind an accurate reconstruction of what Mr Perera's insides looked like in this very moment. The bones, the muscles, the connective tissues. The brain, the vessels, and the blood that was leaking where it shouldn't have been...

  Now came the trickiest part of our work. Projection was a fine balancing act of multiple distracting forces—and quite frankly a real pain—but being able to record and communicate what we saw was paramount to our role. I had to do multiple things at once without letting any of them fall behind. Thinking, choosing, speaking, switching back and forth between Induction and Reduction, all the while still sensing and interpreting millions of magnetic signals in my mind.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Still with my eyes closed, I extended my left hand away from the table. After just a second, I sensed a pool of ferrite powder under my hand, which let me know that Shareef had put the first projector into position. In my mind, I settled momentarily on a slice of Mr Perera's brain, one that cut horizontally across. With a quick spike of Reduction, the batch of ferrite powder jumped onto the vellum scroll, forming a picture that reproduced the image I had been visualizing. Immediately, I felt the powder stabilize on the paper; Shareef had caught it for me and I could let go. I then switched back to Induction and described my findings aloud, concentrating to keep the image clear in my mind's eye.

  "Acute subdural haematoma extending along the right fronto-temporo-parietal regions with associated midline shift, approximately one centimetre. The right lateral and third ventricles are effaced. There is also a superficial haematoma in the left occipital region, corresponding to the point of impact."

  Mr Perera had hit the back of his head on the left side. He then experienced a contrecoup injury where the brain hit against the skull on the opposite side of the initial impact. That was where he had been bleeding from; it had been a slow venous bleed but after more than six hours, the blood pooled and had started pushing against the brain. Had he arrived any later, he very well could have died during the transport. Even now, he was in a precarious state and might need some luck to pull through. The surgeons would likely take him in for an emergency craniotomy, opening his skull to dig the blood clots out and stop the bleeding.

  As soon as I laid out my first set of findings, I heard some voices and movements in the room. The senior Neurologist said something to Nancy, then shuffled out of the room, probably headed straight for the operating theatre to get things ready there. I also sensed the first projector being pulled away to be replaced by a fresh one. I chose the next image slice and threw it onto the second projector, trusting Shareef to catch it swiftly.

  And so it went. Pick an image, throw it onto the projector, describe the findings. By the time we went through all three projectors, Shareef would have finished fixing the first vellum and hung a fresh scroll onto the first projector, allowing us to rotate through them. There were times when this part of the process would hit a snag, either the Radiologist going too fast or the Radiographer too slow to keep up or both. But I was still early in my training and deliberate with my scans; paired with Shareef's quick and assured instincts, we never ran into that problem.

  In the end, I spun the magnet from the neck down to the pelvis and threw up one last image, that of a vertical slice of Mr Perera's spine and surrounding features. "No vertebral fractures. No other bony or soft tissue injures."

  So at least that was a bit of good news. They could take the cervical collar off. It seemed trivial in the face of the overwhelming badness that was going on inside Mr Perera's skull, but it was something. I laid the magnet to rest on the floor and turned off my Magic, feeling a bit dazed for a moment after. It had been a rather intense session.

  I nodded to Nancy to indicate that we were done. She promptly started directing the porter and the Triage nurse to take the patient to the OT while I looked over the finished vellums to check for any glaring errors. There were none. This procedure turned out to be more nerve-racking than most, with a wider—and more senior—audience than I was normally used to, but I seemed to have gotten through it okay.

  As I was mentally patting myself on the back, Nancy came over. I saw her eyes do the familiar dance toward my chest where my name card was sewn on.

  "Thank you, Dr Tao. Um, how long do you need to finish the report? I need to go assist in theatres but I should bring the vellums with me."

  "Please, call me Rui. And yeah, sure thing, should only take a couple of minutes," I said, noting her tired face and reflecting on my earlier prediction that her shift had been extended. I wondered if I looked as tired as she did. "You sure you couldn't hand this over to the night duty? Isn't it shift change soon?"

  "I probably could," she said, giving me a weary smile. "But... I want to do this."

  I nodded, giving back a knowing smile. At times, we could be real gluttons for punishment.

  I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and started scribbling my report, glancing at the finished vellums from time to time for reference. During the daytime, we had scribes who helped us do this during the procedure but I didn't have that luxury now. However, as I wrote, my mind wandered to what Nancy had said during her handover, about how Mr Perera had gotten his injury. Pack of jungle-hounds, attacked when no defensive buffs were up, had to block a blow aimed at... where? Did she mention what the Jungle-hound was going for? Suddenly, I was dying to finish my report and ask for a more detailed retelling of the misadventure. But surely, I couldn't take any more of her time...

  "Dr Lim, if I may," I looked up from my report, surprised to see Shareef approaching Nancy. "I was hoping you could indulge my curiosity by telling me more about how the Jungle-hound attack happened. Seemed like there were some strange circumstances, were there not?"

  I went back to writing, looking down to hide my grin. That sly old dog... I didn't know if he read my mind or was genuinely curious himself, but I was grateful all the same.

  "Yeah, I suppose it was a bit strange," Nancy said, casual in tone and clearly without fears of an impending Jungle-hound evolution weighing on her mind. "Basically, they were surrounded by a pack of Jungle-hounds while they were travelling. They set up like how they normally do, with the Daoshi and the Lancer leading the front, but at least two of the hounds ignored the vanguard and charged straight at Mr Perera, which is why they didn't have any time to put his buffs up. I'm not sure if I got this part correct, but I think one hound went at his horse, kind of spooked it out, and while Mr Perera was trying to get his horse under control, the other hound jumped up and attacked him."

  As I listened, I felt a chill descend. I continued to scribble, the pace of my writing slowing somewhat. Behind me, I heard Shareef ask one last question. "And did Mr Perera perhaps mention where the Jungle-hound was aiming for?"

  "Yeah, he did. Apparently came straight for his head. Good thing he stuck his gauntlet out in time, otherwise he might not even have made it here alive."

  A new set of images flowed into my mind, recreating the scene. An organized pack of Jungle-hounds ambushing a group of adventurers. A pair among them, clearly working in tandem, ignoring the defensive members of the party and going first for the potent yet vulnerable Ranger. One to distract his mount, and the other to pounce, straight at the jugular...

  For a few minutes before shift change, Shareef and I were once more alone in the Dungeon. We were both quiet, each lost in our own thoughts. I thought of the adventurers of Temasek, facing dangers in our service—dangers that seemed to be mounting to unprecedented heights. Then I thought of Lucy, my little sister who was somehow one of these adventurers, out there facing those dangers on a daily basis.

  Finally, my thoughts settled on the leave that I had asked for, the reasons for which I couldn't be truthful about with my own brother. I needed to know. I needed to see for myself. What strange Maladies beset our heroes outside the city gates, and what part could I play—however small and insignificant it might turn out to be—to offer remedies?