I look at the patient’s face. He’s young. Late twenties, maybe. Dried blood crusted at the corner of one nostril. His eyelids flutter weakly, as if some part of him is still trying to claw its way back up through the layers of chemical restraint and oxygen debt.
He looks like there might still be a chance but there isn’t.
Behind us, the Reaper stands at the foot of the table, so close its blade nearly intersects the man’s ankles.
Waiting.
“Can you still see it?” I ask softly, without looking back. Just in case.
“Yes,” Cassian says.
“Yeah,” Talon adds.
The man on the table makes a tiny, broken sound in his throat. The ventilator compensates with a shallow hiss. His fingers twitch against the restraints, nails scraping uselessly at the leather.
I place my hand flat over his sternum.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “You should never have been here.”
Then I do what anyone who values mercy over suffering would do. I take his head in my hands and snap his neck. There’s no resistance. Maybe I imagine it, but in the instant before it’s over his eyes find mine and what I see in them looks like relief.
The monitor gives one last jagged line. Then another. Then nothing. A flat, unbroken line stretches across the screen.
Nobody says a word. Cassian and Talon don’t look at me. They just stare at the man who was already gone before I touched him.
It hits me a beat later that I just killed someone in front of these two without a second of hesitation. The thought of caution didn’t even cross my mind. I followed the most basic impulse I had and didn’t second-guess it.
A hand lands on my shoulder and Cassian squeezes gently.
“Thank you,” he says. “I would’ve done the same.”
My eyes find his and stay there. I don’t know what to say or do in response, so I just look at him. I have never been in a situation where there was no need to perform in front of someone. No mask. No calibration. Not even when I killed Leonard Garza. Every moment of my life has had an audience that required management.
Not this one.
What do I do with this?
I’m already scrambling for something to say when the Reaper moves.
It slides toward the body with the tip of its scythe lowering until it intersects the man’s chest. There’s no physical contact that I can see, but something in the air thickens and then splits. A small blue light leaves the man’s chest and gets absorbed into the blade.
For a fraction of a second I feel a coldness that doesn’t belong to this room. Then it’s gone.
The Reaper steps back. The light on the blade dims slightly, as though something has been taken in and settled. It turns, and without so much as a glance at the three of us, glides toward the far wall and disappears through it the same way it did before.
“So that’s how it works,” Talon mutters.
“Exactly like that,” Cassian agrees.
Bizarre. Far less grand than what humanity decided death should be.
I stare at the body on the table, at the silent monitor, at the mess of unauthorized medications and hastily discarded tubing.
But even if death turns out to be ordinary, even in this new metaphysical world I’ve barely gained access to, it should still have rules. Human deaths should be judged by human laws. And this one, this life, this man who spent his last conscious days staring at a dark ceiling without a single person beside him to help him through the agony, deserves justice.
My colleagues did this.
Men I have worked beside. Men whose names sit on research papers and lecture slides. Men who once asked me if I wanted to join them in “innovative trials.”
