Chapter 2 #2
I tested the bag's weight, adjusted the straps.
Forty-five seconds to the alley through the back door.
Fifty-three seconds to the roof through the crawlspace I'd discovered my second week here.
Ninety seconds to the subway entrance if I ran.
I'd timed it all, practiced in the dark, memorized every obstacle.
The shower was cold to keep me alert. I stood under the stream, washing off the smell of blood and disinfectant and other people's desperation.
My hands were raw from the bleach, cracked and bleeding at the knuckles.
I'd had beautiful hands once. Surgeon's hands, Dr. Morrison had said.
Now they looked like they belonged to someone who'd been buried and dug themselves out.
Every sound made my heart spike. The building settling—could be footsteps. A car door slamming—could be them arriving. Someone laughing on the street—could be the last sound before they kicked in my door.
I should sleep. But I knew I wouldn’t. So instead, I went out.
The four blocks to Zi's Corner Bodega might as well have been four miles. Every doorway could hide someone waiting. Every parked car could contain surveillance. Every face that glanced my way could be memorizing my features for a report that would end with me in a dumpster behind a warehouse.
I needed supplies, and Mrs. Zi's grandson Frank was my only reliable source.
So I walked with my hands in my pockets—one wrapped around pepper spray, the other around the folding knife I'd started carrying—and kept my head down just enough to avoid attention but not so much that I couldn't see threats coming.
The bodega's bell chimed when I pushed through the door, and the smell hit me immediately: five-spice and old coffee and the particular dusty sweetness of corner stores that had been there since the neighborhood was young.
Mrs. Zi stood behind the counter, counting change for a customer, but her face lit up when she saw me.
"Ah, Dr. Maya! You look so thin. When did you eat last?"
The question caught me off-guard. I opened my mouth to say yesterday, then realized I couldn't actually remember. There'd been a protein bar at some point. Maybe Tuesday? But today was Thursday. Wasn't it?
"I'm fine, Mrs. Zi. Just here for coffee."
But she was already moving, her weathered hands reaching for the pot of congee she kept warm behind the counter. "You're not fine. You're disappearing. Look at your wrists—like bird bones."
I pulled my sleeves down to cover the too-prominent bones she'd noticed. "Really, I don't need—"
"Nonsense." She ladled the rice porridge into a container with the efficiency of someone who'd been feeding people for longer than I'd been alive.
A tea egg followed, dark and marbled from its soy sauce bath.
Pickled vegetables that would add salt and sourness to cut through the richness.
"You helped my nephew's friend last month.
The boy with the broken arm. His mother cried when she saw him walking without pain. This is thank you."
My entire body went rigid. That boy—seventeen, radius fracture, clean break—had been an exception.
His mother had sobbed so desperately in Mrs. Zi's store that I'd broken my own rule about treating anyone who might be traced back to me.
Now it was a debt, a connection, a thread that could be pulled until everything unraveled.
"I need to pay." I pulled out a twenty, holding it between us like a shield. "Please. I insist."
Something in my voice must have warned her off because Mrs. Zi's face fell. She took the money with the careful movements of someone approaching a wounded animal, understanding that kindness could be its own kind of threat to someone like me.
The bell chimed again. Frank walked in carrying two boxes with the medical supply company logo partially covered by black marker.
Twenty-three years old, second year pre-med at Brooklyn College, smart enough to get into medical school but not smart enough to realize that stealing supplies for me was a felony that would end his career before it started.
"Dr. Cross." He set the boxes on the counter, then really looked at me. His eyes fixed on my cheek, and I remembered the bruise—purple-green now, three days old from a patient’s errant fist as they’d thrashed underneath me. It was an accident, but it still hurt like hell.
"You have a bruise on your cheek." His voice went soft, concerned, the way young men's voices did when they thought they could save someone. "Are you . . . is someone hurting you? Because if you need help—"
"I tripped." The words came out sharp enough to cut. "I'm fine. This is a business transaction, Frank. Not a friendship. Not a counseling session. You bring me supplies, I pay you, we don't talk about anything else. Understood?"
He flinched like I'd slapped him. Behind him, Mrs. Zi made a small, sad sound.
"Understood," Frank said quietly. He looked at his grandmother, then back at me. "Two hundred for both boxes. Same as always."
I counted out the bills, exact change, and slid them across the counter without our fingers touching. Picked up the boxes, balancing them against my hip. The congee container was warm against my arm, the first warm thing I'd felt in days.
"Thank you for the food, Mrs. Zi. Thank you for the supplies, Frank."
Formal. Distant. Professional. The way it had to be.
I left them standing there, grandmother and grandson united in their concern for someone who wouldn't let them care. The bell chimed my exit, a cheerful sound that felt like mockery.
Behind me, I heard Mrs. Zi's voice, soft and sad: "That girl is running from something. And she's so afraid, she won't let anyone catch her—even people who want to help."
Frank responded, but I was already too far away to hear, walking fast with my supplies and my congee and my isolation wrapped around me like armor. Mrs. Zi was wrong about one thing, though. I wasn't running from something.
I wasn’t running from something.
I was running from someone.
And if I let anyone catch me—even people who wanted to help—Dr. Richard Brand would catch me too.
Then the helping would stop, and the dying would begin, and Frank and Mrs. Zi would learn what I'd learned six months ago: that caring about someone like me was just another way to paint a target on your back.
The congee was still warm when I got back to the basement. I ate it standing over the sink, mechanically, fuel for a body I needed to keep functional. It tasted like kindness, which is to say it tasted like danger, which is to say I threw half of it away and hated myself for wanting more.
Three quick knocks, pause, two slow—the pattern I'd given to exactly four people, and three of them were dead.
My hand found the scalpel before my brain finished processing the sound. Two PM—wrong time. Daylight was for hiding, darkness for working. Anyone who knew the pattern also knew the rules. Unless something was catastrophically wrong.
I crept to the door, heart hammering against my ribs hard enough to hurt. Through the peephole, a distorted face. Familiar but impossible. My breath caught.
Irina Topolov. Surgical nurse, Brighton Medical Center.
The one who'd held retractors steady during my longest surgeries, who'd known which instrument I'd need before I asked.
The one who'd been in the room when I'd tried to report the organ trafficking six months ago, who'd watched security escort me out while Dr. Brand stood there with his sympathetic face and lying mouth.
She shouldn't know where I was. No one from my old life should know where I was.
I opened the door a crack, blade still in my hand. "You shouldn't be here."
"Please." Her voice cracked on the word. "I have nowhere else to go."
She slipped inside before I could stop her, and in the basement's harsh fluorescent light, I could see what I'd missed through the peephole.
Irina looked like I felt—hollowed out, eaten alive by something.
Dark circles under her eyes so deep they looked like bruises.
Hands shaking. The careful composure she'd maintained through twelve-hour surgeries completely gone.
"How did you find me?"
"Rumors." She clutched her purse against her chest like armor. "People talk. Patients. They say there's a doctor in Brighton Beach who helps people who can't go to hospitals. They describe you—small, dark hair, surgical precision. I've been looking for three months."
Three months. She'd been hunting for me for three weeks while I'd been hiding, thinking I was invisible. My throat closed.
"I can't help you, Irina. Whatever you need—"
"I have troubling proof." She pulled out a flash drive with shaking fingers, held it between us like an offering. "Everything Dr. Brand is doing. Patient names, surgery schedules, payment records. I've been copying files for months, ever since you were fired. Ever since I realized you were right."
The flash drive was small, black, unremarkable. It could have been anything—music, tax documents, family photos. But I knew it wasn't. I knew it was death, packaged in plastic and silicon.
“What is he doing?” I asked, my voice harsh, my pulse racing.
“Organ trafficking. For the Bratva. It’s evil.”
My eyes widened.
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
A bitter laugh. "I'm undocumented. Have been for six years.
If I report this, ICE will deport me before I can testify.
Back to Belarus, where my ex-husband is waiting to finish what he started.
" She touched her throat, and I saw the faint scars I'd never noticed before, hidden under the surgical scrubs she used to wear.
"But you—you were going to report it before they framed you. You have citizenship, credentials—"
"Had." The word tasted like ash. "I had credentials. They stripped my license, Irina. Discredited me. Painted me as a drug addict who operated while high. I'm nobody now. My testimony would be worthless."
"Not with this." She pushed the flash drive into my hand. Her skin was fever-hot. "Bank records. Wire transfers. Photos from surgeries. Email chains. He got careless after you left. Thought he was untouchable."
I stared at the drive. Such a small thing to hold so much weight.
"There was a girl," Irina continued, and her voice broke completely. "Three days ago. Nineteen years old. Belarusian, like me. Came in for appendicitis. Routine surgery. She left without a kidney."
My hand clenched around the drive.
"She doesn't even know it's gone, Maya. She's walking around missing an organ she didn't consent to give. They told her the incision was larger because of complications. She believed them. She thanked Dr. Brand for saving her life."
Something cracked in my chest. Not broke—cracked. Like ice when spring comes, still holding but not for long.
"How many?"
"Since you left? At least twelve. Maybe more. The ones who don't speak English. The ones who pay cash. The ones who don't have family to ask questions." Tears ran down her face, but she didn't wipe them. "He's escalating. Used to be one a month. Now it's one a week. And there's something else—"
She pulled out her phone, showed me a photo. A surgical suite I recognized, but with equipment I didn't. Portable organ preservation units. The kind used for legitimate transplants, but too many of them. Far too many.
"They're stockpiling. Building inventory. Like organs are just... products."
The crack in my chest widened. It tried not to care.
Caring gets you killed. Vulnerability equals death.
But what was the point of staying alive if you let nineteen-year-old girls lose organs they didn't consent to give?
What was the point of having surgical skills if you only used them in basements for people who'd already been destroyed?
"Please," Irina whispered. "I can't do this alone. I can't stop him alone."
I looked at the flash drive in my hand. It was warm from her grip. It was also a bomb that would explode the moment anyone learned I had it.
"Leave." My voice sounded strange, distant. "Don't come back here. Delete any record of this address. Delete my number if you have it. Forget you found me."
"But the evidence—"
"I have it now. That's all that matters. Go, Irina. Disappear. Get out of New York if you can."
She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. At the door, she turned back.
"The girl—the nineteen-year-old—her name is Janice. Janice Long. She lives in Sunset Park with her grandmother. Just . . . I thought someone should know her name."
Then she was gone, and I was alone with a flash drive that could destroy Dr. Brand and probably me along with him. I stood there in my basement clinic, holding proof of crimes that made my stomach turn, thinking about a nineteen-year-old girl named Janice who didn't know she was missing a kidney.
The clinical detachment I'd wrapped around myself like surgical drapes wasn't enough anymore. It was failing, system by system, organ by organ.
I put the flash drive in my go-bag. Not because I'd decided what to do with it, but because it needed to be somewhere safe while I figured out how to stop caring about Janice Long and all the others who'd come after her if I did nothing.
The problem was, I already knew: I couldn't.