Chapter Three Superhero Air
The emergency came on a Wednesday. The way emergencies always did.
Right in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
Between a routine ear infection and Jennie’s first coffee break in six hours.
“Dr. Lin! Incoming from Emergency! Six-year-old girl, severe breathing difficulty!” Lin Xing was moving before the nurse finished the sentence.
“Resuscitation room.” His eyes found Jennie across the ward.
“Dr. Jennie. With me.” Her heart jumped.
Half adrenaline, half something embarrassingly close to he picked me. Both feelings got filed away for later.
The girl’s name was Becky. Six years old.
Curly-haired. Terrified. Fighting for every breath.
Small shoulders heaving. The muscles of her neck pulling tight with the effort.
Her parents hovered at the edge of the room, wearing the specific gray-faced fear Jennie had never gotten used to. She hoped she never would.
Lin Xing was already moving. Calm. Quick. No wasted motion.
“Airway’s clear. Respiratory rate elevated.
” He handed Jennie the stethoscope without looking.
“Lungs.” She listened. “Bilateral wheezing.” “Agreed. Acute asthma exacerbation.” He turned to the team, voice level as a metronome.
“Nebulized bronchodilator. Oxygen. Steroids ready.” The team moved.
The nebulizer hissed to life. And that was when the real battle started.
Becky took one look at the oxygen mask coming toward her face and lost the last of her calm.
“No! NO! She twisted away, crying, which made the breathing worse, which made the crying worse, which made everything worse. Her mother made a small, wounded sound in the corner. A nurse tried again. Becky batted the mask away with both hands. Jennie scanned the room. Spotted a small teddy bear on the supply shelf, left over from some other child’s stay.
Grabbed it. Dropped to her knees beside the bed.
“Becky. Look. Look at him.” She waited until the girl’s streaming eyes focused.
“This is very important. This bear needs superhero air.” Becky hiccupped.
“... What?” “Superhero air.” Jennie held the small mask gently over the teddy’s face.
“It’s what superheroes breathe before missions.
Watch — see how brave he’s being? Not even wiggling.
That’s because superhero air makes you strong.
” She leaned in. Dropped her voice to a whisper.
“But here’s the problem. He can’t go on the mission alone.
He needs a partner. Someone even braver than him.
” Becky’s chest was still heaving. But her eyes had locked onto the bear.
“...Me?” “Well, I don’t see any other superheroes in this room.
” Jennie glanced theatrically at the adults.
“These people? Please. They’d never survive training. ” A tiny, wet almost-laugh.
Becky reached for the bear. Hugged it to her chest. When Jennie brought the mask up this time — slowly — the little girl let it settle over her nose and mouth. “Deep breath, partner,” Jennie said softly. “Fill up your superpowers.”
Becky breathed. The nebulizer hummed. Slowly — one minute, two, five — the terrible pulling in her neck began to ease. The numbers on the monitor climbed back toward safety.
Her mother started crying. Her father squeezed Jennie’s shoulder hard enough to bruise — and then, before she could fully rise from the floor, pulled her into a full, unguarded hug, his voice breaking against her shoulder.
“You gave us our daughter back,” he said.
Jennie held onto him for a moment, throat too tight to manage anything more than a nod, and decided she’d wear that bruise with pride.
It was only when she stood up, knees aching from the floor, that she realized Dr. Lin Xing had been watching the entire time. He said nothing. Checked the monitor. Adjusted the treatment plan.
Spoke briefly and kindly to the parents.
But something had shifted in his face. She got to her before I could, he thought, watching Jennie kneel there with her hair coming loose from its ponytail, still murmuring something ridiculous and gentle to a stuffed bear. I’ve been doing this for eleven years.
She’s been here three weeks. It wasn’t envy, exactly.
He turned the feeling over once, clinically, the way he turned over an unfamiliar symptom, and found it was something closer to relief — the quiet, unexpected relief of discovering he wasn’t the only person in the building who could reach a frightened child that fast. He filed the thought away before it could become anything more complicated than that.
Something small. Something Jennie was starting to learn how to read — one rare word at a time, like a language she’d only just begun to study.
It was nearly seven that evening when he found her at the nurses’ station, finishing Becky’s notes. “Dr. Jennie.” She looked up. Braced by reflex. “Sir?”
“Walk with me.” Walk with me. Two words, and her stomach did something that wasn’t in any medical textbook. She grabbed her coat and followed.
They walked in silence down the long corridor of the west wing.
Past darkened offices. Past the cartoon murals some long-ago artist had painted for the kids.
He stopped at the big window at the end, where snow was falling over Toronto in slow, fat flakes.
Gold under the streetlights. For a moment, he just looked out at it.
Jennie stood beside him, hyper-aware of the silence, physically restraining herself from filling it with a joke.
It was the hardest thing she’d done all day.
Including the emergency. “Medical knowledge can be learned,” he said finally.
“Any diligent student acquires it. Protocols. Dosages. Differentials.” He was quiet a second.
“Earning a frightened child’s trust in ninety seconds cannot be taught.
I’ve watched excellent physicians fail at it for entire careers.
” Jennie’s breath caught somewhere behind her ribs.
“Today,” he said, still watching the snow, “you reminded me why I chose pediatrics.”
The silence that followed was enormous. Jennie — who had a comeback for everything, who had once talked her way out of a customs inspection with a joke about mangoes — could not produce a single word.
“Thank you,” she finally managed. “Sir.” He turned from the window.
The moment was already folding itself closed, his face returning to its usual unreadable setting.
“Don’t let it make you overconfident.” “Wouldn’t dream of it.
” A pause. She couldn’t help herself. “Although, for the record — this is the nicest threat anyone’s ever given me.
” Was that — did his mouth twitch? It happened too fast to verify.
He was already walking away. “Good night, Dr. Jennie.” “Good night, Dr. Lin Xing.”
She stood at the window a moment longer. Watching the snow. Grinning like an absolute fool at her own reflection. Superhero air, she thought. I could use some myself right now.
Thursday brought her back to earth. Almost literally.
She was walking the ward, reading a chart — a bad habit, she knew, she’d been warned — when her foot came down on something round and treacherous.
A rubber ball, escaped from the playroom.
Lying in ambush. The world tilted. The chart flew.
Jennie had exactly enough time to think, oh, this is going to be SO embarrassing— A hand caught her arm.
Another steadied her back. Instead of hitting the floor, she found herself suspended at a forty-five-degree angle, staring up into the composed, faintly exasperated face of Dr. Lin Xing.
Neither of them moved. The corridor had gone completely silent.
Somewhere, Jennie was fairly sure, a nurse had frozen mid-step with a bedpan.
“You were reading while walking,” he said.
“I was multitasking,” she said, upside down.
“You were falling.” “That was the third task.”
He set her back on her feet with brisk efficiency.
Released her arm. Retrieved her chart from the floor.
Handed it back. All in about four seconds.
All without a single change of expression.
“Eyes up, in corridors, Dr. Jennie.” He walked on.
Behind the nurses’ station, two nurses had their heads together, whispering with the intensity of wartime codebreakers.
Jennie caught exactly three words — “caught her before—’ — before Lin Xing, without turning around, without even slowing down, said: “Less gossip. More charting.” Both nurses snapped upright like they’d been electrocuted. “Yes, Doctor!”
Jennie pressed the chart over her face and laughed silently into it for a full thirty seconds.
That evening, in the lounge, Sophia was waiting for her with the expression of a woman holding a winning lottery ticket.
“So. He caught you.” “News travels.” “News SPRINTS. Emma texted me a play-by-play with a diagram.” Sophia leaned in.
“And I heard about last night’s little corridor walk, too.
‘You reminded me why I chose pediatrics’?
Jennie. JENNIE. Do you know what that means?
” “It means he’s a good mentor acknowledging solid clinical work,” Jennie said primly, shoving a spoonful of yogurt into her mouth to hide whatever her face was doing.
“Uh-huh. Anyway. Day count?” Jennie’s shoulders dropped.
“Nineteen. Nineteen days until I’m homeless. ”
She spooned another bite of yogurt, grim.
“I looked at two more places yesterday. One had a ‘shared bathroom situation’ the agent refused to explain. The other one — I swear on my grandmother — had a tenant living in the closet.” “Living in—”’ “There was a MAN. In the CLOSET. The agent said, and I quote, ‘He’s very quiet.’” Sophia put down her fork.
“Okay. New strategy. You need local intelligence. Someone who’s lived near the hospital for years.
Knows every building. Knows which ones are decent—” She stopped.
A slow, evil grin spread across her face.
“Someone like a certain department head who’s worked here for a decade.
” “Absolutely not.” “Why not? It’s a completely normal, professional question!
‘Dr. Lin Xing, which neighborhoods do you recommend for hospital staff?’ That’s it!
That’s all!’ “Sophia, I cannot walk up to Dr. Ice and ask him where he lives—” “You’re not asking where he LIVES, you maniac.
You’re asking for area recommendations. There’s a difference.
A small, legally significant difference.
” Jennie opened her mouth to refuse again.
Thought about the closet man. And the drum teacher. And the landlord who said “exactly.”
“...Fine,” she said. “Tomorrow. But if he fires me, I’m haunting YOUR apartment. Rent-free.”