Chapter 16 #2
“Check his eyelash reflex,” I tell Cassian.
It comes out more automatically than anything, the kind of instruction I’d give a nurse or a resident.
I don’t expect him to follow through with it.
Most people outside the medical field wouldn’t know what I’m asking, let alone how to do it.
Cassian lifts one large hand, though, and brushes his knuckles lightly against Talon’s lashes.
There is no attempt to open his eyes.
“He’s under,” Cassian says.
“Hm,” I agree.
I slip a gloved thumb beneath Talon’s lower lid, tilt his eye open, and move a penlight across the pupil. The reaction is sluggish but present. I repeat the test on the other eye. Same result. Almost. Not quite.
“He seems to have some pre-existing trauma,” I say quietly. “Likely from injuries or concussions.”
“He looks like the type to have taken hits.” Cassian’s voice is flat, unsurprised. “Why?”
I look more closely. The blood vessels in the right eye’s sclera are slightly more tortuous, and there’s micro-scarring. It’s faint, but visible under the light.
“This eye,” I say, pointing, “has seen more damage. The vessels are fragile. If anything fails first under ischemia, it will be this one.”
“Well, we need it to die,” he murmurs. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I let Talon’s eyelid fall back into place. “But this changes the timeframes.”
Not by much. But enough to matter.
I step to the drug tray and do the math in my mind—metabolic rate, weight, the fragile vessels behind that right eye—and when I settle on the plan, I grab a vial.
“I’m going to paralyze his muscles,” I say. “He won’t feel it. The sedative has him deeply under. But I don’t want his body fighting the process.” I pause. “Just in case.”
“What exactly are you using?” Cassian asks.
“Rocuronium,” I answer. “His lungs will stop moving on their own, so we’ll breathe for him when we bring him back.”
Cassian’s fingers tighten around the rail.
“Sounds dangerous,” he says quietly. “Is it really necessary?”
“It will make the process more controlled.”
“I see.”
I draw up the rocuronium and inject it slowly into Talon’s vein. The muscles in his neck, his jaw, his chest melt into complete stillness. Within seconds, the rhythmic rise and fall of his ribcage stops entirely.
The monitor doesn’t alarm yet. His oxygen saturation holds at ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. The preoxygenation is doing its job, buying us borrowed time, but it will drain soon.
I reach for the bag-valve mask on the crash cart and hold it out to Cassian.
“Every five seconds,” I say. “One squeeze. Steady, not hard.”
Cassian takes it without hesitation. He positions the mask over Talon’s nose and mouth and seals it cleanly on the first try.
He squeezes. Talon’s chest rises. Falls.
Again. Rise. Fall.
The saturation steadies at ninety-nine.
“Good,” I say. “Just like that. Don’t stop until I tell you.”
Cassian nods once. His eyes don’t leave Talon’s face.
I roll the crash cart a little closer. Then, I apply conductive gel to the paddles and rub them together.
“Inducing ventricular fibrillation,” I mutter. I place one paddle on Talon’s upper right chest, the other on his left flank. “Clear.”
I press the discharge button.
The jolt runs through Talon’s body, making his muscles twitch once under the paralysis. The monitor flares, then dissolves into chaos: irregular spikes, jagged and frantic. The numbers at the side vanish. No heart rate. No normal rhythm.
“Stop,” I tell Cassian.
I set the paddles back in their cradle and glance at the wall clock.
Technically, as of right now, Talon is dead.
Time: 08:07.
I pick up a stopwatch and start it, focusing on the seconds, not on the strange quiet that has settled over the room.
The human brain is not built to stand calmly and watch a heart fail.
Every instinct revolts against it, a low hum of wrongness that sits behind the teeth and won’t be swallowed.
But if I do my job right, it will be over soon, and Talon will come back to life.
If.
“How long?” Cassian asks. “How much longer?”
I say nothing.
The seconds tick by. Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.
I feel the corridor map of his body in my mind. Blood no longer moving through vessels. Oxygen no longer reaching tissues. The retina, starved almost instantly. Synapses beginning to misfire, then go silent.
At two minutes, I feel the old training rise up in me like a reflex.
Start compressions now. Shock again. Don’t wait. Don’t lose brain.
I do not move.
My jaw tightens around the urge.
Two and a half minutes.
My thumb taps lightly against the edge of the crash cart. I watch the clock. I watch the monitor. I watch the line of Talon’s throat for any sign of spontaneous effort.
There is none.
Three minutes.
Every fiber of my training screams now. Everything I was ever taught about saving lives howling at me to act. And I just stand here. Letting a man die on a table.
I let thirty more seconds drip out.
At three minutes and thirty-five seconds, I finally move.
I grab the bag-valve mask from Cassian’s hands and squeeze, forcing air into Talon’s lungs. His chest rises. I let it fall, then squeeze again. Oxygen alone will do nothing without circulation, but I am already reaching for the other syringe.
“Epinephrine,” I say. “Increases peripheral vasoconstriction, drives blood to the core when we get it moving.”
I inject the drug into Talon’s arm. Then I position my hands over Talon’s sternum.
“Cassian,” I say. “When I tell you to, take over compressions.”
He nods. “Understood.”
I begin.
My palms press down and the table creaks softly under the motion. The monitor’s chaos tightens into something that almost looks orderly, then dissolves again. I feel Talon’s ribs beneath my hands, the give and resistance of cartilage and bone.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Between breaths and compressions, I glance at the clock. Three minutes fifty seconds. Four minutes ten. We cannot cross five.
“Switch,” I say, stepping back.
Cassian slides in. His compressions are deeper than mine.
“Good,” I say, grabbing the defibrillator paddles again. “Keep going.”
I charge the machine.
“Clear.”
Cassian does not need to be told twice. He lifts his hands from Talon’s chest and steps back a fraction without breaking his stance.
I press the paddles to Talon’s chest and discharge the shock.
His body jolts. The monitor spikes wildly, flatlines for a heartbeat of a heartbeat, then resolves into slow, stumbling complexes.
“Again,” I say, resuming the bagging.
Cassian returns to compressions on his own.
Talon’s heart right now is like a stubborn machinery unit after a power outage; sometimes you have to kick it more than once before it remembers its job. So that’s exactly what we do. We kick it.
Forty seconds later, the jagged rhythm begins to even out. The complexes grow stronger, steadier, less like a dying animal thrashing and more like something finding its footing. The machine tentatively assigns it a rate.
Forty. Fifty. Sixty.
“Stop,” I say.
Cassian lifts his hands. I keep ventilating, reaching two fingers to Talon’s neck with my free hand, searching for the throb of something beneath the skin.
Pulse.
There it is.
“Welcome back,” I murmur.
I lower the bag, watching his chest now for spontaneous effort. For a moment there’s nothing. Then, like a glitch resolving into movement, his ribcage twitches. He drags in a shallow, ragged breath around the mask, and his eyelids flicker.
Cassian exhales with a sigh. To my surprise, I feel something loosen in my own chest, too.
“Is he—“ Cassian starts.
“Yeah,” I say.
I pull the mask aside, allowing Talon to fight for his own air. It will be uneven at first. But it will be his.
Talon draws a second breath, deeper this time, then coughs weakly.
“There,” I say quietly. “Alive.”
His fingers twitch near the railing. Cassian is on him in an instant, wrapping a hand around his wrist.
“Talon,” he says. “Can you hear me?”
“Give him a moment,” I say, stepping back. “His body just went through hell.”
“Right,” Cassian murmurs. But he doesn’t look at me when he says it. He gently lets go of Talon’s hand, steps away, and paces the room in slow, restless loops, his hands landing on the back of his neck as he stares at the ceiling.
After a couple of minutes, he drags a mobile chair close to Talon and drops into it. I look at him and find something I didn’t expect to see there.
“You did great back there,” I tell him. His mismatched eyes meet mine, wary, like he’s waiting for the catch. “Kept a cool head. Didn’t hesitate.”
“Well, the fucker’s doing this because of me.”
I smile.
“Would feel too bad if he died on you?” I ask. “Thought you’re accustomed to murdering people.”
“I only kill those who deserve it.”
I nod slowly. But even as I do, I’m not sure I understand. Didn’t Talon admit to having killed people too? And yet here Cassian sits, vigil at his bedside, hands still shaking from the compressions that kept him alive.
Perspective is a funny thing.
I’m debating whether it’s worth digging into this when Talon makes a noise from the table.
“Guys?” he rasps.
His eyes are closed. His breathing is labored. But he can speak.
That’s a great sign.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, coming closer. He makes another hoarse sound, one that might be offensive if it had more energy behind it.
“Like shit.”
I reach up and gently pry one eyelid open, shining the penlight across the pupil. The left eye responds. The pupil contracts sluggishly, but it responds. I move to the right.
The right pupil is blown wide. Slow.
I shift the beam across it.
No reaction.
The sclera looks duller than before, the faint pattern of blood vessels that were tortuous earlier now smeared and indistinct, like lines drawn on damp paper. A flush of subtle hemorrhage has begun to cloud the lateral edge, creeping in at the margins.
“Can you see me?” I ask.
Talon blinks a few times, unfocused, and squints at the ceiling. He turns his face toward my voice—instinctively, perhaps—and his gaze drags over me.
“Um, I think so…” he mutters.
Then he looks past my shoulder. His breath stops.
“What is that?”
“What’s what?” I turn around. Nothing.
“The…” His throat works. “The thing in the corner. The… person. No. Not a person. I don’t—that’s—“
Cassian looks there and smirks.
“That, my friend,” he says, “is the fucker that wanted to reap your soul. A Grim Reaper.”
I watch them both. Cassian has a lazy, knowing grin painted on his face. Talon has an expression I have never seen on his face before. Frankly, I didn’t even think he was capable of one like this.
Wonder.
And my heart does that thing again, that sharp electric lurch, that makes me feel alive.
I’m not looking at a man who’s hallucinating. I’m not looking at a man who’s confused, or oxygen-deprived, or grasping at the residue of a near-death experience.
I know it.
I’m looking at a man who can see something I can’t.
Something I built this experiment to find.
And now I want to see what he sees too.