West Mt. Airy, 8:00 a.m.
“Where do you want this one?” Zoey said, hefting a cardboard box, the flaps open and an assortment of electronic gear sticking out the top.
“Um,” Dani said, pointing vaguely toward a plywood-and-sawhorse worktable pushed under the window in her new bedroom. “Over there, I guess.”
“You know,” Zoey said, pushing a loose strand of blond hair behind an ear, “this is a really big place, and you can have more than one room, especially since Hank has now officially moved out.”
“Yeah,” Dani said, ignoring the ringing of her phone in the pocket of her cutoff sweats. She’d been spending most of her time hanging in this half of the twin Victorians with Zoey ever since Syd and Emmett got together, so moving in full-time just made sense. But now Zoey was hooked-up too, and she really didn’t want to be the extra person yet again. “But you might want to get another roommate. You know, maybe Declan?”
Zoey laughed. Like Dani, she was wearing as little as possible on the already sultry August morning—a white Lycra tank and tight pale blue yoga shorts that looked a lot more fashionable than Dani’s usual boxers and faded T. “Dec has her own place, and she’s not really roommate material.”
“If you move out of this place,” Dani said, “I’m going to have to look for a roommate. A three-story Victorian is way too big.”
“Not to worry. She’s only a few minutes away,” Zoey said, “and we’re good with things the way we are.” She smirked. “When we get together, it’s always date night.”
“Yeah, okay,” Dani said, “you can stop showing off.”
“Just saying…” Zoey protested.
Grinning, Dani dropped her duffel bag by the closet. “Maybe when I start sorting through all my stuff, I’ll move some of it into another of the bedrooms up here.”
“You should—there’s not really enough space for that big-ass monitor and supersized gaming chair in your bedroom.” Zoey shook her head. “That chair belongs in a Star Wars museum.”
“Hey! You gotta be comfortable while you’re conquering the world.”
Zoey snorted. “I get that playing online games is a great distraction, the whole flow thing, right? But since you’re up half the night doing it, maybe it’s not exactly the most restful hobby.”
“Not the point,” Dani said, thumbing off her phone again when it rang. “It’s not about rest. It’s about”—she hunched a shoulder—“accomplishing something in the short term. Making a plan and seeing if it will work.” She laughed. “And destroying the enemy forces.”
“I totally get the immediate gratification thing, as opposed to being a resident where the goal line is so far in the future as to be invisible sometimes.” Zoey looked pointedly at Dani’s sweatpants. “Are you going to answer that phone?”
“Nope,” Dani said. “It’s my mother calling to tell me of yet another exceptional job opportunity that I can’t possibly pass up at some pharmaceutical company or research center or, God forbid, think tank, probably on the other side of the country.”
Zoey rested her hip against the footboard of the big old-fashioned four-poster bed. She couldn’t recall exactly where that had come from—maybe Hank had found it on one of his antiquing expeditions. He liked old stuff like that. “Your parents still haven’t quite figured out that you really don’t want to be a research scientist, have they.”
Dani tugged at her lower lip and tried to search for the nonchalance that was her second skin. “No. They’re convinced I’m genetically predetermined to win the Nobel Prize, like the rest of my family. And that sooner or later—and the later it gets, the harder they push—I’ll find my way back to the true path.”
“Well, your mom…”
“I know, she’s amazing and I couldn’t be prouder of her, but I’m not her. Or my younger sister or my younger brother or, for that matter, my father. He’s no slouch and probably in the running for the Nobel in physics sometime in the next decade. Hopefully before that happens, I’ll be done with a vascular fellowship, and they’ll have given up on me changing my mind.”
“I don’t think I would’ve liked to have grown up with all that expectation on my head,” Zoey said softly.
Dani blew out a breath. “I’ve got nothing to complain about. I’ve got a great family. My parents just don’t…get me.” Her phone rang again, and she shoved her hand in her pocket and yanked it out. Damn it. Whatever it was, her mother was not going to quit. She hit the accept button and said in a rushed tone, “Mom, sorry, I’m in the middle of an emergency here. I’ll have to call you back.”
Quinn Maguire said, “Something going on somewhere I don’t know about?”
Dani looked at Zoey and mouthed, Shit!
Straightening to attention even though Quinn couldn’t see her, she said, “Oh, sorry, Chief. I thought you were my mother.”
“That’s a terrifying thought. I take it you’re not actually in the hospital, and whatever the emergency is, it doesn’t have anything to do with surgery?”
“No, something totally, completely not surgical. Sorry.” Dani winced. “Um, do you need me?”
“Just wanted to let you know Ren Dunbar will be taking over Mike’s service tomorrow. Can you get together with her sometime today, do a walk around, make sure she’s up to speed on all the patients?”
“Absolutely, I can do that,” Dani said. “I’ll page her right now.”
“Excellent. Sorry to drag you away from whatever you’re doing.”
“Not a problem, Chief,” she said briskly and slid the phone back into her pocket. Glancing at Zoey, she raised a brow. “That’s weird.”
She thought Dunbar was a lab rat. One of those MD PhD people that never actually wanted to be doctors, just wanted the MD part to go along with the PhD part, which never really made a lot of sense to her. She’d only seen her a few times and never worked with her.
“What’s weird?” Zoey said, setting down another carton she’d retrieved while Dani was talking. “Where do you want this one? I think this is the last of your clothes. Unless you’ve hidden something away somewhere that isn’t scrubs or sweatpants, I mean.”
“I’ll have you know I have civilian clothes. Somewhere.” Dani peered at the few cartons of clothes and wondered if she actually had anything that had survived the last few moves that would be considered going-out-in-public clothes as opposed to going-to-the-hospital clothes or hanging-around-in-the-house clothes. It’s not like she needed them for anything. Dating really wasn’t her thing. In fact, she pretty much sucked at it.
“So what’s up?” Zoey asked.
“That was Quinn.” Dani relayed the conversation. “What do you think? Seems kinda strange to put someone on a service who no one knows.”
“Oh, I know Ren. She’s actually been in the program a few years longer than I have.”
“Really?” Dani frowned, doing the math in her head. Theirs was a five-year program—six, sometimes, with a lab year—and if Ren started before Zoey, something didn’t compute. “Like, what, she’s part of the world’s longest residency program or something? What’s the deal?”
“She came in from one of those programs that combines MDs and PhDs with a research specialty. So she’s been in the lab quite a while. I don’t really know much about her.”
“Well, if she’s taking Mike’s place, she’s going to be finishing up with my year.”
“That’ll be interesting. I guess it really doesn’t make much difference.”
“Yeah, I guess not,” Dani muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Calling BS here,” Zoey said. “Best friends and all that. Something’s up, and you’re supposed to tell me your secrets. I told you about Dec.”
“You never told me about any sex.”
Zoey smiled, that smile she got when she was thinking about Dec, soft and satisfied. Dani tried to imagine what, or who, would make her feel that way, because she was pretty sure she never had, not about anyone. She wasn’t celibate or anything, but she mostly got together with women she connected with online or maybe at the game center. Not all that often—who had time to play anything, especially this last year when she had a whole service to look after. But when she’d tried the girlfriend thing, she just didn’t seem to connect. Maybe she just didn’t get feelings. Her family were all eggheads, and emotions weren’t a thing. If one of her sibs had a problem or a decision to make, it got talked out between them and the parents until a rational solution was reached. Feelings didn’t enter into it.
Except hers. She’d been stubborn about wanting surgery for as long as she could remember. Her parents were aghast, and her siblings were just…confused. Despite all the rational reasons why she was better suited—genetically, constitutionally, and every other way—for the same careers they all intended to follow or had already established, she’d been adamant about a clinical career. So here she was, still wondering about the lives other people had, and still thinking she was running out of time to show her parents that the decision she made was not only a good one, but one they could be proud of. Maybe even proud of her. She’d had a plan, but this Ren Dunbar was a wild card she hadn’t counted on.
She let out a breath. “So, you know, the Franklin surgery prize?”
Zoey’s expression became serious, and she plopped down on the bed to face Dani. “Sure.”
“I, um…am kind of hoping I’ll be in the running for that. It looks good when you apply for fellowships, you know?”
“You have had a lot of big cases,” Zoey said, watching her carefully. “You’ve been thinking about it for a while, haven’t you?”
Dani shrugged. She’d be competing with some of her friends, and talking about it was weird. “I didn’t get the sense anybody else was really going after it.”
“What does this have to do with Ren Dunbar?”
“Seems like she’s some kind of star. All that time in the lab and the double degrees and all.” She knew a lot about that—her parents and sibs all had an alphabet’s worth of letters after their names.
“I don’t know if that will help,” Zoey said. “The Franklin is clinically based for the most part. You know, the attending surgical staff have to vote on what kind of surgeon you are, not what kind of research you’ve done.”
“Yeah, but you know how much emphasis there is in medical centers like this one on research. Making you better rounded. And I don’t have any research experience.” Dani tried not to sound angry about it. Her choice, after all. “You have a year in the lab, don’t you?”
“I have lab time, most of us do here in this program, but I don’t think you need to worry about Ren. You have her beat in every other way. She probably hasn’t done more than fifty cases in the last three years.”
“Yeah,” Dani said lightly. “Crazy idea anyways. I’m not exactly competitive for it. I’m a transfer, after all.”
“That’s bullshit, you know,” Zoey said. “You probably have more cases than any of us, and you’re always lurking around the ER and the trauma unit looking for more.”
“I don’t lurk,” she said defensively.
“You lurk.”
Dani grinned. “You noticed.”
Zoey hopped up, gave her a hug, and said, “Best friends, remember?”
“Yeah, I know.” She loved Zoey, and there was a time, before Zoey met Dec, when she’d thought maybe…but things were better this way. And Zoey was right. Worrying about Ren Dunbar wasn’t going to change a thing.
* * *
PMC, later that morning
“Excuse me.” Ren motioned to a young guy wearing earbuds, pushing a large canvas bin of folded linens toward the OR entrance. He pulled out one bud and smiled. “Where can I find small scrubs? The rack in the OR lounge doesn’t have any.”
“Oh, sure. Come on, I’ll show you where there’s usually some left.”
“Thanks.” Ordinarily if she got a page the night she was on call, she just threw her lab coat on over whatever she’d worn to the lab. She always stayed in-house on her call nights—and whenever she had something running in the lab. Which meant often, and bicycling to the hospital in the middle of the night wasn’t practical or safe. If she needed to scrub on a case, she’d grab whatever she could find, but if she was going to be spending all day, every day in scrubs, which was de rigueur for surgery residents on clinical rotation, she wanted something that fit and didn’t make her look younger than she already appeared. Thankfully, the discrepancy in her age from that of the other residents wasn’t quite as obvious as it used to be, but she didn’t want to be taken for a medical student.
The tech pushed open an unmarked door down the hall from the main OR lounge and pointed to the stainless-steel racks along one wall. Scrub shirts, pants, and green cover gowns lay in loose piles on the shelves.
“If you hunt around in there, you’ll find some smalls.”
“Perfect,” she said as he closed the door behind her. She searched the stacks and took three sets of dark green shirts and pants and carried them back to the locker room. As she set her phone down on the bench in front of her locker, an IM popped up for Raven from Axe. She smiled, grabbed the phone, and read the message.
Have time for a duel?
She texted back: Sorry, have to pass. Maybe later?
NP. Hope you’re doing something fun—or about to win one. Catch you later
For sure.
Later. Maybe. She hoped so. Her orderly life was about to go totally off-track. She wasn’t sure when she’d have free time again, at least not that she could predict. One of the big differences about being in the lab as opposed to clinical rotation was despite how many hours she spent there, she was often waiting—waiting for a test to complete, waiting for a tissue sample to thaw, waiting for the spectrometer to spit out the information she needed. And while she waited, she gamed—some of the time, at least. She supposed she’d be waiting a lot now too, for a case to start, for lab results to come in, for a critical CT scan to be finished. Unlike in the lab, though, she probably wouldn’t be alone, and she probably wouldn’t be able to fill those wasted moments catching an online game.
She’d miss losing herself for a few moments in the challenge of a friendly but completely serious rivalry. She’d miss the connection with people who welcomed her—or Raven, at least—however distant the connection was. She’d miss Axe, even though they’d never met. Axe was one of her favorite competitors. Smart and clever and, fortunately, someone who enjoyed the same kinds of online gaming she did. They’d been playing together, one on one, for the last few months. She’d probably lose that connection now. One she’d gotten used to. One she liked. She sighed. A lot of things were going to change.
Her phone signaled another message. She didn’t know the number.
Dani Chan here. Let me know when it’s a good time today to do a walk around.
And so it began.
Ren replied, I’m in the OR lounge. I can meet you anytime.
30 min in the caf work for you?
Yes.
She messaged Axe.
Got some time—you still free?
Sorry. Something came up. Text you tonight
Sure
With a sigh, Ren slipped her phone into her back pocket and pulled on her white lab coat. Then, thinking better of it, she stuffed the white coat into her locker, grabbed a stethoscope from the top shelf, slung it around her neck, and pulled on a green cover gown. There. Now her uniform was appropriate for her new role. She’d gotten good at adopting uniforms—not just clothes but expressions, language, even attitudes. Nothing masked the fact that she was younger, always younger, always the one who didn’t fit, but eventually not standing out allowed her to disappear.
She wasn’t thirteen anymore, or even nineteen and just starting her residency, and she didn’t plan on disappearing any longer. She wanted to look the part because she’d earned it—because she did belong. Hopefully soon she wouldn’t have to keep proving it.
Twenty-five minutes later she waited outside the cafeteria. Being early was the first step in getting ahead, just like in gaming. Never come in second. She could hear her father’s voice repeating that endlessly, but on that, at least, they had always agreed. She wanted to be the best at what she did.
Gaming had been a natural fit, and she’d picked Raven as a handle when she was ten. She admired the bird’s size and stature, bigger than so many birds, and its often-underappreciated talents. Considered scavengers, they were actually skilled hunters—often hunting solo—and among the most intelligent predators. She liked that about them too.
She was about to text Axe to try to find a time to get together when Dani Chan came around the corner, dressed in scrubs like her, scuffed navy-blue clogs on her feet, and a cover gown flapping behind her. A bit of a bright yellow and black tattoo peeked out along her collarbone and the left side of her neck. A tiger, Ren surmised. Dani was about her height, dark-haired like her, but hazel instead of the almost black of Ren’s. Like the Raven’s.
Ren shoved her phone back into her pocket.
“Ren?” Dani said, holding out her hand. “Hi. I’m Dani.”
Ren shook her hand. “Hi. Yes.”
“I thought we could get a cup of coffee and do dry rounds first. You can make your list, and then we’ll walk around.”
“Fine.”
“Do you want lunch or anything while we talk?”
“No.”
Dani hesitated a second, and Ren wondered if there was something else she should have said. Or asked. She didn’t think so. Then Dani pushed through the cafeteria doors, and Ren followed. She never took advantage of the free mid-night meals when she was on call, but she guessed that was about to change too. While Dani got her coffee, Ren got water for tea.
They sat at a round table on the far side of the cafeteria. Midmorning on a Sunday, the place was pretty deserted.
“Don’t drink coffee?” Dani asked, adding a sugar packet to hers. It already looked like she had a quarter of a cup of cream in it.
“I do sometimes,” Ren said. “But usually just first thing in the morning. Then I switch to tea.”
“Hmm. I never get any kick out of it.”
“You might with good tea,” Ren said quietly.
“Coffee’s more of a sure bet.”
“Not a gambler?” Ren asked before she thought better of it. That was probably a weird thing to say.
Dani gave her a look, then smiled. “Just the opposite, but…” She shrugged. “Not with my coffee.”
Ren had reached that point that she often did when she met new people. She wasn’t any good at small talk and didn’t know where to go next. She was surprised she’d been able to say anything at all. Maybe she just expected not to be able to talk to people, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also far too late to worry about it. “The list?”
“Oh, right.” Dani set her phone on the table and tapped it a few times.
Ren did the same and opened the notes function. She’d have to transfer all of this to her mini-tablet. She should have thought of that. She frowned. Already not on top of things.
“Problem?” Dani asked.
Ren was careful not to blush when she looked up. Dani’s eyes were curious, but warm. Friendly. “No. Nothing.”
“Okay, let’s start with the ICU,” Dani said, a sudden seriousness replacing the playful note her voice had held earlier.
Ren bent her head over her phone. For some reason, knowing Dani might still be watching her disturbed her focus.
For fifteen minutes, Dani recited names, room numbers, diagnoses, OR dates, pending labs, recent vital signs, and outstanding tests.
Not looking up, Ren asked a few questions and took notes. By the time Dani was finished, Ren had forty-five names in front of her. She sat back, looked at Dani. “Big service.”
“The A service covers a lot of attendings, including the big three.”
Ren raised a brow. “Maguire, Naji, and Chung?”
“Yep,” Dani said, “along with three or four others who only have a few admissions a week, if that.”
“What about ER consults?” Ren asked.
“The attendings rotate, which means you’ll get called when they’re up. You’ll need to check the ER board to find out who you’ll be covering. Same for trauma call.” Dani slid a beeper with a red band around the middle across the table. “And today’s your lucky day.”
“Okay.” Ren clicked the trauma beeper to her waistband, collected her empty tea container, and stood up. “You ready then?”
Dani sipped the last of her coffee and grinned. “Always.”
Ren wondered if she should know what that smile meant. She didn’t, but she liked it all the same.