Impuls

Aster

Clark raises an eyebrow.

Emily's palms are sweating.

The portable negatoscope, a screen on a tripod, flashes up; Clark rises from his seat and, moving it slightly to the middle of the room, points to six images in two rows in turn.

– Let's call these patients X, Y and Z," she begins. – The bottom is before, the top is after. One of them we recently operated on, another is on the waiting list for a planned, and this one," she points to the darkest one, "even tried to discharged. So that's three people. – Clark steps aside. – Who's to say what they have in common?

Riley squints, looking closely; Emily takes a tiny step forward, too, trying to remember where she's seen this before, but the surgeon beats her to it:

– This isn't the trio with no brain, is it?

Clark nods contentedly.

– Like three monkeys," Sarah adds. – Can't see. Can't hear. And won't say anything to anyone.

– All of our alphabetists opened up bleeding a few hours ago. – Clark points to the upper scans. – See, this one's clean, and this one's ruptured. Three aneurysms, all in different places, but at almost the same time. We've done both CT scans and MRIs and glucose before; they took readings in half an hour and everything was fine.

– It doesn't work that way. – Dylan gets up from his seat and walks over to the negatoscope. – Maybe we missed something?

– Arteriosclerosis? AH? Something hereditary? – Riley rubs the bridge of his nose.

– Fingers to the sky. – Clark presses his lips together. – No one remembers anything. But everyone knows we screwed up, because right here," she points to the lower right picture, "we opened up her skull to look at the contents, and we didn't really find anything.

– Yeah, because everything in her head has already been checked.

– Maybe the anesthesia had something to do with it. – Kemp gets close to the scans. – Damn, why is it so hard to see…?

– Three at a time? – Clark shakes his head. – On one, yes. The others weren't even touched.

– That's weird. They have no brains, and their… What do they do with them, by the way?

– They keep them on drips," Clark shrugged. – The one you can see from behind Dylan is getting treatments. They've got another one being prepared for discharge, but it's a long story.

– Stress? – Riley suggests right away. – We couldn't have screwed up before the surgery. Maybe Higgins got it wrong. Didn't take into account the risk factors…

– Too many factors," Dylan snorts. – Three arteries burst at the same time in almost the same place. Something triggered it. Something that was performed at the same time. Some kind of laser correction? What do we all have people do in surgery?

– Appendicitis? Plasty? Accident?

– Negative," cuts off the anesthesiologist. – You can't connect appendicitis to the brain. Except theoretically.

– That's what Moss thinks," Clark replies thoughtfully. – He thinks it's just a coincidence.

– Is he furious? – Sara, who has been silent up to now, snorts.

– Lucky for us, it's parliamentary convention in Belgravia today," replies the neurosurgeon grimly. – Otherwise he would have been here by now. In the meantime, he demands that we find the cause ourselves.

– He's dumping the diagnosticians' work on us? – Dylan slumps back onto the couch. – Fuck him. What's there to find out? Confirm the biohours match. Let him prove otherwise.

– Tell him yourself.

– I'm not even going to talk…

Dylan slaps his palm against his palm and goes back to the couch, Riley jumps up from his seat, points to Sarah; Clark silently crosses his arms over his chest, listening and not interfering.

Emily frowns.

The projection spins in her head: here's the brain, here's the part of it that's been removed, here's the aneurysm, the hemorrhage.

The blood runs through the arteries, making a circle – over and over and over again.

Emily walks in a straight line.

Fingers touch the scans – cold thermoplastic, blurry images – leading the widest part, bumping into obstructions. Silent here, unable to hear here, unable to see here.

He remembers, spins in his head the few days he spent with his patients: CT scans, MRIs, neurotomography, general blood tests.

Something eludes her.

The memory tosses: work in nephrology, IVs, ultrasounds, glass vials; give-and-take-no-messages; two on dialysis, three on transplants, seven hundred and forty-nine on the list; and everyone needs help, but no one does; only Higgins runs around with his patients, back and forth, muttering that he should hand out head pills, because…

– …we have to check the kidneys.

She says it so softly that her vocal cords don't even strain, but the office is almost ominously silent in a second.

– What?

– We have to check the kidneys," Emily repeats with a little more confidence. – We only looked at the head, right? And the back of the other one, I remember. They might have ADPBP," she explains. – Renal failure, but with extrarenal manifestations. Large numbers of cysts increase the risks, right? After all, the kidneys are directly connected to critical arteries. The cyst bursts, all the crap from it gets into the bloodstream, goes to the surgically weakened brain and sticks somewhere. The artery says "yuck, yuck, yuck" – and gets inflamed, trying to reject it. We need to look at the kidneys and clean the blood. If it's confirmed, send in a cut. And three at the same time-" Emily thinks for a moment, but the answer comes to herself: "And if they have not two kidneys, but one…?