Chapter 9: Rui (part 2 of 3)

  When I was a schoolboy, I had a protracted crush on a classmate—though now, I could barely remember what she had looked like. For maybe two or three years, we shared the same classroom but I never managed to find the recklessness needed to let her know how I felt. One day, however, something earth-shattering happened: she and I were assigned as partners on a project. We were to meet in the library that very afternoon and begin working together. For the rest of that day, I barely registered anything in class and my body operated as an automaton, going through familiar motions while my mind was taken over by a jumbled mess of nerves and anticipation.

  These few days since I returned to work had been much the same, though instead of playing host to raging hormones my mind was simply... empty. I showed up, read images, and wrote reports. When patients were wheeled in, I gave out appropriate directions, spun the magnets, and produced new images. I was sure I did all of these things, yet I could not recall a single instance. There was no library date to look forward to at the end of my shift. Instead, I'd walk back to my dormitory, fix myself a perfunctory meal, read a few articles before turning in—and not remember a single word of them.

  Today though, it turned out I couldn't even make it to the end of the shift. About an hour before shift change and the beginning of someone else's chaos hour, an elderly man with abdominal pain came in from the wards. The patient was moved onto the exam table, the projectors were set up with fresh scrolls, and I took my position beside the table to begin the imaging procedure. Only, I couldn't. The magnet source wouldn't lift into the air.

  I snapped out of my half-stupor as I directed my full conscious effort on the task. My bones shook and even began to ache, yet no matter how hard I tried, the block of magnet wouldn't budge from the floor. The patient squirmed on the exam table, eyes darting around with uncertainty. I felt beads of sweat forming on my forehead before a hand fell on my shoulder.

  "Go take a break," it was Dr Malhotra, the head of the department who had deigned to vacate his usual seat in the lit corner of the room. "In fact, go home. I'll take this one."

  He was a man I admired and loathed in equal measure, with a little bit of fear mixed in. Normally, I would have wilted under any direct order from him, but the overwhelming frustration I felt in the moment emboldened me to stand my ground. Just as I opened my mouth to speak, however, he tightened his grip and pulled me away from the table—not forceful enough to move me off my feet but just firm enough to make his intentions clear. He seemed to know the gist of what I was about to say and didn't think it would be wise of me to say it.

  I gritted my teeth and stepped away, once again acutely feeling the eyes of the other staff members. Even if I didn't feel like taking orders, I definitely couldn't stay in this room now. As I stalked off toward the door with my head down, I heard an additional set of commands chasing after me.

  "If you're going to come in tomorrow, sort yourself out. Otherwise, don't bother."

  Wrestling with another shock of embarrassment, I hurried away from the Radiology office. I bounded down the corridors, walking fast but with no destination in mind. I felt my eyes burn yet again with fresh tears, but this time they were the angry, petulant sort, the kind of tears I hadn't shed since I was a boy. More eyes passed as I tried to rub my shame away; some lingered curiously while others were quickly averted.

  It would have been inaccurate to say that I felt nothing the last few days. I did harbour a distinct and nearly constant sense of isolation. My sister was in ICU, one of her legs torn apart by a Malady that had been coming for me. In the hospital—and really in the entire city—I alone lived with that fact.

  Some took pity on me—Dr Rivera perhaps exemplifying that this morning. Some thought I was to blame or at least thought me insane to have placed myself in that situation in the first place; the prime representative of this school of thought currently sat fuming in his house, suspended from work for breach of ethics. Others, like Dr Malhotra, thought I needed to shape up and move on with my life. The upshot of it all was that most of my co-workers now gave me a wide berth, like I was a pile of broken glass.

  And now, to top it off, my Magic had failed me. It didn't feel like I'd run out of fuel—I had definitely Inducted, yet I couldn't communicate with the Aurum source. It felt more like... a blockage.

  I slowed my pacing and picked a wall to lean against, trying to be unobtrusive. I took a few calming breaths and tried to Induct again, seeking out Aurous Quintessences in and around me. It had... mixed results. I could feel the Quintessences but couldn't quite capture them. As soon as my mind tried to focus on them, they slipped away. The more I tried, the more distracted I became until I started to feel a headache in addition to the pain in my bones.

  I exhaled loudly, startling a pair of nursing students who were passing by. Dr Malhotra was right. I really needed to clear my mind and sort this out, otherwise I ran the risk of freezing up again tomorrow.

  I started walking again, much slower now as my mind cycled through numerous thoughts without settling on any one of them. I no longer noticed the people who passed me by or where their eyes were directed. Indeed, I wasn't even aware of which way my own feet carried me.

  At some point, I looked up to find that the space around me had grown quieter, the foot traffic now barely existent. Separated from conscious input, it turned out that my feet had taken me back to ICU. Back to Lucy.

  Unable to summon any compelling motivation to change course, I trudged down the hallway in the direction of bed ten. As I approached the room, I was greeted by the sight of Liew Poh-Leng—the trainee Intensivist in charge of Lucy for the day—deep in conversation with a man in civilian clothes. They stood by the wall opposite from the patient rooms, but as I got closer, Poh-Leng glanced up in my direction, said something to the man, and ducked into Lucy's room.

  I looked to the man with curiosity. He was a greying Huaxian with neatly cropped hair, rather short in stature but looking more muscular and standing straighter than was common for someone his age. His simple changshan was black with white trims and had an ironed, well-tailored look to it. There was a healthy tan to his face that indicated a life spent mostly outdoors. I noticed that he was looking right back at me, with a friendly smile that seemed to suggest he might have been expecting me. Something about him felt familiar to me as well. I searched my memories for relatives on either side of the family that might fit his description but came up empty.

  Realizing that I had no proper reason to go into Lucy's room outside visiting hours, and with the hallway having come to a dead end, I had nowhere to go except to come to a stop beside the stranger. As I did, he continued to look at me with that inscrutable smile. Deciding that some kind of exchange was unavoidable, I pointed to the door to bed ten and stammered. "Were you, uh, visiting the patient in there?"

  "I was," the man said simply. I stared, momentarily lost for words. I supposed he answered my question directly enough, yet I expected that he would have more to say on the matter.

  "I'm sorry, I don't think we've met. I'm Rui, Lucy's brother," the one responsible for putting her in this mess, I didn't add. I found myself extending my hand, though I wasn't entirely sure if it were appropriate. The man looked at my hand for a second before he took it firmly, his smile widening. His callused palm and fingers felt rough against my skin.

  "I know who you are, Rui," the man said, tilting his head slightly to look into my eyes. "In fact, I had planned on visiting you next. You saved me the trouble of finding you."

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  "Visit me? Wait, who—"

  Then it hit me. He looked familiar because I had seen numerous drawings and paintings of his likeness, though he was a little shorter than I had pictured in my head—and more than a little older. "You're... Mr Seah?"

  He nodded, beaming ear to ear. So the real Seah Choo-Kang liked to smile. In all the pictures I'd seen, he was depicted with a stern frown or with teeth bared in aggression. The smile made him look childish, like a friendly grandfather who took pleasure in entertaining younglings. He was also much less intimidating without his trusty halberd by his side.

  "I can't believe I'm talking to the real Seah Choo-Kang," I breathed, probably grinning like an idiot. If anyone in Temasek could be described as a celebrity, Mr Seah would top the list. I, like almost every other boy and girl my age, grew up on books and plays about his exploits. As I landed on my next question for him, however, I was reminded of the reason he was here—the reason I was here—and my excitement died down almost instantly, replaced by humiliation. "Do you... uh, visit her often?"

  "I try to check up on her once or twice a week," he said. I waited for more, but again, he seemed content to address what had been asked and leave it at that. I never imagined what my first conversation with Mr Seah might entail, but if I had, it certainly wouldn't have been to the backdrop of my sister in ICU.

  "I... never got a chance to apologize to you personally, Mr Seah," I said quietly, hanging my head in genuine contrition. "I'm... I'm sorry."

  "Yes," the reply was quick and concise. I looked up in surprise. He was still smiling. Though my apology was sincere, I hadn't expected the response to be quite so... direct. He continued, finally with a question of his own. "I accept your apology. Now how do you plan on making it right?"

  The last remnants of the giddiness from meeting my hero and any warmth Mr Seah's grandfatherly smile had engendered were gone in an instant. Not only did he really blame me for Lucy's mishap—as he rightly should—he also expected me to make amends. I had flagellated myself aplenty over the past two weeks but had never thought about something concrete I needed to do as redress. What could he have had in mind? Financial compensation? Corporal punishment?

  "I, well, this... did you... did she... a loss? Should I... I mean, if you just tell me how much, perhaps I could..."

  As I struggled to form a coherent thought, I saw Mr Seah's smile turn into a frown of mild concern. "What are you talking about, man? I'm asking how you're going to make up for sitting on your bum for two weeks and not giving me a single update on what you're working on."

  "I... what?"

  "You are working on something, aren't you? What, you just watched two Oliphants get taken down—bloody brilliantly, I might add—then barely came out alive from a premeditated Jungle-hound ambush, and now that's it, bye-bye, see you later? No follow-up quests? Research questions? Presentations to your colleagues? Newscroll articles? Nothing?"

  I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. What on earth was this man on about? My sister had just lost a leg and was still fighting for her life. And he wanted to send me on another quest? But what little time I had spent around adventurers had been enough to tell me this wasn't some kind of sick joke. Mr Seah was dead serious.

  "You... don't blame me for what happened to Lucy?" I asked weakly, feeling deflated. Along with the tension, it seemed that all the guilt, shame, and fears had gone out as well, at least temporarily. Mr Seah scoffed.

  "Boonie was right. You are a bit slow on the uptake, and maybe a bit too full of yourself. In case you've forgotten, Rui, we're adventurers. Your sister is an adventurer. This is what we do. We put our lives and limbs on the line, and yes, sometimes we lose them. But hey, I bet I get paid a hell of a lot more than you do. And I'm probably more popular with the ladies too."

  I must have had a fairly ridiculous look on my face at this point, as Mr Seah broke into a hearty guffaw. I looked around in alarm, suddenly reminded that we were still in the middle of a hospital—the ICU no less—and expecting to see displeased nurses poke their heads out to shush us. After a short while, Mr Seah settled down and continued, the genial smile back on his face.

  "Don't tell my wife I said that, eh? Anyway, the point is, stop worrying about your sister. We knew the risks going in, and we didn't handle them perfectly. There's no need for you to jam yourself into that appraisal," at this, he suddenly got a spark in his eyes and leaned in closer, dropping his voice as if he wanted to let me in on a secret. "What's far more interesting and what you should be worrying about is how we left ourselves so defenceless against the Jungle-hounds. At debrief, we confirmed that there were no signs of them at all while we were tracking the Oliphants. And yet, as soon as we'd engaged the Oliphants, they came out of the woodworks and targeted our most vulnerable position. It's a crazy thought, but it's almost as if they were tracking us, and knew the best moment to strike."

  I felt a chill in my spine and recalled the words of Asifoa, the detachment leader at the Pelepas outpost who spoke of the Barongs that jumped the fence. It's like something or someone out there is teaching them. Between the shock of the incident, the grief in the aftermath, the drama involving Michael... I had forgotten all about the actual attack and how it fit with my budding theory that Maladies were somehow adapting to adventuring conventions. Prisha believed it, and it seemed Mr Seah did as well.

  "That's why I need you to get off your bum and put in some work for us," he continued, giving me a few friendly taps on the back. "It's the whole reason I let you come with us on this quest, my man. We adventure folk... sure, we have our own scholarly traditions and ways of keeping our training fresh. But just between you and me, the whole industry's become too fractured. And no one wants to believe me when I say Maladies are starting to kill us faster than we can train up new recruits. We need to cast a wider net, and need more eyes and minds on this so we could start to push back. Can we count on your help or not?"

  With this, he kept a hand on my shoulder as he waited for me to respond. I seemed to be getting a lot of hands on shoulders from older men today. I thought back to my personal collection of vellum scrolls and case reports from the past few years. This was precisely why I had thrown myself into this—to learn about Maladies in the hopes I could help devise ways of keeping adventurers safe. But I also knew I wouldn't have taken on this risk if someone dear to me hadn't already been on the front line, putting herself in danger to do what she was best at. No matter what Mr Seah wanted or what was happening to other adventurers in Temasek... for me, it always came back to her.

  "What's going to happen to Lucy, Mr Seah?" I asked, my voice flat. His hand left my shoulder and returned to his side. "Does she... still have a place in Silver Crane?"

  For the first time, he seemed to give my question a moment of consideration. When he answered, he was true to form in his bluntness.

  "In her current state, she can't return to the field," he said, without a grain of sugar in his words. I winced, and let my head fall again. No brother could sleep easy knowing his sister faced down deadly beasts on a daily basis. Yet the same brother wouldn't want to see her dreams crushed, her livelihood ruined.

  "But," Mr Seah continued, and I looked up, "don't you go writing off our Lucy, you hear? You should know better than anyone that she's a tough biscuit. She'll bounce back from this. I don't know how yet, but she'll find a way. Especially considering she's got the help of brothers who're just as stubborn as her."

  Brothers, plural. So Mr Seah was also fully aware of the hullabaloo Michael had caused. How could he be so full of confidence about us siblings? One of us lay unconscious in ICU, and it was unclear if she could walk on her own again. One of us had cursed up a storm at half the senior staff of the hospital and put himself in contempt of court on his way to a lengthy ban from his own profession. And one of us continued to wallow in my own misery, showing none of the resolve with which my sister tackled everything in her life and work, and lacking the basic empathy to reach out to my own brother in his time of need.

  I felt hot tears rolling down my cheeks and made no effort to hide or stop them. I stood facing the wall across from me, behind which Lucy was fighting to get back to her life and my colleagues were hard at work to help her achieve it. I was still grieving, yes. I was still ashamed, yes. But above all, I was angry. Angry at myself for rolling over and letting the punches rain down, when I should have been fighting back this whole time.

  "You're not going in to see her?"

  I turned to the voice, showing my tear-soaked and snot-covered face in all its glory to the hero of Temasek who still smiled up at me in that playful grandfatherly way of his. I rubbed at my eyes and let out a shaking breath before answering.

  "I can't let her see me like this. Not until I've gotten off my bum and put in some work."