Chapter 73: Where is My Doctor...?
"Mmmmm...!!!"
Lily’s ears went pink... Then red... "What is he doing...!" she was startled.
"Sister," Julie said cautiously.
"It’s okay..." Lily reached for the door handle.
"Sister, maybe we should—"
"Don’t stop , Julie." Her hand closed on the handle.
But suddenly, the door opened from the inside.... And Tony Clark stepped out.
He was drenched in sweat— his scholar’s uniform darkened at the collar and shoulders, his tied hair coming loose on one side, dark circles under his eyes from an hour of continuous concentration. He held his needle case in both hands and was looking back over his shoulder at sothing inside the room as he stepped into the corridor.
He almost walked directly into Lily.
He stopped... Looked at her... Looked at the crowd. Looked at Julie, who was making a face he couldn’t imdiately interpret.
"Oh... You’re here." Tony said with a smiling face
The corridor went absolutely silent.
Two hundred people stared at Tony Clark— sweat-soaked, dishevelled, stepping out of a closed ergency room where sounds had been coming from for an hour.
But not a single person expected Tony to smile after seeing Lily in this situation.
The silence lasted exactly four seconds... Then everyone started whispering at once.
"He actually smiled...!"
"He violated a girl in an ergency room?! While she was ill?!"
"That’s— that is genuinely the worst thing I have ever—"
"Soone docunt this!! This needs to go directly to Peak Master Natasha!!"
"The evil boy reputation was not exaggerated at ALL—"
Lily grabbed Tony’s wrist. "We are leaving," she said, in a voice so controlled it was more frightening than shouting would have been.
"Lily, wait... There’s sothing I need to tell you—" Tony uttered.
"You can tell
everything when we are not standing in front of two hundred people." She was already moving, pulling him behind her through the corridor crowd. "Walk. Now."
"I really think you should first..."
"WALK." Lily said impatiently as she used life energy to drag Tony.
Tony walked. The crowd parted for them— partly out of respect for Lily Frost, partly because the scene unfolding in front of them was better entertainnt than anything they had planned for today, and they didn’t want to interrupt it by getting in the way.
Julie followed three steps behind, looking at the ceiling, at the walls, at anywhere except the people staring at her brother-in-law being dragged out of the Healing Tower by her furious sister.
They passed Kelly Don on the way out.
Kelly was standing near the stairwell with her dicine box, watching the procession with an expression of perfect, satisfied concern— the face of a woman witnessing exactly the outco she had arranged. Her eyes t Tony’s briefly as he was dragged past her.
Tony smiled at her. Easy... Unhurried. Like he had all the ti in the world.
Kelly’s satisfied expression flickered for exactly one second before she rebuilt it.
Tony let Lily drag him around the corner and out of her eyeline.
***
The crowd that remained in the corridor slowly began to leave. But the whispers and rumours continued... people shifting, debating, replaying what they had seen, those at the back asking those at the front what exactly had happened and receiving five different-answers.
Kelly moved efficiently through the thinning crowd toward the ergency room. She needed to confirm the patient’s condition— specifically, she needed to confirm that the patient was either dead or significantly worse, because everything that ca next depended on that being true.
She pushed the door open... The room was empty.
She looked at the bed. The sheets were slightly displaced. The monitors were off— not alarming, off, their numbers flat and green the way they went when a patient was discharged or transferred, not when they crashed. The needle tray beside the bed was neatly arranged, every instrunt cleaned and replaced in its proper position.
Kelly stood in the empty room for a mont, processing.
Then, from the corridor behind her, she heard a murmur running through the crowd.
She turned around... The young cancer patient was standing in the corridor for a long ti!
Not lying in a bed... Not unconscious... Not dead. Standing— upright, steady. She was breathing without effort, without the shallow desperate pull of the critically ill, just breathing— normally, easily, like it was sothing her body had rembered how to do.
She looked around at the crowd staring at her, slightly bewildered by the attention.
"Is sothing wrong?!" she asked, looking from face to face.
Nobody answered... Nobody was capable of answering.
A junior nurse dropped the tray she was holding. The clatter echoed through the corridor and nobody looked at it.
"I feel—" the young woman touched her stomach, cautiously, then with more confidence. "I feel fine?! I feel actually fine?! When did that happen?!" She looked back into the empty room, then at the corridor crowd again, utterly confused by the silence. "Where is he?! The doctor who treated — where did he go?!"
Nobody spoke.
Then, from the direction of the stairwell, two sets of footsteps arrived at a sharp pace— Peak Master Natasha, with Hikaru two steps behind her.
Both of them were drawn by the rapid ergency ssages that had been reaching them for the last twenty minutes.
Natasha stepped into the corridor and stopped.
She looked at the crowd. At Kelly Don’s face. At the empty ergency room behind Kelly. And then at the young woman— the patient she had personally reviewed last week and privately, carefully, noted as having less than ten days. But the lady was standing in the corridor with colour in her cheeks and steady eyes and her hand no longer gripping the doorfra for balance.
Natasha’s expression changed... Hikaru put a hand over her mouth.
The young woman looked at Peak Master Natasha with an eager, searching expression— and asked the sa question she had already asked the crowd.
"Where is he?!" she said. "The doctor who treated — I need to find him. I have to thank him. Where did he go?!"
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