The deep subway tunnel was perfectly hidden. It was a long, dark tube under the City of Iron. The walls were made of cracked white tiles. Old, rusted metal train cars sat on broken tracks. The people of the junkyard had turned this forgotten place into a secret hospital.Inside the train cars, patients rested on clean blankets. Brin, the tough woman in the leather apron, was carefully sewing a cut on a man’s arm. She used black silk thread. She moved her hands exactly how Rick had taught her.Rick stood outside the train cars. He washed his hands in a metal bucket of clean water. He was tired, but his eyes were a bright, warm brown. He did not have to hide his magic anymore. The Underground Code was working perfectly. The teenage lookouts, the Rust Sparrows, watched the city guards. They used silent hand signs to warn the clinic.Because of the secret network, Rick could use his pure, beautiful green Earth Qi freely. He did not have to rot his soul with dark gray sludge. The monstro

The silence in the subway station was deafening. The fifty refugees watched. They saw the great, legendary Trash Doctor lower his hands in defeat.Rick began to tremble. It started in his fingers. Then his hands shook. Then his shoulders.He was trembling with a profound, crushing sense of helplessness. His vow echoed in his mind. “Heal the wound of the world, even if it cuts you open.”But what do you do when the wound is the only thing keeping the patient alive?"I... I am sorry," Rick whispered. His voice broke. Tears pooled in his brown eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He fell to his knees beside the metal table. "Bram, I am so sorry. I cannot fix it. I cannot pull it out without killing you."Bram lay on the table. The blue light had reached the center of his face. His left arm and left leg were completely paralyzed, frozen in a state of perfect, relaxed peace.Only his right arm and his right eye were still human.Bram turned his head slowly. He looked at the weeping, trembling

The whisper caught fire. It spread through the dying crowd like lightning. The people stopped looking at Brin. They stopped trying to help each other. They stopped using the Breath Control that Luna had taught them. They all turned their desperate, terrified eyes toward the man in the gray coat."Ghost Doctor," a mother sobbed."Ghost Doctor," a young worker pleaded."Ghost Doctor! Ghost Doctor! Ghost Doctor!"The chant rose up in the subway station. It was a chorus of dying people. But it was not a cry for medical help. It was a prayer.They were treating him like a god. They believed that because he had a name, because he was a legend, he could simply wave his hand and make the silver dust disappear. They believed they did not have to fight anymore, because the magical savior would do all the fighting for them.Rick stood up. He looked at the crowd. He looked at their hands reaching out for him. He felt a sudden, terrifying coldness in his stomach.This was exactly how Yuren had s

"If I stay here, they all die anyway," Rick reasoned. He looked at the sleeping people in the train cars. He looked at the tough nurses who had learned to stitch wounds.They had fought so hard to survive. They deserved to live.Rick turned his eyes toward the dark stairs leading up to the surface. "I am not going to hide in the trash anymore," Rick declared. "They want to treat us like bugs? They want to poison our air?"Rick gripped his staff. The green light flared one more time, mixing with a fierce, human anger."I am going to march right through their front door," Rick said softly, but dangerously. "I am going to find the man who pressed that button. And I am going to show him exactly what happens when you make a doctor angry."Suddenly, a strange, metallic noise interrupted him. BZZZZT. The sound did not come from outside. It came from inside the subway station. It came from the dark corner, where the old, broken train tracks ended.Rick and Luna spun around. Jace raised a rus

The giant map of the junkyard suddenly drew thin, white lines connecting all the green dots.The lines formed a path."I tracked the green dots," Isaac said. "I looked at exactly when they appeared. The pattern was incredibly clever. The green dots never appeared during the day. They only appeared at midnight."Isaac pointed to a dark corner of the map. "Monday night. Thirty green dots appeared near an abandoned gear factory," Isaac said.He pointed to another corner."Tuesday night. Forty green dots appeared near a collapsed sewer pipe," Isaac continued.He pointed to the center of the map."And tonight. Over fifty green dots appeared inside the old subway station," Isaac concluded.Doctor Vance stared at the map. "He moves every night. He never stays in one place. He treats a line of patients at midnight, and then he vanishes.""Yes," Isaac nodded. "He created a mobile, underground hospital. It was a brilliant strategy to avoid our Hunter-Killers. But he made a mistake. He forgot t