TO LATE TO BEG, SISTER

CHAPTER 9: THE NAME THAT MUST NOT BE SPOKEN

The message was only three lines.

[That is the Silent Meridian Hand. Only one person alive can do it. I cannot undo what he set—and I would not dare.]

Karen read it twice. Then a third time. Her fingers, which had been so sure driving needles into Tristan's body, now trembled over the screen. Behind her, Tristan moaned through another wave of pain, and the sound, which should have steadied her into doctor mode, only made her hands shake more. For the first time that night, she was aware that her acupuncture had made it worse. That her own needles had carried the poison deeper.

[Master. You are the Divine Doctor. There is no one above you. You have no master.]

She almost smiled while typing it. It was the sentence she had told the world for fifteen years, the sentence that had made her famous. It had never once occurred to her to question it.

The reply came in under a minute, as if he had been waiting with the phone in his hand.

[I have one. A year ago, at the London Docks, I watched him make an underworld king kneel without touching him. Old eyes in a young body. Since that night, I call him master. Karen—who did this to your patient?]

Outside the window, the London rain had stopped. But Karen's ears were still ringing. Docks. A young man. She suddenly remembered something she had buried good and deep: a stiff brown envelope with a hospital letterhead, in a soaked pocket, which she had found and ignored that night at the orphanage. 

She had held it for half a second. She had chosen not to think about it. Now that choice came back, and stood in front of her like a second patient she had misdiagnosed.

[Master,] she typed slowly, [his name is Julian. He... was our foster brother. We threw him out of the house a few days ago.]

She did not add the rest: [with £50,000 and a laugh.] Her fingers would not write it.

This time the reply took longer. When it came, it no longer had the calm teacher's tone she had known for fifteen years.

[Then listen well, and only once. I will not undo my master's work. If you want the boy's meridians restored, you must ask him yourselves. And Karen—pray he still remembers you kindly. Because if he does not, not even I can save your family.]

The phone nearly slipped from Karen's hand.

For the first time in ten years, Dr. Karen Vance did not know what to say. And for the first time in ten years, the smile she wore like a mask was gone from her face, leaving something bare and frightening.

"Karen?" Victoria came closer. The heels of her shoes clicked on the marble, a sound that usually made staff straighten their backs. Karen did not straighten. "What did he say?"

Karen lifted her head. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. "The one who did this... is Julian. And Master... refuses to help us."

The room went quiet in a different way. Not the quiet of anger. The quiet of a machine that has just heard an impossible number. On the sofa, Tristan forgot to moan for a full three seconds—which, in his condition, was a long time.

"Ridiculous." Victoria laughed first, a short dry laugh. "Orphanage trash understands medicine? He cooked for us for ten years, Karen. I saw his hands every day. Those are a cook's hands."

But even as she said it, her eyes drifted to the ledger on the side table. Two handwritings in the margins. Hers, sharp and slanted. And a smaller, neater one that had corrected her figures for ten years—a correction dated nine years ago caught her eye now, a tiny note beside her own confident sum: ‘recheck the freight line.’ She had closed that book last night and told herself, ‘nothing’. Now, the word ‘nothing’ did not sound as convincing as it had last night.

Siska said nothing. She was thinking about the envelope. Hospital letterhead. Royal London. She had held it for half a second, felt the stiff paper, seen the blue ink of the crest—and chosen to sneer. Her stomach twisted, but she pressed the feeling down, the way she had pressed so many things down all her life. Feelings were not evidence. She had told herself that a thousand times in interrogation rooms. She told herself it once more, and for the first time, the sentence did not sit still.

"I'll go to the orphanage," she said at last, her voice hoarse. "I'll bring that trash here. If he really did this, he will undo it. If he refuses—" She stopped. For the first time that night, she could not finish her own sentence.

On the sofa, Tristan heard everything. And behind his face twisted with pain, something was counting fast. If Julian really was that strong, then the lies he had been feeding these women could turn around and finish him. He had to move faster. He had to make them hate Julian deeper, before they ever learned the truth. 

His left hand, the working one, tightened on the sofa leather until the knuckles went white. His tears kept falling. They were not entirely fake. That was the worst part. He had practiced them so long that even he could not always tell.

"Sisters..." he whispered. "Please... don't let him kill me..."

"Bring him back alive," Victoria said, her voice cold again, the head of the family once more. "And unhurt. For now."

That night, in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, Karen washed her hands. Once. Twice. Three times. The water was cold. In the mirror, her face looked like a stranger's—a woman with no smile on at all. She had built fifteen years on being the only disciple of the greatest doctor alive. She had never once asked who taught the teacher.

And for the first time in fifteen years, she did not feel clean.