The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 6

Director Hale appeared at the far end of the corridor, walking fast, the kind of fast that a man in authority walks when someone beneath his authority is doing something he has not approved of. He was a wide, solid man who wore his position the way some people wear expensive coats, like it was the most important thing about him.

He took one look at Otis and his face went through several things quickly. Recognition was one of them.

“You,” he said, pointing. “You are supposed to be at the billing desk. Your mother's account is nearly empty, and instead of dealing with that you are standing here in my emergency corridor looking like you just climbed out of a dumpster, causing a scene—”

“I'm not causing a scene,” Otis said.

“You told these people that woman is not dead,” Director Hale said, loudly enough for everyone in the corridor to hear, “when she has been declared by two attending physicians. Do you know what that is? That is a disruption. That is harassment of a grieving family. That is—” He stopped and looked at Otis with something that was trying to be pity and was actually contempt. 

“You cannot even save your own mother, who is upstairs right now waiting on a surgery that you cannot pay for, and you are down here trying to play doctor on someone else's dead parent?” He let that sit for a moment. 

“Go home, Otis. Go handle your own problems before you make a mockery of yourself in front of all these people.”

Several people in the crowd nodded.

“He's right,” a woman near the back said.

“That poor girl doesn't need this right now,” someone else added.

The young woman in black had gotten to her feet during this. She was standing now, unsteady, one hand on the edge of the gurney for balance, and she was looking at Otis with an expression that was doing several things at once, grieving and desperate and not quite ready to let go of the thing he had just said.

“Can you actually help her?” she asked.

Her voice was barely holding together. It came out rough and cracked at the edges, the voice of someone who had been crying for a long time and had almost nothing left.

Otis looked at her. “Yes,” he said. “But the window is closing. I need something from you right now. Do you have anything in your bag? Anything thin and metal? Pins, needles, anything like that?”

She blinked at him.

“I know how that sounds,” he said, and he kept his voice steady and direct, because she did not need softness right now, she needed someone who sounded like they knew what they were doing. 

“I know. But I am asking you to trust me for two minutes. What do you have to lose?”

The crowd around them had opinions about this.

“Don't listen to him.”

“He's going to make it worse.”

“Miss, please, your mother deserves better than this circus.”

“Someone needs to remove this man before he actually touches that body.”

Director Hale stepped forward. 

“That is enough. Security—”

The young woman had opened her bag.

She was going through it with shaking hands, and she stopped, and she went still, and she pulled out a small flat rectangular case and looked at it like she was seeing it for the first time. 

“I take an acupuncture class massage,” she said softly. 

“On Thursday evenings. I almost left these at home today. I don't even know why I have them with me.” She held the case out to him.

Otis took it.

He opened it. Silver needles, thin and precise, exactly what he needed. He looked at the young woman for one moment. "What's your name?"

“Lena,” she said.

“Lena. Stay close.”

He moved to the gurney.

“Do not touch that patient!” Director Hale's voice came up a full register. 

“I will have you removed, I will have you arrested, I will personally—”

Otis looked at him once.

Something in that look made the director stop mid-sentence. Not because it was threatening. Because it was completely calm, the specific calm of someone who has already decided what they are going to do and does not need anyone's permission to do it.

The director stopped talking.

Otis turned back to the gurney.

The woman lying on it was older, perhaps late fifties, her face carrying the specific thinness of someone who had been very sick for a long time before this moment. He looked at her for two full seconds, reading what was there the way the knowledge from the ring had taught him to read it, locating the flicker, tracing the pathways, understanding what had failed and in what order.

Spinal compression. Severe, longstanding, the kind that had been cutting off proper nerve function for months. And the liver, damaged deeply, a disease moving through it that had been progressing without adequate treatment.

The flicker was faint but it was real.

He selected the first needle.

He placed it at the center of her forehead, the exact point, the angle precise to the degree, pressing it in with a single clean motion that left no hesitation in the movement at all.

Someone in the crowd made a noise.

He placed the second needle on the left side of her chest, not at the heart but slightly below and to the side, angled inward at a depth that followed a pathway the cultivation knowledge had given him as clearly as a map.

“He's actually doing it,” someone whispered.

He moved along the gurney. Two needles on the inside of her left forearm, placed at points that corresponded to the liver pathway. One at the base of her sternum. He moved the sheet carefully and placed two more along the inside of her left knee, then one at the arch of her foot. He went around to the other side, found the points along her lower back with two fingers first, pressing gently to confirm the exact location, and set two needles there with the same clean certainty.

He stepped to her legs and placed needles at three points along the outer thigh and one just below each knee, corresponding to the spinal pathways that had been compressed.

“His hands are completely steady,” someone near the front said, in a different tone than before. Quieter. Less sure of what they were watching.

“He's done this before,” a woman said.

“He can't have done this before,” a man replied. 

“Look at him. He's not even a doctor.”

“Then explain why he looks like he knows exactly what he's doing.”

Director Hale had not moved. He was watching from five feet away with the expression of someone trying to find the point at which they can intervene again and not finding it.