The Supreme Return Of Logan Kai

Chapter 5

The elevator was a thing he wasn't used to, even though he had used it before, then when his parents were still alive. But this was difference from what he was used to, about a thing and standing inside one while the floor shifted under him without your legs doing any of the work, and it wasn't making any noise.

He noted the sensation and filed it away.

The director's office was on the ninth floor. The receptionist knocked, and a voice from inside said to come in, and she opened the door and stepped aside.

The office was large a wide desk, real wood, not the cheap composite kind. Bookshelves along two walls, actual books with actual use on them, spines cracked and pages marked. A window behind the desk that looked out across the city. A couch along one wall where a woman in a white coat was sitting with a tablet in her hands, not looking up when the door opened.

The man behind the desk had white at his temples and the face of someone who had been doing something important for a long time and knew it. He looked up when Kai Shen walked in, and for just a moment, before his face arranged itself back into professional stillness, something moved across it recognition, maybe. Or the shape of recognition, the way you look at someone you have only seen in a photograph but the photograph was important.

He picked up the letter from the desk in front of him and read it once more, quickly.

“You are Kai,” he said.

“Yes.”

At that moment Director Benson Cole stood up. He extended his hand across the desk.

“Your master and I go back a very long way,” he said. “He speaks highly of you. Please, sit down.”

Kai  shook his hand and sat in the chair across the desk. The woman on the couch had looked up from her tablet when he sat down. She looked at the robe, looked at his face, looked at the robe again, and then looked back at her tablet with the small tight expression of someone who has formed an opinion and does not feel the need to announce it.

“I am glad you are here,” Director Cole said, settling back into his chair. He laced his fingers together on the desk and studied Kai Shen with open, direct attention. 

“Your master told me you are skilled in the traditional methods. Medical and the other kind.”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been studying?”

“Eight years.”

Director Cole nodded slowly. “Your master trained you personally.”

“Yes.”

“Then I will not waste time with formalities.” He picked up a pen and turned it once in his fingers. “We can discuss your role here in more detail tomorrow. For today I want you to—”

The office door swung open.

A nurse stepped in, slightly out of breath, her face doing the specific thing that faces did in hospitals when something had happened and the person carrying the news was trying to deliver it without making it worse by how they delivered it.

“Director Cole.” Her eyes went to the woman on the couch. 

“Doctor Reeves — there is an emergency. Level Three. Bay Four. Doctor Harmon is requesting you immediately.”

The woman on the couch Doctor Reeves — was already on her feet, tablet in hand, moving toward the door before the nurse finished the sentence. She was fast and efficient about it in the way of someone who had done this a thousand times.

Director Cole stood. His eyes moved to Kai.

“Come,” he said simply. “You wanted to work here. Let us see what you can do.”

They moved fast through the corridor. Kai Shen kept pace without effort, the bundle still over his shoulder. Around them the floor had shifted staff moving with that different urgency, the kind that meant someone on this floor was in real trouble.

He could hear it before they reached Bay Four the alarm tone from the monitoring equipment, steady and insistent, the sound of controlled panic in the voices inside.

Doctor Reeves pushed through the bay doors first.

The patient on the table was a woman, mid-thirties by the look of her, dressed in the remains of what had been expensive clothing before whatever happened to her had happened. The team around her was four people a senior doctor with his sleeves pushed up and his face doing the thing that senior doctors' faces did when they had reached the edge of what they could offer and not yet said so out loud, two assistants, and a nurse managing the monitors.

Kai stopped in the doorway.

The room registered him immediately. Four faces turned. Then they looked at the robe. Then they looked back at his face. Then several of them looked at Director Cole to understand what they were supposed to do with this.

“Who is this?” The senior doctor  whose badge read Dr. Harmon — looked at Director Cole with the specific expression of a man who had a crisis in front of him and no patience for complications behind him.

“New staff,” Director Cole said.

“In a robe?” One of the assistants, young, the kind of young that had not yet learned to keep certain thoughts off his face.

Kai  was not listening to them.

He had moved two steps into the room and stopped, and he was looking at the woman on the table with his full attention, reading everything the body in front of him was saying. The color of her skin. The particular way her torso was positioned not by the staff, by pain. The breathing pattern, shallow on the right side, slightly longer on the left. The way her hands lay at her sides. The tension in her jaw even now, even with whatever they had given her, the kind of tension that did not come from a surface injury.

“Hey.” The young assistant stepped sideways, putting himself partially between Kai and the table. 

“I do not know who let you in here dressed like that, but you cannot just walk into a bay in those clothes. Do you have any idea what kind of contamination risk—”

“Move,” Kai said.

Not loud. Not rude. Just absolutely clear about what was going to happen next.

The assistant blinked.

Doctor Reeves, who had been running her own assessment of the patient, looked up at that and looked at Kai for the first time with something other than the polite professional dismissal she had given him upstairs.

“Harmon.” Director Cole's voice was level. “Let him look.”