The Supreme Return Of Logan Kai

Chapter 6

Doctor Harmon pressed his lips together but stepped back.

Kai Shen walked to the side of the table.

He stood over the patient and he was quiet for a moment not hesitating, not uncertain, just still. Taking in what was in front of him the way the Void Reading technique had been built to do. His eyes moved across her in a pattern that looked to everyone watching like he was just looking, just standing there looking, which was already ridiculous enough given the circumstances.

Then he said, “Six ribs fractured on the right side. Two on the left.” His voice was even, factual, moving through it the way you moved through a list someone had read before. 

“The fourth and fifth on the right have displaced  one of them is pressing against the lung lining, which is why the right-side breathing is compromised. Her spinal column has sustained trauma at the T6 and T7 junctions not fully broken, but the surrounding tissue is inflamed enough that the cord is under pressure. Her sternum has a hairline fracture.” He paused. 

“She has internal bleeding in the abdominal cavity  a wound approximately here—” He pointed to a location just below her left ribcage, two inches in from the side. 

“Deep. Narrow entry. Something thin and sharp, moving at an angle, which is why it did not present obviously on the surface. It has been bleeding slowly for at least—” He tilted his head slightly. 

“Four hours.”

The room was completely silent.

Doctor Harmon was staring at him.

Doctor Reeves had stopped moving entirely.

The young assistant had his mouth open.

Director Cole stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his face doing nothing at all, giving away nothing, just watching.

Harmon found his voice first. “How—” He stopped. Started again. “We ran imaging. The imaging did not show half of—”

“Then your imaging missed it,” Kai said. He looked up from the patient and found Harmon's face. “She does not have four hours. The displaced rib will breach the lung lining before then and when it does, everything else becomes secondary. That needs to be addressed first.”

Harmon looked at Director Cole.

Director Cole said nothing. He was still watching Kai Shen.

“Who are you?” Doctor Reeves asked. 

However Kai said nothing after he finished speaking.

He just stood there beside the table and let the silence sit where it was.

Harmon was the first to move. He turned to the nurse closest to him and said, low and clipped, “ I don't believe him, and give me full imaging. CT, ultrasound, everything. Right now.”

Nobody questioned it. The equipment was already in the room and the nurse moved fast, pulling the portable scanner into position while another typed the order into the system. The whole thing took four minutes.

Four minutes that nobody in that room spoke a single word.

They just stood there, some of them watching the machines, some of them watching Kai Shen, and Kai Shen watching the woman on the table. Her chest was still rising too shallow on the right side. Her color had not improved. Whatever time she had left, it was burning.

The scan images loaded onto the screen.

Harmon leaned in first.

He was quiet for a long time. His finger moved across the screen  tracing one line, then another, then stopping over a dark patch just below the left ribcage. His jaw shifted. He moved to the next image. Then the next.

Doctor Reeves moved beside him. She looked at the screen and her face went very still.

“Right side ribs,” Harmon said slowly, like he was reading from a document he did not want to be reading. 

“Four fractures confirmed. Displacement at the fourth and fifth — pressing on the lower lung lining.” He scrolled. “Spinal column. T6 and T7 — trauma markers consistent with compression injury.” Another image. 

“Sternum — hairline fracture.” He scrolled one final time and stopped.

Nobody said anything.

Marcus had moved to the edge of the screen. He looked at the image. He looked at Kai Shen. He looked back at the image.

“The internal wound,” Doctor Reeves said quietly, pointing at the screen. 

“Abdominal cavity. Left side, two inches in from the lateral wall." She did not look away from the screen. “Narrow entry. Angled.”

“Four to five hours of bleeding,” Harmon said.

“He said four,” Reeves said.

Another silence.

Every single thing Kai Shen had said was sitting right there on that screen, exactly the way he had said it, in the exact locations he had named, down to the depth and the angle of the wound that no one in that room had caught before the scan.

Harmon straightened up slowly. He turned and looked at Kai.

Kai Shen was still looking at the woman on the table. He had not moved. He had not said anything. He was just watching her the way someone watches a clock when they know the time is almost up.

“How did you—” Marcus started.

“She does not have long,” Kai Shen said. He was not talking to Marcus. He was not really talking to any of them. “I need to treat her now.”

That snapped Harmon back. 

“You need to—” He stopped. His face hardened. “Absolutely not. You are not a licensed physician in this hospital. You are not a licensed physician anywhere that I can verify. What you just did  diagnosing a critical patient without credentials is already a problem I am going to have to answer for. I am not adding unauthorized treatment on top of that.”

“She will die.”

“We will treat her. The proper way. With proper equipment and proper—”

“You already tried that,” Kai said, and his voice did not rise, did not sharpen, did not carry any kind of argument in it. It was just a fact being stated to someone who already knew it was a fact. 

“Before I walked into this room, you had already decided there was nothing more to do. That is why nobody stopped me from coming in.”