Chapter One: Where Death Is
The clock above the nurses’ station said 11:04 pm, and Xavier Reid had been awake for thirty one hours.
He signed the last chart.
His handwriting had gone bad about six hours ago and he had stopped pretending otherwise.
He capped the pen, put it in the pocket of his scrubs, and took his coat off the hook.
There was a thing he did at the end of a shift.
He counted.
Eleven patients through his hands today.
Nine of them would go home.
One had gone home already, which was the same thing said in a happier way.
One had not gone anywhere and would not.
He had read once that a body replaces almost all of itself over time.
Cells die, cells come in, and after enough years there is nothing left of the original.
A ship gets its planks replaced one at a time until every plank is new, and the question is whether it is still the same ship.
Xavier had always thought the question was stupid until he started cutting people open.
Now he took out pieces of people and put other pieces in and sent them home, and they walked out the door with his work inside them, and they were still themselves.
So the ship was the same ship.
Or the ship had never been a ship in the first place.
It had been a way of getting somewhere, and the planks never mattered.
He was aware that he thought like this when he was tired.
It was a warning light.
He had a lot of those and he ignored all of them.
“Dr Reid.”
He did not turn around.
If he did not turn around it was not happening.
“Dr Reid.”
Denise Clancey came down the corridor almost at a run.
Fifteen years in the department and Xavier had seen her hurry twice.
This made three.
“I’m off,” he said.
“I’ve been off for four minutes.”
“Sixteen year old girl, blunt abdominal trauma, came off a horse and the horse came down on top of her.
BP’s in the floor.
She’s bleeding into her belly and she’s not stopping.”
“Bryce can open her.”
“Bryce is in two with the stabbing.” Denise held out the tablet, she did not look sorry.
“It’s Sofia Alvarez.”
Xavier stopped.
“The mayor’s daughter?”
“The mayor’s daughter.”
He rubbed his hand down his face.
His palm came away damp.
He noticed, distantly, that his hands were shaking a little, and that they would stop the moment he was holding something.
That was the trick of him.
That was the whole trick, the thing they had written about in the hospital magazine when he made Chief at thirty four, youngest in the state.
His hands did not shake.
Not with a man’s aorta open in front of him and eleven people waiting to be told what to do.
Everything above the wrists could be on fire.
The hands stayed still.
“Book the theatre,” he said, and put the coat back on.
He scrubbed with his eyes shut, because it was ninety seconds and he could take ninety seconds.
Marcus Aurelius had written that at dawn, when you cannot get out of bed, you tell yourself you are getting up to do the work of a human being.
Xavier had read the Meditations at nineteen and had never entirely put it down.
It was a strange comfort.
A man who ran the largest empire on earth, who could have had anything, sat up at night writing notes to himself about how to be decent and how to not be afraid of dying, and the notes were never meant for anyone else, and two thousand years later a tired doctor in a scrub room was using them to get through Tuesday.
Do the work in front of you.
That was the whole of it.
Do the work in front of you and stop asking whether the universe is watching.
He opened his eyes.
Ninety seconds gone.
Behind his eyes, in the dark, for less than a second, there had been Claire’s face.
And behind hers the other one.
He had not slept properly in six weeks.
He could go a whole shift without thinking about it because there was always a body in front of him, and the second there was not, there she was.
So he had stopped letting there be a second.
Eighteen hours on Monday.
Twenty on the Saturday before.
He had doubled his own hours and told the board it was for the department.
He shouldered the door open with his hands up.
“Talk to me,” Xavier said.
“Sixteen, sixty kilos, no allergies, no medical history.” Danny Choi was already gowned, already at the side, already looking at Xavier instead of the patient, which was a habit Xavier had trained into all of them without ever meaning to.
“Systolic’s seventy two.
Four units in, she’s not coming up.”
“Because it’s going out the bottom of the bucket.” Xavier held out his hand.
Amara put the blade in it without being asked.
“We’re not doing anything clever tonight.
We open her, we find it, we stop it, we get out.
Nobody does anything I have not said out loud.”
They opened her.
Blood came up and Xavier packed and packed and got a hand in and felt for the shape of the problem.
Liver.
A tear across the back of it, deep, and the vessel behind it opened up.
“Clamp.”
He got control.
The bleeding slowed to something a human being could work with, and the number on the monitor stopped falling, and there was that flat moment in every operation where the crisis becomes a job.
He heard Bryce say something.
He heard Amara counting swabs.
Somewhere in the building a phone rang and rang.
Heraclitus said you cannot step in the same river twice, because the water has moved on and so have you.
Xavier had thought about that a lot in this room.
A surgery is a river.
You come to the same operation forty times and it is never the same operation, and you are never the same man doing it, and the mistake, the actual mistake people make, is to believe that because you have crossed forty times you have crossed at all.
He worked.
He put the repair in.
It took a long time.
He was aware, at some point, that he had lost the thread of how long.
That there had been a stretch where his hands had carried on without him.
It happened sometimes.
It was nothing.
“That’s it,” he said.
“That’s the bleeder.
Come off the clamp.”
There was a pause about half a second long.
He would remember that pause for the rest of his life.
Danny Choi looked at him.
Just looked, with his hand where it was.
And Xavier, if he had slept, if he had been anything like a man who had slept, would have read the look and asked what it was, because Danny Choi was good and Danny Choi did not pause.
But it was Xavier who had said it.
So Danny came off the clamp.
The field filled in under a second.
“No,” Xavier said.
“No, no, get it back, get it back on.”
He could not find it.
It was there and then it was gone under the blood and his fingers went in after it and closed on nothing, and he heard the tone on the monitor change and heard Bryce start to talk fast, and he got the clamp back on the wrong thing, and Amara was already calling for more blood that was not going to get there in time, and Danny was on her chest.
Twenty two minutes.
He did everything.
He wanted that on the record afterwards, and it was true, and it did not help.
He did everything he knew, and he knew more than anyone in that building, and it did not matter, because you cannot repair a vessel you have already gone past and you cannot get back the four minutes when there is no pressure in a brain.
“Time of death,” Bryce said quietly, “twelve fifty one.”
Nobody said anything.
Nobody moved.
Xavier stood there with his hands up and dripping and looked at the girl on the table, and he understood exactly what had happened.
She had died because he had opened his mouth and said a wrong thing in a confident voice, and eleven trained people had heard him say it and only one of them had hesitated and then had done it anyway, because he was Xavier Reid and you followed him.
He had spent nine years teaching them that.
He had been proud of it.
“Get out,” he said.
“Xavier,” said Bryce.
“Not you.
Me.
I’m going.” He stripped the gloves.
“Danny.”
“Sir.”
“You paused.”
Danny said nothing.
“Next time,” Xavier said, “don’t.”
He did not know if he meant do not pause, or do not obey.
He was not sure he had known when he said it.
He went out through the doors and down the corridor and he did not look at Denise, and he heard someone say go home Chief, get some sleep Chief, we’ll handle the family.
The family.
The mayor was in the building.
Xavier walked past the room where the mayor was sitting, and he did not stop, and if he had been offered one thing back it would have been that.
The car park was under an inch of water.
It had been raining since four and it had not let up.
His Corvette sat there in it.
He had bought it the week after he found out.
A stupid car for a stupid week.
He had put nine hundred miles on it in a month, driving nowhere at night.
He got in.
The rain came down hard on the roof.
He drove.
There is a bit in Epicurus that Xavier had liked since he was a student.
It was tidy and it was obviously nonsense and he had never once managed to argue his way past it.
Death is nothing to us.
When we exist, death is not present.
When death is present, we do not exist.
So it never touches us.
There is no moment where you and your own death are in the room together.
Sofia Alvarez had been in the room with hers for twenty two minutes.
The wipers went across, and across, and across.
He thought about ringing Claire and did not.
He thought about what he would even say.
Something happened tonight and I have nobody.
That was true and he was not going to say it to her.
Six weeks ago he had loved her and she had been sleeping with a man who put his hand over his mouth when he laughed, and Xavier had spent six weeks not sleeping so he would not have to think about it, and tonight the not sleeping had killed a child.
You could draw a straight line from her mouth to that table.
He was crying, which was interesting.
He wrote it up in his head.
Patient is tearful.
Patient has been awake thirty three hours.
Patient should not be operating heavy machinery.
The road went out of the city and got dark and the white lines came at him in a rhythm.
He closed his eyes for one second.
The horn was enormous.
It came from everywhere at once, and he was in the wrong lane, and the headlights were already too big and getting bigger, two of them and then a wall of them above, and he pulled the wheel right hard without any thought at all.
The world turned over.
He came back some amount of time later.
He was lying at an angle.
There was a smell of petrol and hot metal and turned earth.
The rain was coming in through where the windscreen had been and it was falling on his face, and it was cold, and the cold was keeping him here.
He tried his legs and there was nothing there.
He tried again and got a report back that he did not want, a wrongness low down and to the left.
It did not hurt yet.
That was how he knew he did not have long.
Bleeding, he thought.
Bleeding somewhere I cannot reach and cannot see.
Textbook.
He could not turn his head much.
He could see up.
The clouds had opened up over the ditch and there were stars in the gap.
Kant said there were two things that filled him with awe.
The starry sky above, and the moral law inside.
Xavier had never bought the second half.
He had cut into thirty or forty people looking for the thing that made them people and had come back every single time with tissue in his hand.
He was very cold now.
He thought, for no reason he could name, about the men who first looked at these stars and gave them names.
About the Greeks who put their dead in the ground with a coin, in case there was a boatman.
They had been so sure.
All of them, every one, sure of a door on the other side, and they had gone into it certain, and it had cost them nothing to be wrong.
He was not going to get that.
He was going to get the honest version.
Off, like a light.
He wanted it to hurt more than it did.
There should have been more to it than this.
A girl called Sofia had died four miles back because he had been tired, and he was going to be allowed to just stop, with no bill, no reckoning, nothing on the other side of the door because there was no door, and that was the part he could not forgive.
The dying he could take.
It was the getting away with it.
The stars went in and out.
Do the work in front of you, he thought.
There is no work in front of me.
His last thought was Epicurus, because of course it was.
Where death is, I am not.
He was wrong about that.
He was wrong about all of it.
Welcome to The Deathless Legion.
This is a historical dark fantasy with a slower, more grounded approach to progression.
The mc won’t become powerful overnight.
His progression comes through knowledge, observation, experimentation, strategy, and eventually the people he gathers around him.
If you’re enjoying the story, please leave a comment, add it to your library, and follow the book.
Early engagement makes a huge difference for a new story.
I’d also love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading.
Royal Jester