But before they could use it, the electricity cut out. It was a wet blackout—that’s how Bradford remembered it, as a cold wetness. The boy had undergone several minutes of manual reanimation, but he was going to need a shock. “Lantern flashlights candles generator anything!” he yelled, and then he felt, with horrible certainty, that another hand was pulling him out of the boy’s body. Bradford cried out, shouting accusations at the surgical team, what were they doing, and in the dark, no less!—it was early morning—and he heard, “nothing, Doctor, we aren’t doing anything, the rest of the hospital has electricity, the outage is only here in the operating room,” and when someone brought a lantern to the table they all clearly saw that over the boy’s open chest, above the metal keeping his sternum separated, above his stilled heart, there floated what could only be described as a piece of night, but transparent, like soot, perhaps, or thick smoke, and when the assistant surgeon tried to touch it, put his hand through it, murmuring what the holy hell is happening here, no sooner did his fingers brush the black dust than he screamed and pulled back his hand and it was no longer his hand, now he was missing half of his three longest fingers, the middle, ring, and index, and he was screaming and screaming, and the electricity didn’t come back and Bradford wasn’t about to take the same risk as his assistant, because although he didn’t understand what was happening and he couldn’t believe it, he knew that this slowly receding darkness was dangerous. More than dangerous. It was the Darkness his father had told him about, the one the Order’s mediums summoned, the one the Englishwoman desperately sought. The boy had been in cardiac arrest for fifteen minutes and the nurses were blathering nonsense, tending to the assistant, someone was saying it had been an accident, he must have inadvertently bumped into a scalpel, which was impossible, but people would rather justify, invent, refute, and not see when they have to believe. Bradford held out through the stampede of people—nurses, the anaesthesiologist, scrubs—who said they’d seen the boy wrapped in darkness like a cocoon, he stayed until the darkness withdrew, and then he touched the boy’s motionless heart again and whispered come on, you’re here for a reason, if you are the voice of the gods then beat, and the heart started beating between his fingers as though it had never stopped. Bradford closed up the boy’s chest alone and in silence, not listening to the explanations, the complaints and grievances from the others—he didn’t even know who they were, whether they were other doctors or directors or what. When he had finished suturing, he accidentally moved the green sheet covering the boy’s arms, and then he saw the proof. The mark. A hand on the boy’s arm, the mark of a hand, like a burn scar. It wasn’t strange, he even told himself then: sometimes the cold of the ice used to bring on hypothermia in surgeries left burns; it was even less strange after the disaster that had occurred in the operating room. A nurse could have rested her hand there and left a mark in the cold. He studied it. It was deep and looked old. It was a scar. A left hand on the left arm, the Left Hand of Darkness. He had read about that sign. He knew what it meant.