Now, with Bradford on his knees, a cry rings out and the Darkness takes a high Initiate. Still far away, some thirty meters away. It would come for him tonight, but he still had time. He remembered his first encounter with the Darkness, unexpected and unpleasant, like accidentally stepping into sewer water.

The second operation on the child Juan Peterson was performed five months after the palliative shunt. Hypothermia, Bradford remembered: the blue boy again packed in ice, as beautiful as the dead. He remembered the pleasure of saw against sternum, and the stupidly woeful expression on the face of the technician wielding it—he’d had to tell her we’re saving his life, quit the theatrics, and she’d murmured something about compassion that had almost made his hands start to shake, the worst possible thing for a surgeon. That surgery had never before been performed in the country—actually three procedures: close the intraventricular communication with a patch, open the pulmonary valve to pull back the thickened muscle, and place a patch on the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery to improve circulation in the lungs. And, if he had time, he would also close the interatrial communication. He did have time: Bradford managed to finish everything in six hours, with only a few minutes of rest; he hadn’t wanted to let anyone else make even the simplest sutures.

He remembered the moments before the revelation with unbearable clarity. Just when he was about to announce he had finished and they would proceed to close up, the boy’s heart, which had held up for so long, barely speeding up in certain stretches, began to beat uncontrollably, arrhythmically, and Bradford recognized the ventricular fibrillation, the muscle’s frantic shaking, that harbinger of death. He carefully started manual reanimation; decisiveness and delicacy would be key, and he gave the order to prepare the external defibrillator, a novel apparatus that the cardiovascular surgical team had used with discretion and success.