The flesh of a mother can knit itself back together underneath Kisa’s touch. A baby born on the brink of death can be revived, can transform into a wailing infant, flushed and healthy.

Kisa is also one of the leading experts on fetal congenital heart disease, able to detect what the machines sometimes cannot, able to perform the necessary surgeries with skilled hands that never falter, never fail. Yet there’s a catch: She cannot heal mortals. Kisa can heal only creatures, those who believe in the power of the Korean gods.

And that restriction hurts. She aches from it—and for something…more. She knows not what—just that there’s a startlingly new feeling of emptiness within her today, a dark, gaping void waiting to be filled.

Perhaps it’s from skipping her usual order of a flat white this morning in favor of a few more treasured minutes of sleep. The lack of caffeine has certainly done her no good.

Kisa inhales a deep breath of night air but is unable to clear the taste of antiseptics and the surgery room from her lungs. Her head still throbs from the emergency C-section she’d had to give a petite haetae woman. Haetae are notoriously hard to deliver, the guardian creature’s wary streak beginning in the womb. Sometimes the babes are too cautious to even want to come out into the world of danger. Kisa swallows hard.

How long has it been since she left the hospital? Days? Weeks? Ever since the hospital cut their staff numbers, she’s been working herself until she falls from the brink of exhaustion and has no choice but to pull herself back up. Kisa’s vision blurs with tears. It’s not that she doesn’t love what she does, or that she no longer feels the surge of triumph when she delivers a happy and healthy child. It’s that she’s so tired.

Nobody knows she’s up here.

It would be so easy to slip away…to finally rest…

Kisa chews on her bottom lip. A flicker of red intrudes in her vision and she grimaces, pointedly not looking at the red thread that tied itself around her left pinky finger hours earlier, wrapping itself around the little finger in an intricate floral pattern almost reminiscent of a mugunghwa.

It’s no surprise, really, that she’s seeing things. It’s the stress of it all, affecting her nervous system, increasing her vulnerability to hallucinations. Because there’s no chance the thread, the one trailing down the building, winding into the streets below, is real.

She’s seeing things. Feeling things.