He brought his attention back to his late wife. There was surprisingly little to say to her. On the brink of going under the knife, in a house where all the occupants were angry with him, only one topic came to mind.

‘That’s the worst thing about leadership, Barb,’ he began. ‘They can train you to teach, and they can train you to guide people. But they can never train you to deal with the loneliness.’

He kissed the part of the photo which held Barbara’s face, and returned it to the cardboard box. Once it was back in place, he had run out of excuses. It was time to face Lorraine.

*

Lorraine could be an intimidating person, but never more so than now. McCormick lay flat on the clinic bed wearing nothing but his underwear, as the Underdogs’ nurse marched to and fro across the clinic in an understandably foul mood.

She opened the top drawer of a dulled filing cabinet that had once held McCormick’s student assessment data. Now it held Lorraine’s emergency medical supplies, some of it in sealed jars that had dusted over from months of idle storage. Lorraine’s hand emerged with an unused bottle of clear liquid, and she readied her syringe.

‘I never thought I’d use expired drugs on a patient,’ she mumbled with a weak tremor.

McCormick had a couple of humorous comebacks in mind, mainly about how he never paid attention to use-by dates on food. But he knew the process would be more tolerable if he only spoke when asked a question.

‘So how much do you weigh?’ she asked.

‘Still eighty-four kilograms.’

‘Not eighty-three or eighty-five?’

‘Well, we might have all weakened the springs on the scales by weighing ourselves too much,’ he said with a chuckle.

‘Do you definitely weigh eighty-four kilograms?’

‘Yes. I do. So one kilogram makes a difference, does it?’

‘If you give the wrong amount of anaesthetic to a patient, you could kill them. If you give a child an adult’s dose they won’t wake up. I have to calculate how much to give you based on your age, height, weight, body mass index and general state of health, and I can’t afford to get it wrong. A teaspoon too much will cause permanent brain damage.’

She poked the syringe through the bottle’s foil cap, and spent nearly a whole minute measuring the correct amount, tapping the syringe to get any bubbles to the top, then squirting and re-measuring. Eventually she seemed satisfied, and turned to McCormick with the loaded syringe.

‘And all of this,’ she continued, ‘so you can go running around in New London and probably get yourself killed!’

‘If I get killed and we destroy the AME project… I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s a win. An extremely good one.’

‘It’ll be a better win if the shield dies and you don’t.’