Chapter 46
It was a child’s voice.
As soon as he heard the knock, Nathan’s plan to “pretend to be gone for five minutes” was shaken by his conscience.
“Come in.”
“Yes.”
The patient entered the clinic. It was a little girl. Nathan quickly flipped through the chart and asked,
“What’s your name?”
“It’s Carla. …Isn’t Miss Alice here?”
“She had something to do. I’ll take care of you instead.”
Worry crept onto Carla’s face. Nathan interpreted it in his own way.
“I’m the teacher who taught Alice medicine. I’ll make sure it doesn’t hurt, so come here.”
Carla hesitated, then sat in the examination chair. Nathan found the page with the girl’s records almost at the same time.
[Carla. Estimated to be around 10 years old. Health condition: good.]
There was nothing else. Maybe she’d never come in because she was sick.
‘…Wait. What’s this?’
At the end of the sentence, there was something scribbled out, a line drawn over a short word. Nathan tilted the paper, holding it up to the sunlight. The deepest groove spelled out “body proportions.”
‘Why write something like that?’
The word was just annoying. Nathan frowned and turned his body.
“Where does it hurt?”
“I fell while running yesterday. Since then, I keep coughing.”
Coughing? A respiratory illness? What if it’s something airborne?
He wanted to run out of the exam room right away. If the patient so much as sprayed a single droplet, he would.
Nathan put on gloves and a cloth mask, then sat down in front of the patient.
Her rare jet-black hair and pale sandy skin showed she wasn’t from this land. He hoped she hadn’t come from somewhere with the plague.
“Let me see your eyes and inside your mouth.”
It had been a long time since he’d done an exam. Even longer since he’d seen a child.
But surprisingly, Carla seemed used to being examined. She leaned forward, opened her mouth, and stuck out her tongue, following each step. Thanks to that, Nathan could examine her quite comfortably.
‘Has she been examined by Alice before? But then why is there no record?’
Or… maybe it was before she came to Reki.
‘She looks healthy.’
No fever. Her tonsils were normal.
Next was the stethoscope.
Balancing the patient’s privacy and his own desire to minimize contact, Nathan looked over the girl, planning to listen through her clothes. But he felt a strange sense of discomfort.
The proportions of her arms and legs were a little odd.
‘She doesn’t look like she’s hit puberty.’
He checked again that there were no gaps in his gloves, then carefully rolled up the girl’s sleeve.
Probably something she hadn’t experienced in an exam before. Before she could ask, he spoke first.
“Carla. How old are you?”
The girl reflexively moved her right hand. Her fingers curled and uncurled awkwardly.
“…I’m ten.”
“You’re tall for your age. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t. The only other kid my age is Gon, and he’s even taller than me.”
“You must be good at tag, then. Right?”
“Oh, I wish!”
Maybe she was upset about something while playing. Carla suddenly started talking a lot. While she did, Nathan rolled up both of her sleeves to compare her arms.
‘Her arms… the bones are different.’
He felt a small bump in the middle of the right radius. If that was all, he’d think it was just an old childhood injury.
But when he felt the ulna on the other arm, Nathan was at a loss for words. The curve there was almost wavelike.
It wasn’t just the forearms. The humerus was also slightly bent, and the collateral ligament stuck out.
It was as if the whole arm had been shattered and then healed wrong in every possible way.
‘Did someone play block-building games with her arms?’
Nathan looked more closely and soon doubted his own eyes. The mottled skin under the sleeve made the “block game” seem less like a joke.
Strangely smooth sandy skin, tanned patches, wrinkled skin… all formed a bizarre patchwork.
It looked as if someone had grafted other people’s skin onto a child.
Maybe even the lumpy bones were like that…
‘No way.’
“Doctor? Do I have to keep holding my arm up?”
“Oh, no. You can put it down.”
Nathan lowered Carla’s sleeves. He held back the natural question, “Are your arms okay?”
What would be the point of asking? Was he going to start treating these strange people he’d kept his distance from?
“I’m going to listen to your breathing now. Hold still.”
“Should I lift my shirt?”
“If you breathe deeply, that’s enough.”
Maybe it was a relief. Her ragged clothes wouldn’t get in the way of listening to her lungs.
“Chest out. I’m going to start.”
Carla tensed a little and straightened her chest. Nathan listened to her breathing from above.
Aside from her initial nerves, her breathing rate and the ratio of inhalation to exhalation were normal. There were no crackles or other abnormal sounds.
‘Seems fine.’
He decided to watch her for a day. If there was still a problem tomorrow, he’d ask Alice to check.
As his hand moved toward the bronchi,
Nathan’s stethoscope picked up a strange sound.
Sss…
‘What is that?’
Nathan listened closely.
At first, he thought it was just the stethoscope brushing against her clothes. Once it was in place, there should be no noise.
But the source of the sound seemed to sense the stethoscope and made itself even more obvious.
Hoo, hoo…
The breathing of a small life.
Just before he dropped the stethoscope, Nathan desperately tried to push away his intuition with another explanation.
‘That can’t be.’
Why would he think something like that? It must be a problem in Carla’s bronchus. Maybe a foreign object causing an obstruction?
But it only took three seconds to realize that the sound was completely different from Carla’s own breathing.
“Doctor?”
Worry crept into Carla’s voice.
Nathan couldn’t even manage a reassuring lie.
“Hold on. Let me look at where the stethoscope is touching.”
“Okay.”
Carla answered reluctantly. By then, Nathan was already unbuttoning her shirt.
He’d expected to see something shocking after seeing her patchwork arms. Maybe stitched-together flesh and suture marks.
But under her shirt, at the spot where the bronchi would branch, what awaited Nathan was a face the size of a fist.
The base looked like kneaded dough, but the eyes, nose, and mouth were all clear.
His emotions screamed. His reason clamped down on that scream, frantically flipping through old pediatric textbooks in his mind.
‘…Conjoined twins.’
A rare occurrence where identical twins are born not fully separated. They can share organs like the heart and lungs, and about half are stillborn.
But from the look of it, this wasn’t just a case of conjoined twins. Maybe vanishing twin syndrome had happened too.
Usually, the absorbed twin is just found as a flat remnant attached to the sibling’s placenta…
“Sss…”
Why is this one breathing?
But actually, there was something even more horrifying.
A memory from ten years ago flashed in Nathan’s mind. A merchant’s excited voice rang clear.
“You said it was a gift for the hospital director, right? I just got word of the perfect specimen! Even rarer than conjoined twins. Here, want to see a picture?”
Nathan tried to estimate the girl’s original build by her skin color.
It was a ridiculous thought, but if only the sandy skin was hers…
“They said she died at four or five years old. Shouldn’t be hard to transport.”
A sample of a girl who died with her conjoined twin absorbed into her chest.
Nathan couldn’t remember the main face from the catalog the merchant showed him, but the fist-sized face embedded in the chest was unforgettable.
Carla.
This was the specimen Nathan had ordered ten years ago.
***
“Ahahahaha!”
The navigator burst out laughing at Alice’s question. His diaphragm danced like a flag in a storm.
Even though she should have asked, Alice’s face turned red.
‘Was that too naive a question?’
The navigator was still chuckling as he spoke.
“You must’ve been in quite a hurry, huh? How would we know something like that? Hm? We’re stuck here too!”
“I’m sorry…”
“It’s fine.”
The navigator waved his hand. Soon his lips, stretched to the point of tearing, slowly closed.
“I’ve said all I have to say.”
“…”
“Now, I think it’s your turn to tell us something, miss.”
Give and take.
What would they ask in return for their knowledge?
Alice instinctively felt for the outline of the knife in her pocket.
