Unsurprisingly — the very air here languishes in stillness, stinking of stale cigarettes and soggy newspapers. Last night's downpour leaves the pavement slick and treacherous. The puddles trick the eye, as reflections tend to do: the passageway stretches twice as long after rain.

Nate plods through, careless of the water speckling his leather dress shoes. Or he hasn't noticed. Chin burrowed in a thick scarf and headphones clamped like earmuffs, he listens to an audiobook of Plutarch's Lives. It's an old recording. He prefers those. The narrator's bass voice rumbles like a distant storm, sibilants drowned in a comforting wash of static, recounting Theseus's exploits.

When he passes a shadowed recess three-quarters down the alley, whim or premonition compels Nate to look, in time to see a figure peeling away from the brick, an outstretched arm —

But too late to prevent the bullet from boring between his ribs, precipitous as lightning. He buckles to the ground.

SAM LEISER

Nate finds it first. There’s a delay after the fall, immobile seconds while his brain processes the sudden insult, sends troops of catecholamines surging through his bloodstream. Then fight-or-flight kicks in, belatedly: his hands flutter into the air and land again on his left clavicle, motion sluggish and confused as the first stirrings of anesthetized Drosophila flies. They know what to do from years of ingrained medical training, feeling down the left side of his chest and counting each rib in passing like xylophone bars. Fingers still when they reach the entry wound, corresponding exactly to the epicenter of a sharp pain that worsens with each breath. His hands slacken back to his sides, purpose fulfilled. It doesn’t surprise, that he hurts most where the bullet's entered, but the discovery still thrills, familiar and new at once. He’s done this for so many patients — but never for himself.

Simply knowing dims the fear and dulls the pain, or maybe it provides a distraction, a detachment. He might be dying, firsthand, but Nate looks on his prone body from high, the image projected onto the back of his eyelids. It overlays a body from his memory, a disconcerting sort of double-vision. Likely because you are going into shock, his knowledge supplies, and depersonalizing.

His eyes flit open, as leisurely as if he were waking alarmless, and half-focus on the face hovering above him. It’s not his own face. That recognition jerks him a little more awake, a little more lucid. “Third intercostal space,” Nate rasps unhelpfully.

SAM LEISER