Chapter 15: The First Incision I signed her name. Not mine. Not the hospital’s. Not the witness line or the date block or the risk acknowledgment checkbox. I signed her name. Lena M. Varga. Right under “Patient.” I wrote it slow. I wrote it clean. I wrote it like I was carving it into stone. Like if I made it neat enough, precise enough, it would undo something. Fix something. Absolve something. I don’t know what I thought it would do. I just knew I had to write it. The pen lifted. The moment the tip left the paper, the clipboard vanished. Not dropped. Not fell. Just gone. Like it had never been there. My hands stayed in the same position, fingers curled around nothing. The air where the board had been felt empty in a way that had weight. The pages stopped falling. They didn’t hit the floor. They didn’t flutter to a rest. They just froze. Midair. Suspended. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All around me. Names. Dates. Diagnoses. My signature at the bottom of every one. They hung there like ghosts caught mid-sentence. Like the room itself had paused to watch what I’d done. Lena exhaled. I didn’t see her chest move. I didn’t hear it. I just knew. It was the first breath she’d taken since she appeared in this corridor. The first real breath. Not the shallow, waiting kind. Not the silent, watching kind. A full one. A human one. And then she whispered. “Now operate.” The wall behind her split open. Not with a sound. Not with a shudder. Just a clean, mechanical slide. Two panels peeling apart like theater curtains. Behind them, a surgical table glided forward. Stainless steel. Padded restraints. Overhead lamps already lit, casting a sterile white glow. It stopped exactly where she stood. She didn’t move to make room. The table just appeared around her, like it had been waiting beneath the surface of the wall for this exact moment. The counter on my chest flickered. 205. Then 204. It was counting again. Each number dropping with the pull of air into my lungs. I could feel it now. Not just the number. The breath itself. The way my ribs expanded. The way my throat tightened just a little more with each inhale. The way the air didn’t quite fill me anymore. Like something was being siphoned out with every exhale. I looked down. The scalpel was back in my hand. I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t reach for it. It was just there. Like the clipboard. Like the table. Like Lena. Like everything in this place that mattered, it simply appeared when it was needed. When it was time. This time, it was warm. Not hot. Not burning. Just warm. Like it had been held. Like it had been used recently. Like it remembered the last time it cut into flesh. My fingers closed around the handle. The metal didn’t feel cold and clinical anymore. It felt alive. It felt expectant. It felt like it knew what was coming. Lena didn’t move. She stood beside the table. Not on it. Not strapped to it. Just beside it. Her scrubs were still clean. Her face was still calm. Her eyes were still on me. But something had changed. The waiting was over. The watching was over. Now there was only the doing. And she was waiting for me to start. I stepped forward. One step. Then another. My shoes made no sound on the tile. The pages still hung in the air around us, frozen in their descent. The counter ticked down. 203. 202. I stopped at the edge of the table. Lena didn’t look at me. She looked at the scalpel. At my hand holding it. At the blade. I raised it. Not high. Not dramatic. Just enough to bring it level with my chest. The light from the overhead lamps caught the edge. It didn’t gleam. It didn’t flash. It just sat there, steady, warm, waiting. I didn’t know where to cut. Not on her. Not yet. On me. Again. Like before. Like in the white room. Like when the ink bled from the walls and showed me what I’d done. But this time, it wasn’t about remembering. This time, it was about doing. About performing. About operating. The scalpel hovered over my own skin. I could feel the warmth of it against my shirt. I could feel the weight of it in my hand. I could feel the counter dropping. 201. 200. I didn’t cut. Not yet. I just held it there. Letting the moment stretch. Letting the warmth sink in. Letting the silence press against my ears. Lena didn’t speak. She didn’t nod. She didn’t gesture. She didn’t sigh. She just stood there. Watching. Waiting. Like she had all along. Like she always had. Like she would until I made the first incision. I took a breath. The counter dropped to 199. The scalpel pressed against my shirt. I didn’t push. Not yet. I just let it rest there. Let the warmth seep through the fabric. Let the weight of it remind me what it was for. What I was for. What I had been. What I had done. The pages still hung in the air. The names still whispered. The table waited. Lena waited. The scalpel waited. I waited. The counter dropped to 198. I tightened my grip. The scalpel moved.