Page 104 of Hospital for Immortal Creatures

“I’ll take over,” Mikhail said.

The two creatures exchanged glances.

“Shall we assist?” the man asked.

“I already have an assistant. You’re free to go.”

He urged Amelia to follow him into the room. Edging in behind him, a sudden burst of enthusiasm ran through her. She was about to help operate on a lycanthrope with gunshot wounds, and despite it being a huge trauma to tackle, Mikhail trusted her enough to be his only assistant.

He handed her a cap and a mask. “Do you know how to clean up?”

“Of course.”

Mikhail prepared and Amelia copied everything he did. After they had washed, dressed the surgical gowns over their scrubs and donned gloves, they got into the OR. The lycanthrope’s body was lying on top of the table, positioned on his left side. His head was hidden behind a green cloth. A burly man with a face mask waited by the table, so Amelia supposed he was the anaesthetist.

“Boris,” Mikhail greeted him.

The man nodded.

The operating nurse, whose tiny size had been nearly dwarfed by Boris’ bulky frame, stepped around him and waited on one side of the operating table.

Mikhail stood beside her, and Amelia took the position opposite them.

“Change of plans,” Mikhail said. “I’ll be teaching my new assistant, so I ask for your patience.” Then he turned to her. “First, we’ll open the chest. Scalpel.”

The nurse handed him a knife from the instruments table. He cut the lycanthrope open from the sternum to the back, sliding the blade with confidence along the ribs. Amelia observed his skilful movements. Once, she might have seen an animal inside him, but now he was the epitome of a surgeon’s precision and finesse.

He spoke to her while he worked. “The lycanthrope is a combination of a man and a wolf, but, of course, you already know that.” Blood stained the cut through the skin. Mikhail pressed on the vessel with a gauze, took an instrument that Amelia recognised as bipolar forceps, and coagulated the tissue. The smell of burnt skin filled the air. “What you may not know is that anatomically, a lycanthrope is very similar to a human – like many other species, actually.”

He cut the tissues underneath with an electric knife until he reached the glowing greyish structure Amelia knew was the pleura. Mikhail pierced it with one swift motion of his index finger. A puff of air escaped through the puncture, resembling the sound of a tyre deflating.

“I’m checking for lung adhesions,” he explained as he moved his finger around. “If there are any and I cut the pleura with a sharp instrument, I can harm the lung.” He cut the pleura wide open with the electric knife, taking the retractor from the nurse and placing it on the patient’s chest. “Unlike some other species, which can live without food, the lycanthrope needs a regular supply of meat to survive.” He exposed the intercostal space step by step. “That is why a lycanthrope’s stomach has four parts…”

Ever since she had decided to study medicine, Amelia had dreamt of this. She had been inside an OR many times as a student but had always stood by the wall, from where she could view most of the working process only in her imagination. In some halls, she had observed through a screen, connected to a camera pointed at the operating table. Two or three times, she had been allowed to step onto a small platform just behind the operating surgeons and survey their work from there, over their heads. Most surgeries she’d seen, however, were streamed off the internet. When she had started at St. Nicolas as a nurse, her duties had focused on the patients who had already been operated on and she had never got the chance to enter an OR – as a volunteer or anything else.

What she was experiencing now was a dream come true, to some extent. Maybe not under the current circumstances and definitely not with Mikhail, but the feeling that she was finally doing what she was supposed to was too strong to ignore.

The two of them inspected the patient’s insides, but it was next to impossible to see anything beyond the blood that had filled up the chest.

“Take the aspirator and suck up the blood,” Mikhail instructed in a tone that showed no doubt in her ability to perform the task.

That made her confidence inflate – she was part of a team. She took the aspirator. “The lung is unrecognisable. I’ve never seen one so mangled before!”

“There are three entrance wounds and only one exit wound,” Mikhail said as he surveyed the injury. “We cannot save the damaged lobe. We’ll have to remove it. Use the retractor and pull the lung out.”

The upper lobe of the right lung was torn beyond recognition. The rest of the lung tissue was precariously attached to the bronchus and vessels. She obeyed and hesitantly placed the retractor inside the lycanthrope’s chest, praying that her hands wouldn’t shake under the watchful gaze of the three immortals.

Mikhail grabbed the lung in his hand. “Pass me the Satinsky clamp,” he told the nurse, then clamped the bronchus and, with the help of two other instruments, also did the artery and vein.

Amelia shifted her attention from the lycanthrope on the table to Mikhail. He was concentrated but calm. His movements were quick, precise and confident. She had never seen skill like his before. Not a single surgeon, young or old, had ever shown such unnatural, borderline creepy agility.

“Scissors,” Mikhail said. “As part of the New Generation, you’re privileged. You can come here and learn. Years ago, when we were starting, we had to go to human hospitals to gain knowledge. Among humans. Operating on humans.” He cut the bronchus and the vessels above the instruments, removing the upper lobe of the lung, while Amelia held the retractor and aspirated the blood. “At first, everything was one surgery. I have to admit that the humans I studied under were truly impressive. One doctor could do everything, not like today, with the hundreds of medical divisions and narrow specialisations.”

“Medicine today is not like it used to be,” Amelia couldn’t help but respond. “There’s so much information, and no way for one person to know everything.”

Mikhail threw her a telling glance.

The nurse bobbed her head to support Amelia’s statement. “Of course. But in the human world, there are a lot more diseases than in ours… Although”—her voice lowered to a whisper—“you’ve probably heard of Doctor Nyavolski’s strange discovery a few days ago? The carcinoma…”

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