They worked with the focused intensity of people who understood exactly what was at stake. Not abstractly, not the professional obligation of medicine or the institutional weight of a difficult case but concretely and personally, because the man sitting upstairs beside the patient had looked at Patricia when she'd taken the notepad from his hands and said please in a voice that had nothing to do with his money or his power or any of the authority that usually accompanied men like Damien Blackwood. Just a man asking her to save someone he loved.
Patricia had been saving people for twenty-two years. She intended to save this one too.
"Compound seven is ready," called one of her pharmacists. "Thirty-two minutes ahead of schedule."
"Don't celebrate yet. Compound nine is the difficult one. Let's move."
The chair beside Aria's bed had become the entire world.
