The Ward Door Was Second From the Bend on Echo Hospital's Third Floor

The corridor on the third floor of Echo Hospital bent to the left, and the ward door was the second one from that bend.

Igyeol stopped two steps from the door. Saebyeok was on the left, Dohyeon on the right. The exit was twelve steps behind them, and the stairs lay beyond that.

The sentence Yura had heard yesterday still had no waveform to it. Don't turn me into someone you saved. Igyeol had only been told the sentence, not the voice behind it.

Not hearing it was better. He couldn't judge what he hadn't heard, and if he heard something he couldn't judge, he'd start pretending to know.

"Two sounds." Dohyeon said.

"Interval."

"Zero point seven seconds."

It was crying, but not human crying. It was a medical equipment alarm, and the same tone overlapped twice. The second one started before the first one ended.

"Is it one machine echoing?" Saebyeok asked.

"An echo would keep a fixed interval." Dohyeon lifted the meter. "This one stretched and shrank. Zero point six eight to zero point seven three."

The machine hadn't wavered. A person had.

Igyeol looked through the gap in the door. The ward held four beds, and only one was in use. The curtain was drawn open.

One bed. One patient. Two alarms.

"We're going in." he said.

"Order." Saebyeok asked.

"Saebyeok first, I'm beside her. Dohyeon takes readings from the door."

Saebyeok raised her shield and entered. Igyeol was half a step behind and to her side. That position had been his since chapter 8.

The patient was a woman. She looked over sixty and wore an oxygen mask. A chart hung at the foot of the bed.

Dohyeon turned the meter toward the bed.

"One here." he said. Then he turned the meter toward the empty bed on the left. "One here."

It was an empty bed. The sheet was pulled tight, and the equipment was off.

"Does a machine that's off make a sound?" Saebyeok asked.

"No sound." Dohyeon said. "A signal."

Igyeol touched the empty bed. The sheet was cold. There was no body heat.

What he did next wasn't his ability. He pulled his hand back.

"Igyeol." Saebyeok looked at him. "Were you about to use it?"

"I was." Igyeol said. "I'm not using it. I haven't decided what to check yet."

"Tell me when you decide."

"I will."

Footsteps came from the corridor. Six people, their pace matched.

Bae Jisu didn't block the door. She stood beside it.

"Han Igyeol." she said.

"Captain Bae Jisu."

"Have you seen the chart?"

"Not yet."

Jisu lifted her terminal. She didn't turn the screen toward Igyeol.

"The official chart has one patient." she said. "There's a name, a guardian, an admission record. Third floor, room 12, bed 1."

"There are two signals." Dohyeon said.

"That's your meter talking."

"I used two meters." Dohyeon said. "One older model, one newer. Both read two."

Jisu looked at Dohyeon for a moment. Then she turned back to Igyeol.

"I'm putting two of my people on bed 1. Oxygen and transport prep. Now."

"What about the second signal?"

"I don't put people on a patient that doesn't exist."

Two of her team moved. They didn't wait for Igyeol's answer. They took positions on either side of bed 1 and laid out the transport board.

That deployment was Jisu's answer. Put people where something existed, and none where nothing did.

Seeing that, Igyeol didn't change his own judgment. Instead he proposed something else.

"Captain." he said. "I'm not going to argue about command."

"What, then."

"Let's first confirm whether the two signals are two different bodies, or a double record of one body." Igyeol said. "If they're different, we need to bring both out. If the same, there's only one. If we pick one without checking, we can't undo it later."

"How many minutes to check."

"I don't know."

"Then no."

"Leave your two people where they are." Igyeol said. "We'll look at the second one. We won't use your resources."

Jisu looked past him then, at the empty bed.

"Why are you the one looking at that side."

"Our team handles the side without a name." Igyeol said. "That's all we've done for a month."

Jisu didn't take up that sentence. Instead she spoke to her own team member.

"Transport on standby. Maintain oxygen only."

Standby. Not withdrawal.

Mirae came into the ward then. He wasn't carrying a camera.

"There's a guardian in the corridor." he said. "The daughter. She's been there a while."

"What did she ask?" Jisu asked.

"I didn't ask her anything. She asked me." Mirae said. "Whether her mother cries twice."

The ward went quiet for a moment. The two alarms filled that quiet.

"The guardian heard it?" Igyeol asked.

"Since yesterday. She told a nurse, and the nurse said it was a machine problem."

Dohyeon wrote that down. Someone outside the team had observed the same phenomenon first, and the timing was a full day ahead of the team's.

"I'll take the guardian's statement. No filming, though. She hasn't seen inside the ward."

"Why is that the condition." Jisu asked.

"If we write down that she saw something she didn't see, that statement breaks first, later."

Meanwhile, Dohyeon separated the two signals. His method was time.

"For three minutes I'll only track bed 1's breathing. Breathing differs person to person."

The patient's breathing was twenty two per minute. The first alarm matched that breathing. It rang when oxygen saturation dropped, and stopped when the breath deepened.

The second alarm didn't match.

"The second one is twenty six." Dohyeon said. "It kept ringing even during the four seconds this patient's breath stopped."

"A different body." Saebyeok said.

"A different breath." Dohyeon said. "I can't claim it's a different body."

Igyeol took up that distinction. Observation and judgment, he'd heard that phrase for the third time today.

"Captain." he said. "Two breathing rates came out. Twenty two and twenty six."

"The chart has one."

"The chart has one, and the breathing has two."

Jisu walked to bed 1. She took the patient's wrist herself, not one of her team.

She counted fifteen seconds.

"Twenty two." she said.

She had confirmed it with her own hand. Igyeol saw that.

Then Jisu went to the empty bed. She touched the sheet. Touched it, then pulled her hand back.

"There's nothing here."

"There's a signal."

"Is a signal a person?"

"I don't know." Igyeol said. "That's why we should check."

For about three seconds Jisu held onto that.

Then she said,

"Han Igyeol. The official chart has one patient. We bring the one out first. If you insist on a second, it goes on record that the first was delayed because of the second."

"Who writes that record."

"I write it."

"Then write my objection alongside it." Igyeol said. "Time and reason included."

"I will." Jisu said. "But you should know something too. Right now, in this hospital, giving up on one side is my notice to you. Not a request."

Saebyeok stepped forward then.

"I'll accept the notice." she said. "I'm invoking our team's right to halt. Handle the transport as you judge best, Captain. But if we can't pin down the second signal's location within ten minutes before transport time, I'm halting our entry."

"Why."

"Searching without a location isn't searching." Saebyeok said.

Jisu looked at Saebyeok. Not at Igyeol this time.

"Your name."

"Yun Saebyeok."

"Note that a condition's been attached." Jisu said. "That works in our favor too."

Igyeol understood the meaning of that. An objection with a condition attached protected both sides later.

Dohyeon lowered the meter toward the floor then.

"I've got a location." he said.

"Where."

"This room. But the height is different." Dohyeon said. "The second signal is 40 centimeters off the floor. The bed height is 60 centimeters."

Under the empty bed.

Igyeol bent his knees and looked underneath. Nothing was there. Even the dust lay evenly.

The even dust was the problem. If someone had been under the bed, the dust would have been disturbed.

"There's no person, but there's a person's signal." he said.

"Then the signal is false." Jisu said.

"Or a person is here and we just can't see them."

"How are those two different."

"If it's false, we can erase it." Igyeol said. "If someone's here and we just can't see them, erasing it makes the person disappear."

That was something he'd learned in August. When the same incident is left as two records that don't match, the Tower doesn't erase one, it splits the space instead. A split space returns that contradiction as danger.

This ward now had that shape. One bed with two breaths, one chart with two alarms.

Jisu stopped at that sentence. Igyeol noticed the half beat of hesitation.

"Where did you see that."

"Last month." Igyeol said. "The manifest listed six people total but only five names. Someone told me to correct the name column."

"Did you correct it."

"I filed three objections. The license went conditional, and that person is alive right now."

"Can that be done with your ability."

Before answering, Igyeol looked at Saebyeok. She was still counting the ten minutes.

"I'm not using it right now." he said.

Jisu smiled for the first time. It wasn't mockery.

"Last year you'd have used it without even asking."

Igyeol didn't answer. That was true, and there was nothing to answer to the truth.

Transport prep finished at 6:12 PM. And at that moment, one of the alarms stopped.

The first one. Because the patient's saturation had risen.

The second one kept ringing. The zero point seven second interval was gone, and only that remained.

The sound left alone had no interval. It just continued.

"Captain." Igyeol said. "The first one stopped. Now there's nothing to compare it to."

"What does that mean."

"Before, the two sounds proved each other. The zero point seven second gap was the evidence." Igyeol said. "Now there's one. One can be explained as a machine error."

Jisu understood that calculation. Her face showed understanding, not agreement.

"Did you keep the waveform." Jisu asked Dohyeon.

"I kept it from 5:41 PM to 6:12 PM."

"Give me a copy too."

"One condition." Dohyeon said. "If your side cites this, put our team's name in the source. Don't switch it to your own measurement."

"You think I'd do something like that."

"I don't know." Dohyeon said. "That's why I'm attaching a condition."

The condition was accepted. Jisu added one more line.

"Transport goes out in an hour. If it's not found by then, my report writes it as one signal."