Janvis's eyes widened in alarm abd instinctively reached toward the wall-mounted red emergency button. "His heart is going into tachycardia—I need to call the Doctor"
"Relax love, it'll be better after a while," Rose assured nonchalantly without her eyes leaving her watch. "Stand down."
Scarlet remained entirely still beside the bed, watching Quive's face.
"Heavens, luck be with this soul this time around" she thought having seen a similar reaction from the soldiers who volunteered but had terrible end as they ended up dead or paralyzed after being injected with the serum. Within seconds, a subtle, warm flush began to spread across his deathly pale cheeks.
The violent spasms on the monitor gradually leveled out making the wild screeching slowing down until it settled into a strong healthy beep... beep... beep.
Rose lowered her arm. "Now ain it all good now huh, he's stabilized."
They waited in complete silence inside the room for a full hour, monitoring the telemetry readouts to ensure no secondary rejection occurred.
Once sixty minutes had elapsed and Quive's oxygen saturation reached a flawless hundred percent, Janvis stepped outside to call for the medical staff.
A few minutes later, the clinic director himself entered the room, accompanied by young Professor Adams carrying an electronic diagnostic tablet.
"What happened? Did his vitals shift?" The director asked hurriedly as he stepped up to the bed. But as soon as her eyes landed on Quive, he stopped dead in his tracks almost staggering.
The gray, cadaverous tint on the officer's face was completely gone, replaced by a healthy, natural blush. His breathing was deep, steady, and unassisted.
The director quickly pulled out his penlight, peeling back the medical gauze covering Quive's left eye socket to examine the severe trauma. His hands began to tremble slightly.
"This... this is medically impossible. The ocular tissue and optic nerve bed... there are clear vascular signs of spontaneous structural recovery. If we perform an immediate corneal transplant, he might actually regain full sight in this eye."
Beside him, Adams stared down at the monitor, his mind racing to make sense of the clinical impossibility unfolding before him. He prided himself on his sharp, practical intellect—so much so that he preferred solving complex diagnostic puzzles through conventional medicine, often forgetting he even possessed an extraordinary biological trait of his own.
Deciding he needed absolute clarity, Adams quietly activated his superhuman gift.
His pupils instantly contracted into pinpricks, his irises shifting into a pale, translucent shade as his vision pierced straight through skin, muscle, and bone. He focused his x-ray gaze onto Quive's chest and head.
What he saw made him confirm his doubts. Inside Quive's chest cavity, hairline fractures along his ribs were knitting together before his very eyes, the bone tissue rapidly remodeling itself. Adams shifted his gaze higher, looking directly into Quive's skull and damaged eye orbit.
Flowing through the cerebral blood vessels was a strange, microscopic vapor—a subtle, iridescent fume sipping through the tissue and actively stitching together destroyed neurons, repairing damaged brain matter, and rebuilding the shattered ocular nerve line cell by cell.
The sheer impossibility of such a miracle unfolding beneath his gaze shattered Adams's composure. He didn't believe that there was anything capable of doing something like that at least not without the help of extraordinary entities like witches and even they would require the use of material and chants.
Also compared to the medical advancement made by MACE, he could say that there were little to no one who could match them, but then of course there's always someone better and this he had realized at the moment which nearly made cussed out loud in absolute disbelief.
Adams quickly pulled his gaze away, blinking heavily as his irises shifted back to their natural dark hue and swallowed hard with his knuckles white against the edge of the diagnostic tablet.
The microscopic, iridescent haze still burned in his mind's eye—stitching destroyed neural paths and fusing shattered bone with a speed that he had never seen.
He glanced toward the clinic director, who was already scribbling frantic notes onto a physical chart, his hands shaking with awe.
"Incredible," the director breathed, shining his penlight once more across Quive's recovering pupil. "Close to an unadulterated structural regeneration. Adams, prepare the surgical suite. If we pull the donor cornea from the primary bank immediately, we can execute the transplant before the vascular tissue stabilizes into its final form!"
"Right away, Director," Adams stammered, casting one last unsettled look at Detective Quive before turning on his heel and hastening down the hallway toward the surgical theater.
Scarlet and Rose stepped closer to the side of the bed, their faces a seamless portrait of astonishment.
"Well, isn't that something," Rose sighed leaning slightly over the railing to inspect the detective's temple. "Look at that, Scarlet. The entry wound from the bullet is practically closed up. Just a pale, faded scar left behind."
Scarlet tilted her head, maintaining facade for the director's benefit. "A stroke of luck. It seems the detective has a far stronger constitution than anyone gave him credit for. Director, if there is a chance for a full corneal recovery, we strongly suggest you proceed with the transplant surgery immediately. As friends of his family, we would want him to wake up with his sight fully intact."
"Yes, yes, of course!" the director declared, his voice rising in uncontrolled excitement. He didn't wait another second. Turning around, he practically ran out of Room 204, his white coat billowing behind him as his voice echoed down the quiet corridor, calling frantically for the chief anesthesiologist and the scrub nurses to prepare Ward 3 for immediate emergency surgery.
Once the director's hurried footsteps faded down the hall, only Janvis, Rose, and Scarlet remained inside the quiet room.
Janvis stood near the foot of the bed, her hands clasped tightly behind her back. She withheld her intense, burning curiosity, asking no questions about the silver cylinder or the miraculous fluid that had just rebirth her dying superior under an hour. She knew better than to pry into Dr. Maru's sector.
"Whatever was in that vial... it worked," Janvis said softly, offering a brief, respectful nod to the two operatives.
"Thank you. This saves the local precinct from a massive administrative nightmare, and it keeps Bill's mess hidden strictly within these walls."
Scarlet reached into her jacket, pulling the empty glass syringe out to inspect the glass barrel under the overhead light. A faint, cold smile touched her lips as she looked at the spent tool.
"Dr. Maru's work rarely fails when deployed correctly," Scarlet noted casually.
As she went to recap the needle, a single, microscopic droplet of the iridescent fluid—leftover residue clinging to the tip of the bevel—flicked off the steel point. It fell silently, landing unnoticeably on the back of Janvis's left hand, right between her knuckles.
Neither Rose nor Janvis caught the tiny spill in the dim light. Scarlet simply recapped the barrel, slipped the syringe into her inner pocket, and adjusted her leather jacket.
"We have fulfilled our immediate directive here," Rose said, stepping toward the door. "We'll be returning to Shilton to monitor the reports on the things which have developed during your short absence. Keep us updated on Quive's status post-transplant, if you don't mind."
"I will," Janvis replied, stepping aside to let them pass. "Safe travels back to your hotel."
Rose and Scarlet exited Room 204, blending back into the hospital traffic as they made their way toward the private elevator bank.
Left alone in the quiet ward, Janvis let out a long, heavy sigh of relief, feeling the immense tension of the morning finally drain from her shoulders. Quive was alive, the clinic was beginning to become its usual rowdiness, and the crisis had been temporarily averted.
Feeling the fatigue settling into her face, Janvis walked out of the room and headed down the administrative hallway to the staff restroom to freshen up before the surgical team arrived.
She pushed open the restroom door, stepping up to the polished granite vanity and looking at her reflection in the mirror. Her mascara was slightly smudged from the early morning rush, and her false eyelashes were sitting slightly unevenly on her left eye.
Reaching up with her left hand, Janvis used the back of her fingers in which the iridescent drop of serum lay resting against her skin to gently press and adjust her upper lashes into place.
As the faint, highly concentrated catalyst made direct contact with the delicate mucous membrane of her eyelid, a cool tingle flashed through her skin, vanishing as quickly as it came. Unaware of this small change, Janvis smoothed her blazer, took a deep breath, and turned back toward the door to oversee the incoming surgical unit.