Episode 10 — The Night of the Nexus Cut
New York never slept, but tonight it trembled.
Roosevelt Memorial's windows rattled with distant thunder that wasn't weather. Somewhere above the skyline, the multiverse hummed like a wounded engine. Michael Carter leaned on the ambulance bay railing, hoodie under his scrubs, blunt tucked behind his ear, locs swinging at his jaw when the wind knifed down the avenue. He could feel it—Vital Resonance thrumming under his skin like a second heartbeat.
[Level 9 — Prestige 0]
[XP: 3,200 / 5,000]
[Skills: Cellular Restoration | Surgical Precision | Nerve Reconstruction | Cross‑Species Adaptation | Rapid Multi‑Target Healing | Dimensional Awareness | Silver Tongue | Aura of Authority | Vital Resonance]
A siren carved the night. An ambulance fishtailed into the bay. The back doors blew open and the universe fell out.
The patient's chest glowed through the torn trauma drape, not human-glow but rift-light—green, blue, violet, colors that belonged to things with more angles than reality allowed. Every monitor hooked to him spiked and flatlined in the same breath. The medic's eyes were wild. "Found him on 7th. He said one word, doc—Emissary—and then the city lights went sideways."
The ER swallowed him; the air bent. Nurses staggered, cursing. A magnetized tray skated across the floor without touching it. The patient's chest rose and fell like it was arguing with gravity.
Lang shoved in, breath hot with fury. "No. This is over. We isolate the freak and call the Feds."
Michael's locs brushed his cheek when he turned. Calm. Deadly. "You speaking as a doctor or a coward?"
The chief of surgery shouldered through the chaos, mask hanging at his neck. His eyes took in the warped monitors, the bleeding light, the way the Emissary's pulse dragged the room like a tide. He looked at Michael. "OR Three. Now. If we don't fix whatever that is in his chest, this whole building shreds."
Lang sputtered. "We can't operate on a… a portal!"
Michael stepped close enough that Lang could see his own panic reflected in Michael's eyes. Silver Tongue slid into place like silk over steel. "Then watch me."
⸻
The Walk to War
They wheeled the Emissary down the hall and fluorescent lights strobed like lightning trapped in glass. Ceiling tiles bowed. Somewhere, a vending machine disgorged candy onto the floor like an offering. Dimensional Awareness screamed in Michael's skull—every loose atom in the wing tuned to the patient's heartbeat.
The scrub nurse handed Michael a gown; her hands shook. "This is crazy."
Michael slipped into sterile calm. "It's surgery." He looked at the room. "You, clamps. You, suction. You two, lock the doors. Nothing in, nothing out." His Aura of Authority rolled off him; shoulders squared around the table. Even the air steadied.
The Emissary's eyes fluttered open. A thousand stars drowned in them. "Healer," he rasped, voice like static through water. "The Seed is cracking."
"What Seed?"
"Rift… heart." He coughed light. "If it dies, this node dies with it."
The chief swallowed. "You heard him. If we screw this up, we don't just lose a patient—we lose the hospital."
Michael nodded once. "Scalpel."
⸻
The Nexus Cut
The first incision was less a cut than a negotiation. Steel met reality at a seam and reality yielded. Blood poured bright and ordinary for three heartbeats, then turned thin as dawn. The sternum separated with a squeal like a subway car scraping the dark.
Lights flickered. The anesthesiologist swore. "Vent stable—barely. He keeps trying to breathe with two rhythms."
"Then we give him one." Michael's hands glowed around the retractor. Surgical Precision diagrammed the territory in his mind—pericardium like silvered silk, the myocardium throbbing around something that was not muscle. The Seed sat nested in the left ventricle like a gemstone made of weather, faceted with movement, every edge threatening to cut the world.
"Holy—" the chief breathed. "It's fused to his conduction system."
"Then I'll refit the wiring." Michael's voice went low. "Clamp. Micro forceps. Don't let that field touch bone."
The seed pulsed. The room's gravity hiccupped; a tray floated an inch before clattering back. Nurses swore. A light bulb popped. The whole building breathed in.
Michael planted his palms on either side of the open heart and pushed Vital Resonance into the air like a dome, harmonizing the OR with the Emissary's impossible rhythm. The fluttering drapes went still. Monitors steadied. The floor remembered it was floor.
"Field stable," the perfusionist whispered. "How the hell—?"
"Don't ask." Michael smiled without looking up. "Suction."
He went to work.
He teased alien filaments off Purkinje fibers like he was untangling hair underwater. He sutured with thread that didn't cut so much as persuade reality to rejoin. Nerve Reconstruction ferried impulses around damage; Cross‑Species Adaptation taught his hands the Emissary's biology in motion—four-lead conduction blooming where two would always fail.
The Seed fought back. Each time he lifted a strand, the OR's walls creaked, the rift in the patient's chest yawning wider inside the tissue. It flashed images at him—twin suns, crimson oceans, a field of glass that sang in storms. He breathed, anchored, adjusted. "You belong to him," he told the Seed softly. "Not to me. Let go."
It didn't understand language. But Silver Tongue wasn't only speech; it was intent sharpened to a scalpel. Little by little, power bled outward from the fusion point without tearing the ventricle to confetti.
Suction whined. The chief ran instruments like a pianist. Sweat prickled under everyone's caps.
"Pressure falling," anesthesia warned.
"Borrow me three beats," Michael said. He slid two fingers into a place no map had ever marked. Rapid Multi‑Target Healing rippled out—not to patients in beds, but to the team: steadier hands, clearer focus, a whisper of stamina poured back into exhausted muscles. Nobody noticed; everybody performed like an orchestra snapping into tune.
He lifted the Seed free of the last alien tether.
The hospital screamed.
Every monitor in the building stuttered; elevators froze; the night itself seemed to blink. Michael's Resonance thickened, a shield around the surgical field. He cradled the thing the way you hold thunder.
"Container," he said.
"There is no container for—" Lang, somehow in the gallery, choked on his own sentence as Michael looked up and made a new one out of thin air: a bowl of air frozen hard by will and geometry. The Seed settled into it like it had been waiting.
The Emissary's heart collapsed around a void. For a single, cold, silent second, there was nothing.
"Pace it," the chief snapped. "Now."
Michael leaned in, two fingers on myocardium, his voice falling to a command not meant for people. "Beat."
The heart shivered. Then it obeyed.
One beat. Two. A cascade. Sinus rhythm shot across the monitor like the sunrise.
The OR breathed.
The city breathed.
The universe changed its mind about tearing this address off the map.
"Close," Michael said softly.
They did, hands moving in a glaze of wonder. When the last stitch kissed skin, the lights in the OR warmed from winter to morning. The anesthesiologist's knees went weak; the chief's laugh came out strangled and wet.
Michael peeled off his gloves. His hands shook only after they were empty.
[XP +2,100]
[XP: 5,300 / 5,000]
[Level Up! You are now Level 10 Healer.]
[New Skill Unlocked: Chrono‑Theater (Localized Time Dilation in Surgical Fields).]
[XP: 300 / 5,000]
Time dipped around him like it gave a respectful bow.
The Deposit
They were still coming down when every phone in the hospital buzzed at once.
Residents, janitors, cafeteria workers, security, volunteers—everyone looked down. Notifications bloomed like fireworks.
INBOUND TRANSFER — 50,000.00 USD
Origin: Interworld Liability Pool — Nexus Compact, Article 7 (High‑Risk Node Stabilization Bonus — Sitewide).
Silence. Then a scream from Radiology. Then two. Then a wave of shouts rolled through floors like a stadium roar.
The chief blinked at his screen, then at Michael. "What the hell did you just sign us up for?"
Michael smirked. "Hazard pay."
Lang pounded the viewing glass with an open palm, face purple with disbelief. "This is a trick!"
The CFO burst into the hall breathless, hair on end, iPad clutched like a life raft. "It's real. Everyone on payroll got fifty grand. Even the night valet. Even the coffee cart girl. My god."
A message piggybacked the deposit:
To the staff of Roosevelt Memorial:
On behalf of the Nexus Compact, gratitude for safeguarding the Emissary Core. Your world remains anchored. Compensation as stipulated. Keep the Healer alive.
— The Ledger
"Keep the Healer alive," Jessica read aloud, eyes flicking to Michael. Her grin was half disbelief, half hunger. "Looks like the multiverse just hired the whole building."
⸻
The Aftermath (Wild)
By the time the patient hit PACU with a serene, steady beat, the hospital had turned into a roaming party. The on‑call rooms glowed like embers; relief and adrenaline combusted into something messy, human, and loud.
Security guards high‑fived phlebotomists. The crustiest ICU nurse danced with an ortho attending in the supply closet between towers of saline. A respiratory therapist cried into a social worker's hoodie and kissed them a minute later. Somebody blasted music from an abandoned nurses' station. Somebody else taped a "THANK YOU, HEALER" sign to the ceiling that had tried to fall in an hour earlier.
Was it reckless? Absolutely. Was it earned? Also absolutely.
Michael moved through it all like the eye of a hurricane—hugged by strangers, blessed by families, tugged into selfies with people who hours ago didn't even believe in him. He smiled, chill, but there was a knife's edge of exhaustion under it. He found a shadowed corner outside the stairwell and finally lit the blunt he'd been carrying since the ambulance bay.
Jessica slipped in after him, cheeks flushed, eyes bright. She didn't say anything for a second. Just leaned her forehead to his, breath syncing, the last of the terror burning off in her smile.
"You just saved our entire world and paid my student loans," she whispered, wrapping her fingers in his locs. "And you still smell like the OR. That's fucking intoxicating."
He kissed her because he wanted to and because the night had taken so much and because sometimes being alive demanded proof. It was heat and relief and the soft laugh people have when they realize they get to wake up tomorrow. They broke only when a stretcher rattled by and someone yelled his name down the hall.
"Duty calls," he said, grin crooked.
"Come back," she said.
"I always do."
Debrief with the Devil
The board met in a shell‑shocked clump at dawn. The chief sat at the head of the table in scrubs spattered with a little bit of the universe. The CFO looked like she'd aged backward. Lang stared at his hands.
The chief cleared his throat. "Two items. One: we are the first hospital in recorded history to receive an interworld stabilization bonus. Two: Carter is now the point for all rift‑adjacent clinicals. Any objections?"
Lang lifted his head. The old fury was there, but smaller, shriveled by what he'd witnessed through the glass. "He'll destroy us," he managed.
Michael stepped in, Aura of Authority humming, Silver Tongue sharpening. "No. I'll keep you paid and breathing. In that order."
Laughter rolled around the table, the kind that startled people into remembering they were allowed to be happy.
The chief pushed a pen toward Michael. "I hate paperwork. You speak to them." He tapped the words Nexus Liaison on a letterhead that hadn't existed yesterday.
Michael took the pen. Time bent a fraction around Chrono‑Theater—just enough to let him read three pages in a blink and slide the signature into the perfect second.
"Done."
⸻
Hook for Tomorrow
He ducked outside into a morning that tasted like rain and ozone. The city had gone oddly quiet, like even the traffic was catching its breath. Michael leaned against the loading dock, exhaled smoke, and let the world climb off his shoulders one vertebra at a time.
[Level 10 — Prestige 0]
[XP: 300 / 5,000]
[New Skill: Chrono‑Theater (Local time dilation in surgical fields; extend focus, extend life).]
His phone buzzed.
Unknown number. No caller ID. A voice like polished stone: "Healer. Another Seed is failing. Not in your hospital—in your subway. Southbound line, ten minutes. If it cracks, your city drowns in nights that never end."
Michael flicked ash, rolled his wrists. "Text me the stop."
"Already did," the voice said. "Bring your scalpel."
He slid the phone away and smiled into the newborn day. Limitless worlds. Limitless people to save. And now—limitless time, inside the theater where he was god.
"Round two," he said to the empty air, and the empty air, grateful, didn't argue.
He tucked the blunt behind his ear, turned on his heel, and walked back through automatic doors that opened like the mouth of fate.
"I am the cure."