The emergency room was a choir of shattered glass and human suffering, but for Christopher, it had suddenly become a vacuum. He stood over Gurney Seven, his bloody gloves hovering inches from the mangled torso of Elena Vance, Jack's senior law clerk. She was twenty-four, brilliant, and currently exsanguinating from a grade IV splenic rupture.
"Wright! We need you in Trauma 1! Richard is losing a crush victim!" Miranda Bailey yelled, her voice a staccato burst through the cacophony.
"Richard can wait! This one is mine!" Christopher roared back, his usual sarcastic drawl replaced by a feral intensity.
He didn't wait for a surgical suite. He grabbed a scalpel and performed a bedside laparotomy right there in the bay, the betadine splashing onto his Tom Ford boots without a second thought. His mind was a binary code of surgical steps and suffocating dread. Elena had been with Jack. He knew they had a briefing at the District Court this morning. The ferry was the only way across the Sound for them.
I told him to take the I-5, Christopher thought, his hands moving with a terrifying, automatic speed. I gave him the spoiler. Why is his clerk on my operating table?
"Elena, look at me!" Christopher barked, his voice dropping into a low hum meant to pierce her shock-induced stupor. "Where is Jack? Was he on the vessel?"
Elena's eyes flickered, the pupils dilated to black discs. Her lips moved, cyanotic and trembling. "...car... he stayed in the car... the lower deck..."
Christopher felt his heart stop. The lower deck of the ferry was where the impact had been centered. It was currently underwater.
"Wright, her BP is 60 over palp! We're losing the rhythm!" a nurse screamed.
"I have the hilum!" Christopher shouted back, his fingers clamping down on the splenic artery with the force of a vice. "Push two units of O-neg and get me a Satinsky clamp! Now!"
He was a triple-board certified prodigy, a man who knew every death and disaster in this universe, but as he worked to save Elena, he realized his foreknowledge was a glass shield—it had shattered the moment Jack stepped off the script.
He finished the splenectomy in record time, his hands slick with the blood of a girl who was his only link to the man he loved. He handed the suction to a terrified intern and stepped back, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Transfer her to ICU. Stable condition," Christopher said, his voice hollow.
He stripped his gloves and pulled his phone from his pocket. Thirty-two missed calls from an unknown number. He hit redial.
"Dr. Wright?" It was a paramedic's voice, shouting over the roar of helicopters and waves. "We found your number on a wallet in the lower deck debris. We have a male, early thirties, pinned in a submerged vehicle. He's hypothermic and unconscious. We're airlifting him to Seattle Grace now."
Christopher leaned against the cold tiles of the hallway, a single, savage laugh escaping his throat. The universe didn't just want him to watch the show; it wanted him to bleed for it.
"Get OR 1 ready," Christopher whispered into the phone, his sarcasm finally, completely dead. "The Consultant is going in."