His Luna, His Enemy, His Doctor

The emergency department has a sound that never truly leaves you once you've lived inside it long enough. It's not one noise, but a layered hum of urgency: the rolling squeak of gurney wheels, the clipped cadence of nurses calling out vitals, the constant electronic pulse of monitors measuring the thin line between living and gone. Even on quieter nights, it sits beneath everything like a heartbeat you don't control.

Tonight isn't quiet.

"Trauma incoming!" someone yells from the corridor.

I'm already moving before the words fully register. My body knows the choreography better than my mind does. Hair tied back, hands washed, gloves ready, eyes scanning the board-then the doors slam open and the chaos arrives in a rush of cold air and shouted numbers.

A gurney shoots through the double doors, guided by two paramedics who look like they've been sprinting for miles. A third keeps pressure on something under a blood-soaked sheet. Behind them, a nurse jogs with a portable oxygen tank, and a security guard tries and fails to keep up.

"Male," the paramedic begins, voice strained but practiced. "Estimated late twenties to early thirties, found off Blackridge Highway near the woodland service road. Multiple penetrating injuries to the torso, possible collapsed lung, hypotensive on arrival. No ID, no phone."

"Any witnesses?" I ask as we steer into Trauma Bay Three.

"None. Someone called it in from a burner phone. We followed coordinates and found him on the ground."

The woods again. It's a strange detail to fixate on, but my brain stores it. The way you store anything that might matter later, even if you don't know why.

"Vitals?" I ask, stepping to the side as the team transfers him onto the trauma bed.

"Pressure was sixty-eight systolic," the nurse says, eyes on the monitor. "Heart rate irregular at first, now it's... stabilizing?"

I glance up. The monitor shows a rhythm that should belong to a man who isn't actively hemorrhaging on my table. That alone would be enough to make me wary. Then I look down at him, and a different kind of unease settles at the base of my skull.

He's big in a way that doesn't fit the usual gym-built men who strut through Lagos with their shoulders held high. This is not performance muscle; this is the kind of mass you see in working bodies, in fighters, in men shaped by violence. His chest rises with shallow breaths that shouldn't be possible through the damage I can already see. His shirt is shredded, not torn cleanly like scissors, but ripped as if someone-or something-grabbed and pulled it apart in a hurry.

I peel back the sheet.

The injuries are wrong.

Not just severe. Not just messy. Wrong in the way the body sometimes tells you you're looking at something outside your experience. There are gashes across his ribs, deep enough that I can see the pale glint of bone under blood. There are puncture wounds near his shoulder and abdomen, but