Chapter 9: His Own Two Feet

Dante took the back row of the physiology hall.

He had never in his life sat in the back row of anything.

Four seats along, Daniel was chewing his thumbnail down to the quick.

The hall filled with a low, anxious murmur.

A hundred and ten students held the same printed sheet and compared answers in whispers.

Thomas sat in the third row with his legs crossed, perfectly relaxed.

At nine exactly, the professor came in.

She was small and gray-haired, with a sharp nose and a stack of folders under her arm.

She set them on the lectern and looked over the room with open dislike.

"I'm told," she said, "that there is a paper going around."

Nobody answered.

"Good. Put it away. We're starting on the adrenal cortex."

"Professor."

Javier stood up in the fifth row.

Every head turned.

"Mr. Javier," she said. "You have a question about the adrenal cortex?"

"No, ma'am. I have a question about heparin."

He walked down the steps with a folder in his hand.

His glasses had slipped, and he pushed them up with one finger.

He did not look at Dante.

He did not look at anyone.

Dante gripped the edge of his seat with both hands.

It was the hardest silence he had ever kept.

"The leaked sheet gives the loading dose for a seventy-kilo patient as eighty thousand units," Javier said.

His voice was steady.

"The correct dose is a tenth of that. A patient given the sheet's figure would bleed until they died."

The professor held out her hand.

Javier gave her the folder.

She read the first page, and the second.

Her mouth went thin.

"There are eight," she said.

"Eight wrong answers out of thirty. Every one of them is wrong in the dangerous direction."

Javier took a breath.

"I marked them and wrote the correct figures. The textbook pages are in the margin."

"Who wrote this paper?"

"I don't know who wrote it. I know who made the file."

He took out his phone and set it on the lectern.

On the screen was a small gray box of document properties.

Author: T. Whitfield.

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