Chapter 11: The Hepatic Vein

At twenty to midnight, Han Zhiyuan had been on his feet for seventeen hours, and his pill had stopped holding at nine.

The coach had gone under a lorry on the Ningshang expressway, and seven people had come through the emergency doors in forty minutes.

Four theatres were running, and every surgeon in the building was in one of them.

Lu was still on the Hangzhou road with his phone going to voicemail.

Han had taken the worst of them himself.

The patient on the table was a lorry driver of forty-nine whose liver had been torn open against the steering wheel.

Han had packed it, stopped the worst of the bleeding, and found what he had been afraid of.

A vein behind the liver was split along three centimetres, and every time he lifted the packing, it filled.

"Pressure?" he said.

"Seventy over forty," said the anesthesia resident from the head of the table. His voice was thin and very steady.

"I've got four units in and two more coming. I can't keep up with this much longer, Director."

"You will not need to."

Han held the packing down with his left hand and took the fine needle in his right.

Gao had loaded it for him without being asked.

She had stood on the other side of the table for eight years, and she knew the moment before he did.

He brought the needle to the edge of the tear.

His hand shook.

It was the fine, fast shake of the Thursday bench, and it made the tip chatter against the vein wall.

He tried again, braced his wrist on the packing, and breathed out slowly.

The needle skidded, and the tear lengthened by a centimetre, and dark blood rose and spilled over the edge.

Nobody in the theatre spoke.

*Not like this,* Han thought. *Not on a man with a wife in the corridor.*

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