– Does she still drive? – Laughter in response. – Maybe you should get a scooter.

– Fuck you," the woman replies laconically.

– After you, sister!

She tries to say something back, but the sound of the engine starting and the momentary screeching of the tires interrupt her; the woman's shoulders slump tiredly.

She walks forward seven meters – a little more, and she will be at Johnson's side – and then she flicks the alarm, and the dark blue MINI Cooper flashes its headlights; a minute more, and the roof moves back, obeying an invisible command.

That's the car they were asking about, does it drive?!

Emily sighs enviously again – what could be better than rushing through the London highways in a convertible after a long day at work…?

The light of a passing car illuminates the face of a stranger for a moment, and Emily is surprised to recognize her as Clark.

Without knowing why, Johnson stands and watches until the car disappears in the distance; only then, on her way down to the subway, she smiles to herself: it's a good thing she ended up in neurology after all.

Maybe this is her tiny chance to get better.

The next two days pass all too quickly – both the night and day shifts are devoted entirely to the emergency room: Emily hasn't really figured it out, but some major accident outside the city has thrown her schedule off, turning it into a 24-hour shift. For almost twenty hours she relentlessly bandages, washes, stitches, and injections, filling out thousands of papers at the same time. Nothing is heard from neurology – either they have forgotten about her, or the date of surgery has not yet been set. Johnson hears from the ear that the operation in a deaf boy is going well – but does not pay attention to it: is not enough deaf young men all over the hospital?

By morning, Emily no longer knows where anyone is, doing her job on autopilot, and then, collapsing with exhaustion, she crawls to her locker, where she somehow pulls off her white coat, crumples it into a ball, and throws it on the tin floor.

Nothing, Johnson thinks, in two weekends she will have washed it three times and ironed it four times.

Somehow the fact that she has had to work so hard, as if for an entire shift, makes her angry; but this anger is not bright flashes or flashes of thunder, no; rather a humming and gray longing for calm.

Melissa puts her hand on her shoulder, encouragingly, saying that everything will be all right; but Emily does not react: it seems that if you put a pulse oximeter on her, it will show solid zeros.

And dots.

Mel says:

– You got off easy, Sarah's got three in there – all on her hands.

An outsider would have thought it was children, but Emily knows that one of her colleagues has had three deaths. Not that death scares her – in hospitals, death is always wandering the halls looking for its own room – but it must be a stressful time to lose your mind.

Or not.

Already as she walks away, slipping past Olivia, the perpetually charged battery from the front desk, she hears her holler.

And, fixing a mop of curly, perfectly coiffed blond hair, she smiles and hands Emily a form folded in half:

– Dr. Harmon said to tell you he's expecting you in the operating room tomorrow.

She doesn't seem to have two days off.

* * *

Emily is embarrassed to admit, but she's never been in a real surgery. No, of course, college internships meant attendance, but it was one thing to be in the operating room with a supervisor, another to be in the operating room with doctors like that.

What it is about them she doesn't know; maybe it's because she's never worked with surgeons, or maybe it's because Clark-who-who-is-no-name and Moss-who-is-always-evil seem like little gods in this vast system called Royal London Hospital.

On the morning before surgery, she wrinkles in front of her locker, buttoning her robe at random, tucking unruly strands into a bun, and checking several times. A piece of paper rustles in his pocket – the form Olivia gave him, time and number: two o'clock in the afternoon, room seventy-four.

Mel jokes wickedly: like a date, by golly – and hands out a hirsute suit in a rustling bag. He adds, "They'll put the rest of the sterile part on you there. Smiles: some experience, if not the greatest, but experience. Rebecca looks crookedly out from under her false eyelashes, and Emily unwittingly wondered if they let her into the operating room…

At the exit of the office nurses meet Dr. Gilmore – the same whom Johnson ran into a few days ago – and politely greeted. Strangely, the doctor, rushing through the corridors, shouting something into the tube about a paternity test, is now a swarthy, almost dark-skinned man with a short red haircut and a nametag sloppily tucked in his pocket.