Chapter 65: Chapter 65: Venipuncture

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Chapter 65: Venipuncture

The room behind the door looked nothing like anything Kairan had seen elsewhere in the orphanage.

The walls were white or perhaps they once had been; now they bore the same sickly pallor as Grimsdyke’s skin, bathed in a cold light that poured from ceiling-mounted lamps without casting a single shadow. On those walls, arranged in precise rows, dozens of bags filled with dark red liquid hung from metal hooks, each bearing a handwritten label with a name and a date. Some were full and taut; others were nearly empty and limp, as if long forgotten.

“Have a seat,” Grimsdyke said, pointing to a stiff chair beside a metal table covered in instruments Kairan had never seen before.

Kairan sat down. He had no idea what a blood draw entailed. In the Abyss, blood was spilled in battle, not donated. Yet he watched Grimsdyke move with the same focused attention he would have accorded a master-at-arms, and when the man gestured toward his arm, he extended it without question.

“Venipuncture,” Grimsdyke said, tying a tourniquet above the elbow. “We are proceeding with a peripheral venous draw. The sample will be used for a complete blood count with differential, an electrolyte panel, and to prepare a unit for storage in case an autologous transfusion is required.”

He palpated the antecubital fossa with two fingers, searching for the vein.

“I’m using a twenty-five-gauge needle,” he continued. “In pediatric patients, the subcutaneous adipose layer is less developed; the course of the cephalic and basilic veins is more superficial, with a shallower angle of entry compared to adults generally around fifteen to twenty degrees. A narrow gauge reduces trauma to the tunica adventitia and limits the incidence of reactive venous spasm or perivenous hematoma formation caused by puncturing the opposite wall.”

He found the spot. He disinfected it and returned to the tray.

“Whole blood consists of approximately fifty-five percent plasma water, plasma proteins such as albumin, globulins, and fibrinogen, as well as coagulation cascade factors. The remaining cellular component includes erythrocytes, responsible for oxygen transport via hemoglobin and its affinity, which varies according to partial pressure; leukocytes, involved in innate and adaptive immune responses; and platelets, responsible for primary hemostasis through adhesion to the exposed sub-endothelium.” He spoke with the same flat cadence as before. “I will draw about two hundred milliliters a volume well below the critical threshold, even considering the estimated blood volume for your body mass, which is roughly seventy milliliters per kilogram. Medullary erythropoiesis, stimulated by renal erythropoietin in response to relative hypoxia, restores the red blood cell mass over the course of a few weeks.”

Kairan listened to every word without grasping the actual meaning; the terms washed over him like a language he had never studied. *I didn’t understand a thing he said,* he thought, *but he seems to know exactly what he’s talking about.* It was the same kind of competence he had recognized in Kaldreth when the old wizard spoke of spells Kairan could never hope to master: the confidence of someone who has no need to simplify, because he does not expect to be challenged. He felt the prick a tiny one. He watched the tube fill with dark red, identical to all the bags lining the walls.

He couldn’t deny it: the man knew exactly what he was doing. Every movement measured, every term precise the competence of someone who had repeated the same action countless times.

And beneath that competence, the feeling he’d had earlier hadn’t budged an inch.

It was while the tube was filling that Kairan heard it.

Not from the door he’d entered through. From another direction through the wall to his right came a voice, too distant and muffled for a normal ear to catch. But Kairan didn’t have a normal ear. He had always been able to hear through stone walls, from up to thirty meters away.

“Doctor,” said the voice thin, young. “The nutrient drip is finished.”

Kairan didn’t know the word *drip*. But he caught *food*, and the tone in which it was spoken the flat weariness of someone repeating the same thing every day made a single name spring to mind.

Ezra.

Grimsdyke slid out the needle, pressed down with a cotton pad, and began bandaging the arm without haste.

“Done,” he said. “You can go.”

Kairan stepped out. The corridor was empty the other forty-nine had already returned to the common room. He leaned against the wall beside the door and closed his eyes.

He listened.

He heard Grimsdyke’s heavy footsteps moving on the other side, then an inner door, a metallic creak.

“I’m coming,” said the doctor’s voice.

A squeak. A footstep. Then: “Ezra. How are you?”

Silence. Then the child’s voice, faint. “The same as always, Doctor.”

“No more draws for today. But no one has blood like yours. No one ever has.” “I can’t take it anymore, I doctor”.

The voice trembled, cracking. “Every day you take so much blood from me. I haven’t seen sunlight in a year, I think. I don’t even know how much time has really passed. I don’t wash. I don’t play. I can’t do anything. I’m forced to piss and shit right here, like an animal.” A ragged breath. “Please, set me free. I want to die. Kill me, please, and take all the blood you want. All at once. Then it’ll be over, at least.”

Grimsdyke replied without hesitation, his voice steady and unchanged. “If I kill you and take all the blood at once, then it ends. This way, however, it keeps going.”

Kairan remained motionless against the wall, eyes closed, swept by a feeling that wasn’t fear it was more like the cold rage he had felt only a few times before, the kind born of an injustice too great to simply stand by and watch.

That was when he heard a different kind of footstep close, real not through the wall, but in the corridor itself.

“Kairan?” Amara’s voice low, a stifled whisper.

Kairan opened his eyes. He saw her at the far end of the corridor, worry written all over her face.

He pushed off the wall and walked toward her.