Chapter 10: Breaking Point

The heart monitor’s flat line meant nothing without power. Dr. Rajesh Patel pressed his stethoscope against the old man’s chest and heard silence where rhythm should be. His hands shook as he reached for the defibrillator paddles—dead weight without electricity.

“Time of death…” he started, then stopped. What time? The clocks had stopped at 3:17 AM when the hospital’s backup generators finally died. Outside, Providence sat in darkness except for the occasional flicker of candlelight in windows.

“Doctor?” Nurse Patterson’s voice cracked. She’d been crying since the second patient died an hour ago.

Rajesh stripped off his surgical gloves and threw them across the OR. They landed with a wet slap against the wall. Twenty-three years of surgery, and he was supposed to operate by candlelight like some medieval butcher?

The third patient wheeled in as he was still washing blood from his hands. Grandmother, maybe seventy, massive coronary. Her family clustered around the gurney, speaking in rapid Spanish, their faces streaked with tears.

“We need to move fast,” Rajesh snapped, pulling on fresh gloves. But move to what? Without monitors, without proper lighting, without the machines that had been his hands and eyes for two decades?

The woman’s eyes fluttered open as they transferred her to the table. She looked directly at him and smiled.

“Doctor,” she whispered, “do you hear the music?”

His scalpel paused above her chest. “Ma’am, I need you to count backwards from ten.”

“The singing from below. They’re coming up to help us remember.”

The anesthesiologist looked at Rajesh with raised eyebrows. Without proper monitoring, they were giving drugs blind, praying her heart wouldn’t stop.

“She’s delirious,” Rajesh muttered. “Probably hypoxic.”

But as he cut, he could swear he heard something. A low humming that seemed to rise from the floor itself, resonating through the building’s bones. His hands steadied. For a moment, just a moment, he felt like he was exactly where he belonged.

Then her pressure dropped.

“She’s crashing,” Patterson said, reading the manual gauge.

Rajesh worked faster, his hands moving with desperate precision. But without the machines, without the constant stream of data that had guided every movement for years, he was flying blind. The humming grew louder, and the woman’s lips moved silently, as if singing along.

Her heart stopped.

“Get the paddles,” he barked, then remembered. No power.

He placed his hands directly on her chest and pressed, trying to restart her heart through sheer force of will. The humming filled the room now, and he could feel something moving beneath his palms, like electricity without current.

“Come back,” he whispered. “Come back.”

Her eyes opened. Not gradual, not the slow return of consciousness he’d seen thousands of times. They opened like someone stepping through a door, fully present and aware. Her face looked different—luminous, like she was lit from within.

“Thank you,” she said, sitting up on the table. “I remember now.”

Patterson stumbled backward. The anesthesiologist crossed himself.

The woman stood, the surgical site on her chest sealed impossibly clean, no sutures, no scarring. She looked at Rajesh with eyes that seemed to see through him.

“Your hands know things your mind forgot,” she said. “Trust them.”

She walked out of the OR, past the stunned medical staff, past her weeping family who fell silent when they saw her face. Rajesh watched through the window as she disappeared down the hallway, moving with a grace that belonged in dreams.

“What the hell just happened?” Patterson whispered.

Rajesh stared at his hands. They were steady now, but he could feel them trembling inside, like tuning forks struck too hard. He’d saved her. Or something had saved her through him. Or she had never needed saving at all.

The next patient died before he could even begin.

A twenty-year-old kid, motorcycle accident, internal bleeding. Rajesh opened him up by flashlight and watched the life drain out between his fingers. No mystery, no miraculous recovery. Just blood and failure and the kid’s mother screaming in the hallway.

By dawn, he’d lost three patients and saved one impossibly. The ratio made no sense. Nothing made sense. He sat in his office, still in blood-stained scrubs, staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else.

Dr. Morrison knocked and entered without waiting. “Raj, we need to talk. The nurses are saying—”

“Get out.”

“Look, I know this is unprecedented, but we can’t have doctors—”

Rajesh swept his desk clear with one violent motion. Papers, coffee mug, family photos crashed to the floor. “GET OUT!”

Morrison backed toward the door. “You need to go home. Take some time. When the power comes back—”

“The power isn’t coming back!” Rajesh was on his feet, hands clenched into fists. “Don’t you understand? It’s not coming back. None of it is.”

When Morrison left, Rajesh locked the door and collapsed into his chair. His phone had died hours ago, but he picked it up anyway, muscle memory dialing a number he hadn’t called in years.

It rang once. Impossible. The cell towers were down.

“Beta,” Dada’s voice came through clear as if he were in the next room. “I was waiting for you to call.”

Rajesh started crying. Great, gulping sobs that shook his whole body. “I lost them, Dada. I couldn’t save them. Without the machines, I’m nothing.”

“You are not the machines, Rajesh. You never were.”

“Then what am I? If I’m not a surgeon, if I can’t save people, what am I?”

The silence stretched so long Rajesh thought the connection had died. Then Dada spoke, his voice gentle but firm.

“You are my grandson. You are Priya’s father. You are the man who wanted to heal people before you learned to be afraid of failing them.”

“I killed them.”

“No. You carried them as far as you could. Some were ready to go home. Others needed to stay. This is not your choice to make, beta. It never was.”

Through his office window, Rajesh could see people moving in the street below. Not panicking anymore, not running. Walking slowly, deliberately, as if they were remembering how to use their bodies. Some of them were humming.

“I don’t know who I am without the job,” he whispered.

“Then maybe it’s time to find out.”

The line went dead. Rajesh set the phone down and looked at his hands again. They had stopped trembling. For the first time in twenty-three years, they were completely still.