The alarm sounded like the howl of a wounded beast.

  San did not wait. He ran, the hospital's white corridors stretching before him like a maze. His blue glove had changed; trapped within it was a deep, warm, living crimson. The patient's blood. Yet another blood.

  He entered the bathroom, closed the door. The relative silence was more terrifying than the noise. He looked at his hands. The tremor started in his fingers and spread like an infection. He tore off the glove with revulsion, as if peeling off dead skin. Threw it. Turned on the cold water to its maximum, shoved his hands under it. The stream was violent, painful. The water ran clear. Clean.

  But the blood did not leave.

  Fine lines under his nails. A spot on the rise of his knuckle. A smudge on his wrist. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Opened them. They were still there. Not real. They had disappeared under the force of the water and soap. But his sight refused to forget them. His bodily memory remembered their stickiness, their warmth, their weight. It was the ghost of remorse, imprinted directly onto his senses, not his skin.

  This is madness. Non-existent blood. Wash your face. Inhale. Get up.

  But he did not get up. He stood bent over the sink, breathing with difficulty.

  Two light knocks on the door. They were too polite, too dreadful.

  He opened it. Dr. Nora stood there. His supervisor. A woman past fifty, her eyes never lied. She looked at him first, for a long time, as if reading a diagnosis on his forehead. Then she looked at the glove thrown in the corner like a strange carcass. Finally, she looked at his hands, reddened from scrubbing.

  "Dr. San," she said with a calm that was glazed with frost. "Go back to your office. I will handle informing the family."

  He knew. He knew exactly what she meant. "I will handle it" meant: I will carry the knife. I will enter the room knowing their gazes will cut me, and I will say the words. I will make my name the one their children will curse later. All so that you, the failed surgeon, can retain a sliver of false innocence, so you can come back here tomorrow as if nothing happened.

  He shook his head. A silent refusal. His throat was a knot through which words could not pass.

  No. Sin cannot be delegated. The blood is on my hands, mine alone. If I accept, it's as if I'm washing my hands with hers. And that is filthy.

  He saw something in her eyes more akin to sorrow than anger. She understood the system better than he did. In the giant machine of the hospital, when an operation fails, blame must be placed on a cog. And that cog must be expendable. He was the perfect cog. Young, without protection, without an established reputation. His refusal was not courage; it was foolishness. A foolishness for which he might pay dearly.

  "It's on your responsibility," she whispered, then let the door close.

  My responsibility. Yes. Everything is always my responsibility.

  He dragged his feet to the waiting room. Each step was like dragging a corpse. He opened the door.

  There were five of them. The wife, the son, the daughter, and the elderly parents. They were sitting in a row, silent, as if in a courtroom awaiting the verdict. The wife raised her face towards him. There was a remnant of hope in it. A weak, cracked hope, but it was there.

  Don't look at me like that. Don't give me hope just so I can kill it.

  His throat went completely dry. The air was heavy with the smell of antiseptic and anxiety.

  "Ma'am... Sirs...", he began, his voice strange even to his own ears. "I'm sorry... The operation... We couldn't save him."

  Silence.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Then it broke.

  The wife did not start with crying, but with a moan. A deep, muffled sound that came from her depths as if something had been torn inside her forever. Then she bent over, and her shoulders shook. The eldest son, a man in his forties, rose from his seat suddenly, then sat back down as if his legs had abandoned him. The elderly father stared into the void, his eyes glassy.

  And after the moan, came the words. One knife after another.

  "What did you do to him?" the wife screamed."He was fine! He was talking to us just a moment ago!""Where is the head of the department? Where is the responsible doctor?""You... you killed him!""Incompetent doctor! Murderer!"

  Murderer. The word hung in the air. In this world, at this moment, there was no difference between a hand that erred and a hand that intended. The result was the same: an empty bed, shattered hearts, and someone who must bear the curses.

  He said nothing. He stood there, slightly bent, receiving the storm. Every accusation was true, from their perspective. And from the perspective of the system that trained him, failure was the ultimate betrayal.

  He left the hospital without feeling his feet. The cold night air slapped him, but it did not refresh him. He smelled the familiar city smells: car exhaust, dust, cheap food from a nearby stall. And beneath all that, a scent clung to him that he could not escape: the smell of antiseptic. The smell of the white room. The smell of failure.

  Four times. This year alone.

  He walked without direction. A twenty-nine-year-old man. An age where he was supposed to be a husband, a father, a head of a household. But he was alone. His relationship with his family in the distant city had cooled when the news of successes stopped and implicit condolence visits became frequent. He lived in a concrete box overlooking a busy street, hearing the hum of life but not participating in it.

  And I am not a bad doctor. That was the catastrophe. If he were bad, it would be simple. He could hate himself and change his course. But he knew. He was the best in his class. His hands did not tremble. His memory was sharp. His studies were meticulous.

  The problem was in the distribution. In the surgical department, as in everything, there was a rigid caste system. The new, soft dolls—like him—were thrown to the wolves: critical, complex cases with an official success rate of fifty percent. A divine dice roll. Meanwhile, the gods—the department heads, the stars—chose carefully: routine operations, wealthy patients, cases that guaranteed a sure success to be added to their glossy records. They built their statues on the wreckage of those who fell below.

  Today's operation. A man in his sixties. His heart condition was complex but operable. It was his share because the "Professor" was on the upper floor, performing a facelift and nose job for a famous TV presenter. A simple equation: the life of an ordinary man in exchange for the beauty of a wealthy woman. And the Professor would never hear this alarm.

  He reached his building. Climbed the dark stairs. His apartment was cold, dark, empty. He threw himself onto the bed without taking off his coat. The darkness was like a heavy blanket.

  He grabbed his phone. The pale blue light was harsh on the eyes. He scrolled through the news without interest. Politics, economy, crimes... then he stopped.

  The main headline: "Catastrophe: United States Launches Tactical Nuclear Missile on Its Own Territory After Major Defense System Failure."

  He tapped on the news. Cold details: a software glitch, a simulation mistaken for real, a chain of irreversible commands. A country possessing the largest military arsenal in history, the most advanced and complex weapons, falls victim to its own excessive intelligence. It bombs itself.

  Meanwhile, other countries, weak, poor, torn by civil wars, still stand. Not because they are strong, but because their destruction does not require all this complexity. Their destruction is cheap. Everyday.

  Well, he thought, the void expanding in his chest. It doesn't seem like there's any hope of survival.

  The thought was not dramatic. It was a cold, logical conclusion. If the great powers could collapse from a stumble in their software, what fate awaits a small, already damaged cog in a corrupt machine?

  He raised his right hand in the darkness of the room. The hand that caused—according to the family—the death. The hand he had scrubbed until its skin peeled.

  And he saw.

  It was not a hallucination. It was not a spot from tired eyes.

  It was a black halo.

  A darkness not like the darkness of the room. A denser, more essential darkness. It wrapped around his hand from the wrist to the fingertips, like a liquid glove of heavy oil. It had depth. Thickness. It was not on the skin, but around it, emanating from it. He felt its coldness immediately. A dry cold, devoid of moisture, piercing the flesh directly to settle in the bone.

  What...?

  He moved his index finger. The black halo moved with it, connected, but with a slight delay, as if following with its own will. He raised his hand before his eyes. In the darkness, the halo absorbed the remaining light, did not reflect it. It was like a hole in the shape of his hand.

  Cautiously, as if reaching towards a strange animal, he touched the halo with the fingers of his left hand.

  The fingers passed through it