The final chamber revealed itself not as cell, but sanctum—a surgical atelier polished to aseptic brilliance. Stainless steel surfaces reflected Fran's pallor in funhouse mirror perfection.
"Most crumble when Death's scalpel nears... like Julie convulsing in her lab, John begging with severed arteries."
Themis emerged from clinical shadows, her surgical scrubs draping a sculpted silhouette. "But you? You dissect mortality itself."
Her voice flowed like liquefied mercury, each syllable precisely dosed. "Implanting keys in visceral repositories was meant to break lesser minds. Yet you carved yourself open with butcher's indifference."
Fran's sutured lips curved. "Flattery won't reduce consultation fees."
"Then explain this paradox." Themis' gloved hand gestured to transfusion equipment still glistening with Fran's blood. "You spared a stranger while bleeding out. Clinical detachment... or latent humanity?"
The physician's scalpel caught the overhead light. "Souls are messy, Themis. I prefer studying circulatory systems." She tapped her temple. "Yours particularly—such elegant degradation."
Themis' scalpel-sharp gaze found Fran already prone on the operating table, limbs arranged with sacrificial precision. "Eager to play cadaver, Doctor?"
Fran's lashes fluttered in mock innocence. "Both, darling." Her finger tapped the transfusion scar. "400cc masquerading as 800? How... considerate."
"Ethics require survivors." Themis activated the hemodialysis machine, its hum harmonizing with the cryo-preservation unit's frosty exhale. "Your renal repossession awaits."
"Curiosity—" Fran's gloved hand brushed the chilled organ container. "—did you grade my performance? Pass/fail with extra credit?"
Themis' needle found Fran's jugular with liturgical precision. "Congenital analgesia explains much."
"Pain's just... data." Fran's pupils dilated as cold preservation fluid snaked through her veins. "But Themis? If you wanted my kidney—" Her laughter bubbled through the sedation. "—you could've just asked."
Even Fran's critical eye begrudged admiration. Themis moved with liturgical precision—clamps snapping, sutures looping, scalpels dancing in surgical metronome. No anesthesiologist murmured vital signs, no nurses scrambled for instruments. Just one woman orchestrating a renal relocation like some biomedical Bach.
"Retrograde to the point of absurdity," Fran mused through neuromuscular haze. Her own research had pioneered single-surgeon transplants, but witnessing this antiquated grandeur merged with aseptic modernity... deliciously heretical.
Themis' blade parted dermis with lover's intimacy, navigating the terrain Fran's prior surgery had pre-mapped. Fingers spelunked through adipose layers, tracing vascular highways and neural tributaries.
The preserved kidney emerged from its cryogenic shrine. Two hundred and seventy-three anastomoses commenced—artery to artery, vein to vein, ureter to bladder. Simplicity itself, for those who'd rewritten transplantology's bible.
Fran observed through drug-lidded eyes as Themis' needle wove their biological tapestry. Paralysis anchored her body, but consciousness floated freely—clinical curiosity overriding survival instincts.
"Fascinating," she tried to say, though her diaphragm remained inert. "You suture left-handed... to honor the cadaver donors?"
Themis' final knot cinched as the clock struck two hours. "No," she replied, swabbing the incision. "To unsettle observers."
Fran's eyelids fluttered open to Themis' silhouette haloed in surgical lights. Thirty-three minutes post-operative—she'd counted each morphine-dampened second.
"Procedure concluded." Themis released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Residual neuromuscular blockade persists. Rest. We depart once—"
"Done then?" Fran's yawn carried the languor of Sunday brunch, not post-transplant convalescence.
"All trials concluded." Themis peeled off blood-crusted gloves, fingertips brushing Fran's cheek in grotesque parody of comfort. "You're saf—"
"Wrong." Fran's voice sharpened into surgical steel. All traces of anaesthetic haze vanished—her pupils contracting to forensic focus. "Our pre-op conversation. Your answer reeked of... omissions."
Themis' retractor clattered against stainless steel. The antiseptic silence amplified tenfold.
"Three victims you claimed—Julie, John, yourself." Fran's sutured lips twisted. "But why include me? The truth, Themis. Not courtroom poetry."
Themis' gloved hand froze mid-caress. "My convictions are pure. Why insist on this... heresy?"
Fran's smile sharpened as she catalogued the tells: micro-tremors in the carpal tendons, vocal cord harmonics spiking at 220Hz. "Darling, even you don't believe that catechism anymore."
The surgeon's tongue clicked in mock reproach. "Justice? Ethical audits? Please—" Her suture-scarred lips brushed Themis' trembling fingers. "You're addicted to the scalpel's verdict. That sweet, sweet executioner's high."
The overhead surgical lamps flickered as Fran pressed closer. "Don't blush. Power's aphrodisiac is nothing to... ashamed of. I've prescribed worse."
Themis' retort emerged fractured: "No. Not—"
"Denial suits you." Fran's laughter danced like shrapnel in the antiseptic silence. "Oh, John deserved his arterial geyser. Julie earned her OD. But me?" Her pupils dilated, black oceans swallowing amber rims. "I'm your first real kill, aren't I?"
Fran's breathing remained steady as Tamis's nails bit crescent moons into her cheek. "Jurisdiction? Darling—" Her tongue flicked against the surgeon's thumb. "—you carved 'Themis' into your operating theater door. Even your subconscious craves judgment."
The name escaped like a trapped nerve impulse:
"Tamis."
Fran's pupils dilated—not from pain, but predatory delight. "Ah, true names now? How... intimate." Her carotid pulsed against Tamis's palm, a challenge in arterial morse code.
The surgeon's grip tightened reflexively. "You provoke me mid-transplant? Fascinating death wish."
"Violence is just crude hematology." Fran's smile stretched against restraining digits. "Judgment's scalpel... controlled hemorrhage... same principle, really."
She craned her neck, exposing more throat. "Admirable restraint. Most would've strangled me after that 'executioner's high' quip." Her tongue clicked. "Unless... your obsession transcends ethics?"
Fran's clinic-curated smile remained flawless. "Cruelty's just honesty in formalwear, darling."
Tamis's scalpel hovered between them—part tool, part confessional cross. "Yes, I'm addicted to judgment. But this..." Her gesture encompassed the sterile chamber. "...is my methadone clinic."
The surgeon's boot tapped John's corpse. "Suicidal redemption? How... derivative." Her tongue clicked. "You'd have stopped after me only if I failed? Please."
Fran's gloved finger traced Tamis's carotid pulse. "Your third trial. Ninth would've seen electrodes in ocular nerves. Twentieth?" She leaned closer, breath frosting the surgical light. "You'd compose symphonies with scream harmonics."
"Self-awareness won't save you," Tamis hissed.
"Save?" Fran's laughter skittered like dropped forceps. "I'm diagnosing your relapse potential. Ten more subjects and you'd—"
The heart monitor screamed as Tamis's grip tightened on the defibrillator paddles.
Tamis froze, her bioluminescent irises flickering between resolve and dementia. "Post-operative revelations... perfect." The scalpel glinted in her trembling hand—a surgeon's suicide note.
"Witness my final diagnosis," she hissed. The blade arced toward her carotid triangle.
Steel rang against concrete. A corpse-cold hand clamped her wrist with biomechanical force. Tamis wheeled toward Fran—but the surgeon lay supine, hands raised in mock surrender.
"Not my specialty, darling." Fran's pupils dilated. "Though I do admire your... audacity."
The restraining hand belonged to the autopsy table's previous occupant. John Howard's mummified corpse loomed over Tamis, formaldehyde fumes wafting from desiccated pores. His wedding band gleamed dully beneath clinical lights.
"Ah..." Fran's tongue clicked. "Seems your groom objects to the finale."
She casually picked up a roll of newspaper and began to flip through it.
It was all about her dead fiancé, John Howard.
Fran's voice flowed gently, ethereal yet filled with a rich laughter, as though reciting some kind of poem.
"Death is the ultimate solace. It can heal foolishness and madness alike. It may not be the best choice, but it is the final destination. Eternal tranquility is the promise of death to all living beings."
Unbeknownst to her, she had already sat up from the operating table, donning her physician's coat once more.
"But death is also a relentless affliction. Like a festering sore, it clings to the living, never fading. Your undeserving fiancé has unfortunately fallen victim to the ailment known as death…"
"And I have cured him!"
Fran's face was shrouded in a pale gray shadow, her smile obscured. Only her amber, deep golden eyes shone brightly.
She was clearly smiling, and even though it was hidden, Tameis could see the wild joy reflected in those eyes.
"What... what have you done?! John was clearly dead... I watched him lose his pulse; he was nearly rotting... But why... can he still stand?"
Tameis found herself stumbling over her words, having lost the composure she once held. Even with her determination to seek death, she could not suppress the fear that now appeared on her face.
The edifice of common sense—that grand architecture built from empirical certainties—crumbled in Tamis's mind. John Howard's reanimated corpse clamped her wrist with metallurgic strength, his mummified flesh defying decomposition's arithmetic.
"Biomechanical necromancy?" Tamis's whisper fractured mid-syllable. The cadaver's grip mirrored surgical steel alloys, its preservation transcending cryogenics.
Fran descended from the operating table with ballerina grace, her post-transplant vitality mocking medical textbooks. "Rest? Darling—" Her sutured lips curved. "—I'm just getting started."
With tailor's precision, she pinched the incision suture. The flesh parted like celestial theater curtains, revealing not viscera, but a cosmos-spanning stardust expanse. No blood. No tissue. Only infinite void where biology should scream.
"Observe." Fran's gloved hand gestured to the wound-portal. "Death's just... poorly worded diagnosis."
Nebulae churned in the wound-portal's depths—cosmic brushstrokes swirling with auroral malice. Each stellar gust carried whispers of event horizons, beautiful and bowel-emptying.
"Concern yourself not, dear Tamis." Fran's fingers danced along her abdomen. The incision sealed with zipper's finality, leaving alabaster skin shimmering like eventide frost.
"Physician becomes patient today." Her palm hovered over Tamis's racing carotid. "Let's excise that... ethical abscess."
The surgeon's pupils swallowed their amber rings, becoming event horizons themselves. Tamis's mind fractured at the edges—how could flesh house supernovae? How could a woman smile while wearing the universe as epidermis?
"Wha—" The question escaped unbidden, sacrilegious in its simplicity. "What are you?"
Fran's silence resonated deeper than any confession. Her unmarred abdomen gleamed—a star map to nowhere, everywhere, and the surgical theater between.
Tamis's gaze darted between Fran and her reanimated fiancé. "You'll... transmute me into that?" Her jaw clenched as formaldehyde-scented decay wafted from John's mummified grin.
"Perish the thought." Fran's index finger wagged like a metronome of reason. "Death-mongers aren't doctors—they're meatpackers with delusions of grandeur." Her gloved hand tilted Tamis's chin upward. "Your diagnosis? Mandamus addiction."
The surgeon's scalpel tapped Tamis's sternum. "We'll redirect your judicial impulses... refine the compulsion."
"Redirect how?" The words emerged strangled.
"Maintain your hobby, but install ethical safeties." Fran's nail clicked against the operating table's edge. "Be crueler than human law yet fairer than Jigsaw's traps. Binary verdicts are for cosmic horrors and bad screenwriters."
Her surgical light flickered as she leaned closer. "Option B: neural reconditioning. I'll excise the hunger entirely... along with certain... inconvenient memories."
Fran leaned closer, her breath mingling with the antiseptic air. "But consider this counterproposal—" Her sutured palm hovered between them, a surgeon's oath and demon's pact fused in one gesture.
"Become Themis Unbound. A shadow-bound arbiter dispensing justice no court dares touch." The overhead lights glinted off her canines. "We'll replace bloodshed with... surgical precision."
Tamis's gaze dropped to the offered hand—its lattice of stitches resembling some profane legal code etched in flesh. John's mummified corpse stood sentinel behind them, his loosened grip now a silent accuser.
"Flaying screams offer catharsis, not truth." Fran's thumb brushed Tamis's pulse point. "Let me teach you elegant violence. The kind that leaves verdicts in bone marrow and lymph nodes."
The heart monitor's beep counted lost seconds.
When Tamis's trembling fingers finally met Fran's, the cold steel of John's wedding band pressed between their palms—a grotesque ratification seal.