Nohara Rin is a medic, and if there’s one thing doctors know, it is death. It is familiar to her in all its forms. Close-eyed, a decaying bunch of daffodils at the bedside, a last whispered reassurance in the air. Familiar too are the choked out sighs, blood and bile bubbling past lips. Abandoned slippers, chipped red nail polish on a long-dead corpse.

People say that medics are life-givers. Rin knows this is false. Every time her hands glow green, she is throwing herself forward, tossing barrels off a sinking ship as the waters creep higher and higher. Death can only be delayed, and yet Rin fights, buying another few precious years, a minute, a moment.

She sees it often. To the man with the close-cropped hair and the trembling hands, stay and rest, she says, you need time to recover. A wound, a poison, the body, failing. She sees him once, and she sees him again, and then the next time she sees him, his hands no longer tremble; instead they lay limp and nerveless on the egg-white sheets. The water has risen. He has all but drowned, no air present but the quiet hiss of the ventilator, the stifling heat of the fan.