A/N: All characters are Steph's, personalities are mine! Enjoy the chapter, I'm pretty proud of it!

4: Ignorance

No one had spoke of Jessica since her death. There was no service to honor her time here, or even her being alive. It's not the way things are done here. We're on a tight schedule, and not to become distracted by death or trouble. There was a quick meeting that lasted about point five seconds—a distracted mention of her death, how it happened, and a hypothesis that was usually never followed through as to why it happened given by Cullen—and we were off to do what we came here to do. Here, there is no delaying the inevitable. People die. Humans die. It's inevitable, and the attendings have taught us and grilled it into our heads since we all became eligible to start our practices at nine years old.

Death happens. There is nothing you or I can do about it. It can be stemmed from old age, disease or infection, assault, or self-harm. But it always happens. Outside, thousands of millions of humans are murdered, and in here, hundreds of humans die.

I had thought a lot about what Jessica asked me the day we took Sumo and his unfortunate partner to the dumpsters: "Are we murderers?"

The question rang in my head day and night, whether I was busy with a human or in an Assessment. We've harmed more humans than saved. Does that make us evil? Does it make us like them? Are we helping them? Are we even doing any good? These questions and thousands more swam round and round in my head. Day after day I thought of new questions. I guess only time will tell.

Another human was dying. I was sitting in the same aisle that Alice, Emmett and I usually sit in, when my baby monitor rang to life. I heard feet pounding past me in the dirt, creating the most dust bunnies I've ever seen. I sat for a second and watched as we all put ourselves on the line to save an inevitable death. Isn't this what we we're not supposed to be phased by?

I heard someone scream my name. It was Alice; she was waving me to come to her from behind the wall. I looked at her for a couple seconds before she ran to me, her shoes creating more dust bunnies than were already there. She kneeled in front of me, and looked at me dead in the eyes. Her piercing blue eyes glared at me. Suddenly, she slapped me and grabbed my arms and pulled me up to a standing position, and ran with me like a rag doll.

We came to the main area. Beeping could be heard from every angle of the room. Black, the third attending, shouted for us to shut off our monitors. We all did. Alice shoved her way through the crowd that surrounded the mattress, and I followed. Why is everyone gathered? This happens every day. This isn't special.

Or wasn't. I saw who was on the bed and I knew exactly why Alice slapped me earlier. I quickly found a glove off of a resident, took it, and put it on myself, and began to see if I was going to get selected to handle the case.

Cullen spoke, "McCarty, step up. Now."

Emmett, wherever he was, dogged the crowd and came to the front to stand next to me Alice and I. He stared at who it was and gasped. He, too, was in shock at the case he was presented with. "Why…."

Cullen dropped his knives with a bang on the tray, "It doesn't matter why right now, Mr. McCarty. What matters right now is that we save this life in front of us. Now, what do I do?"

Emmett quickly became serious and a hush came throughout the area. You could hear the slices being made. "Signs and symptoms?" he asked, looking down at the body.

A voice somewhere in the crowd screamed, "Headache, trouble with vision, paralysis to the facial area, and trouble walking!" It was a resident. And she was having a stroke.

Emmett quickly whispered, "Damn it, a stroke." I think it was more to himself than to anyone, because none of us ever believed this would happen. She was invincible to everything, and it should not have ended this way. Because we all knew we were too late, and it would end. Including Cullen. Emmett continued, "Proceed with finding the source of the bleeding and get control of it. I suggest cutting into the skull to find the source."

Cullen quickly took the knife and dove into her head. The sound of bone slicing through the dull knife gave me the shivers. It wasn't supposed to end this way. She wasn't supposed to go like this. Blood soon poured and gushed out of the wound that would no doubt get infected. "McCarty!" Cullen shouted.

Emmett rushed to help Cullen control the bleeding, handing him towel after towel to soak up the blood. "More towels!" he screamed to Seth, the fourth-year-intern. He ran to try and find more towels—but he wouldn't find any because we ran out this morning. "We have to control this bleeding…." He was beginning to hyperventilate.

"McCarty, find the source and give it to me, I'll control the bleeding." How can Cullen be calm at a time like this? This was death. This was our worst nightmare.

Emmett quickly crouched down on the floor to try and find the source of the ruptured artery. There was so much blood I don't know how he did it without touching her, but he did. "There. Left hemisphere, by the temporal lobe."

There were pints and quarts upon quarts of blood getting soaked up by the dirt. There was no way to clean it up either. This place would reek of her for the next couple weeks before we all got used to the smell. I have no idea how she hasn't died from bleeding out. Cullen, worked quickly at trying to control the ruptured artery.

Emmett spoke, "No!" he shouted at Cullen, "Not there," he pointed at the place he was going to cut at. He switched his hands up north about two degrees and said, "there."

Cullen stared at Emett for a long time. I think he was contemplating himself at what to do—no one was prepared for this. Finally, he went with what Emmett said, as it was the rule and he didn't have much choice. Two degrees could make or break any Assessment. Two degrees between life and death. Two degrees between right and wrong.

There was a pop. A scream. Foot steps. A silence. The monitors went dead. The silence could wake the dead. No one was breathing, including myself.

Alice was the first one to speak, "Time of death: twenty fifty-two."

Emmett had killed Dwyer.

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