Dr. Sarah Lanen had left Proxima Central Hospital after wrapping up her shift, three hours ago when the first minutes of Saturday had started to run. And yet there she was again; climbing the steps of the entrance, saying goodbye to her idea that she wouldn’t set foot in the hospital again until Monday morning.

She got out of bed with the news, a nurse friend had texted her, and wasting no time, she drove half the city back. She was young and could afford to interrupt her sleep to have a good time awake and not to trembling when using a scalpel.

As she entered the entrance hall, she heard people talking about a truck trailer and how terrible the explosion had been, and others crying over the death of someone. She heard again that between sobs they said ‘truck’ and ‘explosion’. Her breathing quickened, and she headed for his office, evading patients wandering the aisles and staff coming and going.

The hospital was a place that did not close its doors, that did not know what it was to be empty; and although every night there was busy, with cases of injured people, many from drinking and driving—yet another reason for not wanting to return there until Monday—this Friday there were more people than usual. Something serious had happened.

She regretted not having turned on the radio in her car to find out on the way; she was so worried she hadn’t thought about it. Although in a hospital, the news flew like gossip behind the scenes of a TV network; it wouldn’t take long to find out what had happened.

She had to be prepared to deal with an emergency, and she prayed that the reason that had brought her back was unrelated to whatever had happened to the truck and its trailer. She walked into her office and didn’t even bother to turn on the light; took the green scrubs—which she had left on the rack in the hope of not wearing it on Saturday—and put it on top of her blouse. She adjusted her glasses and took off down the aisles, straight to the ER.

In the seven years she had been there practicing as a doctor, she’d become used to seeing terrible things and attending to horrifying cases. But when the patient was someone she knew, the situation changed. Her skin: white, almost pink, lit up like a lightbulb. She felt a shudder in the pit of her stomach and figured it could be three things: the need to eat something, the need to sleep, or most likely, anxiety.

She was tying her red hair with a rubber band she’d found in the pocket of her scrubs, when she saw another doctor, also in scrubs, coming towards her with such a shattering pace that even some nurses quickly stepped aside. And she didn’t blame them. Cabrera was a tall, corpulent woman who could intimidate anyone, not only because of the enormity of her physique, but because her temper was capable of making the hospital itself shudder.

Cabrera lowered his mask—her cheeks glowed in the corridor lights—and she removed her surgical cap with the same gesture that a disgusted novice nurse would remove gloves soiled with blood. The elastic of her cap caught on the black curlers that jumped out of her hair.

Sarah smoothed her uniform with a couple of slaps so it wouldn’t show she had put it on in a hurry and took a deep breath, trying to hide how disturbed she was. She knew her presence at that hour would be frowned upon by Cabrera, and showing how emotionally engaged she was would only get her in trouble.

“What are you doing here, Lanen? Your shift is over,” Cabrera said.

Sarah knew the rules of the hospital, though she knew that Cabrera’s anger didn’t come because she was disobeying them, but because last week she had treated a patient of Cabrera by mistake. Cabrera had screamed and complained to the directors of the establishment, and from that moment on, the tension between them had ceased to be professional to become personal.

“We are well-staffed, Lanen, and it is the norm of this hospital that shifts are respected. I don’t want to have you snooping around my patients again.”

“I didn’t come to snoop on your patients!” Sarah answered, and without looking at Cabrera, continued on her way. “One nurse told me that Uri O22 was admitted,” she explained. Her voice shook a little. “He’s a friend of mine and I want to know how is he.”

“Well, you ask me, because I’m the one who is attending him,” Cabrera said, and knowing how stubborn her colleague could be, she didn’t bother to slow her down and followed her.

You are friends with this Uri O22 guy, right? He just got into the ER.

That was the message her friend, the nurse, had texted her. Sarah had tried to contact her to ask for more details, but no one had answered her call; surely her friend was busy with a patient. She had called the hospital, but no one had told her exactly what Uri’s condition was. To top it off, Uri’s cell phone was dead.

Then, she suspected that behind what had happened there was a night of drunkenness—It wouldn’t be the first rodeo for Uri. But maybe this time he had drunk too much and crossed a red light and—

Sarah and Cabrera set aside to give way to two nurses who were urgently carrying a wounded man on a stretcher.

“What happened?” Sarah asked.

“Multiple-vehicle collision at eight and fourteen.”

Sarah went pale, her stomach dropped, and her steps slowed noticeably. Was it likely that a truck trailer had something to do with the accident? Those crashes used to bring fatalities.

She remembered the last time she’d seen Uri, last weekend when they had gone to the hospital charity ball, and a sharp pain pierced through her chest. Nothing bad should happen to someone as cheerful as Uri. Not to him.

“Don’t worry, your friend wasn’t in the crash,” Cabrera soothed her.

Sarah’s stomach returned to normal, or almost. A sensation of heartburn crept up her esophagus, and this time she determined the cause: it was anxiety.

“The funny thing is, they found his car abandoned three blocks away,” Cabrera commented.

Slowly, Sarah resumed her pace. “I don’t understand.”

“The paramedics attending the victims say they heard an explosion in Liberty Park, the one that’s next to the avenue. One of them went to see, and there they found them.”

“That’s where they found Uri?”

Cabrera nodded. They both walked through the door that announced Emergencies and into a new aisle full of doctors and nurses.

“We are treating those injured in the accident,” Cabrera said. “They are many, but we’re well-staffed.”

That was an unnecessary remark in the conversation, which Sarah refrained from answering. She didn’t want to fight; she wanted to see Uri.

“Your friend is out of the woods,” Cabrera went to room seven. “His twin is quite bad, though. I don’t think he would make it.”

“What twin?” Sarah stopped just before passing by. Her glasses slid down the bridge of her nose. “Uri doesn’t have a twin!”

With a sullen gesture, as if to say, ‘Don’t waste my time,’ Cabrera pushed open the door and pointed out the patients.

Sarah’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God…”

Upon returning to the Hospital, Sarah had imagined the many scenarios in which she might find her friend Uri. What she had in front now didn’t even resemble one of them.

In the room there were two beds; Uri O22 rested in one, covered with a white sheet up to the base of his neck; and in the other, in equal conditions, there was again Uri O22. Two almost identical people; both with an IV bag holder on the side of the bed, a peripheral line placed in their hands, and a monitor checking their vital signs.

“Your friend is the one on the left,” Cabrera said and stood at the foot of the bed on the right. “We signed this one in as O22-B. He was a soldier; no ID on him, though. Not a wild guess to think they’re related, though, don’t you think?”

Stunned, Sarah looked from one, then the other.

Cabrera realized that her colleague’s surprise was genuine.

“What a friend you turned out to be, Lanen! You didn’t even know that he had a brother.”

“Uri and I grew up together in the same orphanage,” Sarah replied; she hated that they questioned her word. “I’ve known him for as long as I can remember. If there had been someone who knew about a brother of his, besides him, that would have been me!”

“Oh!” Cabrera gasped in amazement. “Didn’t know you were adopted!”

Sarah went silent. What a fool! She had just given Cabrera material for the staff to gossip about.

“Yes, yes. I was lucky to be adopted by the Lanen, okay?” she said. “Now, can I get down to what really matters? Thanks.”

She took Uri by the hand and looked at him. Remember, he’s not your friend right now, she thought. He’s just another patient, and a patient needs a doctor, not a friend. Her emotions shouldn’t play against her duties. It was neither the place nor the time to act like one of those rookies who burst into tears when they had to attend to an old man in his last days, let alone when she had Cabrera by her side, attentive to her every move. She let go of his hand and checked the medical report.

Uri presented a case of electrocution. Her friend had been exposed to an alternating current of considerable intensity; his blood pressure had plummeted, altering his heart rate, carrying him to unconsciousness. Fortunately, his time of exposure had been rather quick; he had no fatal wounds or horrible burns.

Things were unclear about his friend’s accident; however, one thing was clear: it had been an accident with a stroke of luck—if such a thing existed. An accident was an accident; period, she thought.

She read the signals thrown by the monitor; Uri’s condition seemed stable.

Then she turned her attention to the other patient: the one that looked just like his friend, though unshaven and with longer hair.

She deferred the luxury of marveling at the existence of this person and studied his medical report and his signals on the monitor; pushing away from her mind all non-professional inquiries, such as, who was this guy and where had he been all these years? How long had it been since Uri knew about him, and why hadn’t he told her before?

Unlike Uri, his brother had received a high-intensity discharge. O22-B was lost. He’d suffered a cardiac arrest, and the paramedics had revived him; however, the current’s pathway had been decisive to the severity of his injuries.

She uncovered him a little and saw they bandaged his chest. The entry wound—through where he received the discharge—had to be under there; the exit wounds should be in his lower limbs. She pulled up the sheet and found his feet all wrapped up with white gauze; beneath these, the necrosis surely was eating up that poor guy’s toes. She covered him back and kept reading the report. Besides the aggression to his heart, the unknown twin had muscle contractions, trauma on arms and legs, and a wound on his back that didn’t seem to have something to do with the core case.

Sarah gave a significant look at Cabrera.

“According to this,” she said, “it’s as if O22-B had been the victim of a…”

“Lightning,” Cabrera nodded, equally intrigued. “Like he’s been the victim of a damn lightning bolt. There was a power surge in the underground fuses of the park and they blew up. Maybe your friend and his brother were caught in the blast,” she ventured. “I heard one paramedic say that the park looked like a dynamited field, full of holes, and that something shorted the lamps. Although I also heard something very curious, y’know? Sure, it must be a lie, but—”

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Roberto, the ambulance driver…” Cabrera lowered her voice as if she were ashamed to say what she was going to say. “Roberto says he saw the footage that a girl made with her phone, near the accident, where some guys—Well, he says he saw two guys flying by. But then he said that one of them seemed to have a red light on his face, you know, like those Cyclopes.”

Sarah brushed the gossip off.

“They must have been testing a new flying android. Who knows?”

“But Lanen, isn’t it weird that they see two men flying, and then they find these two near there?”

Sarah glared at her; the last thing she wanted to hear at the moment was nonsense and rumor mill.

“Susana,” she said. “Uri doesn’t fly.”

“Sure, sure, I’m just saying it’s weird.” Cabrera cleared her throat. “The good thing is, your friend is out of danger, right? We are waiting for him to regain consciousness and tell us what happened there.”

And since when you’re a detective? Sarah wanted to ask her, but returned her attention to Uri’s twin. She still hadn’t come out of her amazement at the existence of this person.

“O22-B here is bad,” Cabrera approached him. “We managed to stabilize him, but I doubt that—Well, it’s a weird case, y’know? And look at the wound here, right over his heart.” She lifted the bandage from his chest a bit, revealing a tiny puncture mark surrounded by redness on the skin. “It’s almost imperceptible. You see it? Your friend Uri has it too. I thought they were marks from an epinephrine injection or something, but the paramedics say they were already there when they found them. You say that…?”

“—The discharge that knocked them down could have entered through there?” Sarah considered it for a second. “I don’t know. It is possible that—”

The equipment that monitored Uri’s progress beeped, and on the screen, his vital signs blinked a few times, then returned to normal. They both walked away from O22-B and went to see what happened to Uri. Doubting the proper functioning of the machine, Sarah took her friend’s carotid pulse; a priori, everything was fine.

And suddenly, the alarms of the control teams went off.

As weird as it was, the twin brothers suffered from ventricular fibrillation at the same time: chaos in their heart rhythms that would soon lead to their death. They convulsed. And as if one monitor copied the other, the electrocardiograms of both became a violent seesaw of lines.

Acting urgently, each doctor grabbed a defibrillator from the shelf.

Three paramedics stormed into the room, lured by the alarm. One took the gel pot while another put on the latex gloves. Sarah turned on her heels towards Uri with the defibrillator’s paddles up and her eyes wide open behind the glasses.

By assembling two groups, they split between the dying and began a busy struggle to save their lives.

A paramedic spread gel across the paddles Cabrera had in her hands, and she put them on O22-B’s chest.

“Let’s go to 300! Clear!” she announced, heard the device’s beep, and delivered the electric shock.

The monitors showed no improvements. A continuous whistle gave the patients up for lost.

“No response!”

Sarah activated the discharge at Uri, and Uri’s body arched from the artificial momentum. On the monitor, the lines were still straight. That was the scenario so feared by Sarah; her friend was leaving them forever.

“Not here, either! He’s coding! Epinephrine and jump to 360!” she barked. “Now!”

A paramedic woman did as she was told. She plunged the long needle into Uri’s heart, unloaded the syringe’s content, and withdrew it. Sarah placed the paddles; the beep sounded, and again the electric impact shook the young man.

None of the brothers responded.

Cabrera, who was sweating like hell, with her face tightened in a gesture of surrender, stepped back from O22-B. “There’s nothing else to do.”

“You can’t leave him now!” Sarah was exasperated, and since her character as a doctor didn’t allow her pulse to tremble, her voice did it instead.

The sturdy doctor turned to her. The aggression of rivalry was again on her face.

“Lanen, this is my shift! Things here are done my way, and I say we’ve done everything we can!”

“No, you didn’t!” Sarah addressed both her group, and those who helped O22-B, and ordered them, “Another epinephrine and repeat the shock!”

“Are you crazy?!” Cabrera got angry. The paramedics didn’t know who to obey. “If fibrillation doesn’t cause them irreversible brain damage, you will with that!”

“So what?! They’ll be dead anyway!” Sarah barked. “I’ll take full responsibility, but I won’t go without them breathing. Do it! Epinephrine! 360 Joules! Now!”

The syringe plunged that long fang back into Uri’s heart once again. Biting her lip, Sarah tried to bring him back. She looked up at the others fighting to get his friend’s brother back and prayed that neither of them would end up dead. Life had to prevail; she had to impose it.

She heard the beep of the defibrillator working for the last time, then the muffled sound of the electric shock. But the whistling continued and gave the patients for lost.

Releasing their breath, Dr. Lanen and Dr. Cabrera took a step back and walked away from their patients. There was nothing to do anymore. Death had taken the twins away from them; death had stolen triumph from life.

Until, the moment Sarah turned to avoid seeing Uri dead, one of the equipment’s whistles transformed into a beep… beep… beep…

The signs of life for which they had fought so much returned, although on a single monitor. As if death had pitied the doctors, and having witnessed the tenacity they had put into their enterprise, had finally decided to return one of them to life.

Dr. Lanen and Dr. Cabrera exchanged glances.

Uri O22 had returned. His twin brother did not.

Later, Sarah Lanen had a strange sense of loss as she saw the deceased young man lying on the gurney, ready to be taken to the morgue. He was so identical to his friend that she couldn’t help but wonder if it really was Uri who was sleeping in the room and not the one who had passed away.

Nonsenses, she told herself.

Only when the Hospital staff took the body covered by a white sheet and a tag that said O22-B hanging from his foot, she was able to look away.

She felt a weight on her chest and felt like crying. She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

She deserved a break, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep; she was still shaking.

She watched Uri closely, stroked his cheek, and thought about the twin.