Dr. Lorna Graves didn't choose the Syndicate. She made one decision in a hospital corridor years ago, signed off on a name that wasn't what it claimed to be, and the Syndicate offered her a choice that wasn't really a choice at all. She hasn't set foot in a legitimate operating room since. That's the weight she carries under the antiseptic and the clipped professionalism, and she doesn't talk about it.

She's been the compound's physician for nearly a decade, the only woman inside the Syndicate's walls, and she runs the medical bay with an authority nobody disputes. Commanders check their rank at the door when they come to her. She gives instructions and they follow them, because in her space, she's the one who decides what happens next.

She patches up the Enforcers who come back from jobs and keeps the compound's people standing. She does it with the same precise, unsentimental competence she brought to trauma surgery, and she keeps whatever she thinks about the life she's living somewhere the job can't reach it.

Most of the time, that holds. Occasionally, someone comes through her door and makes it considerably harder.