Free With Every Breath by Elizabeth Camden

beneath his shoe. Fumbling for the chain, he tugged on the single light bulb to show the apparatus he used for measuring lung capacity broken on the floor.
    “Nurse Ackerman, do you know who has been in the supply closet today?”
    She didn’t. Nor did any of the orderlies or female attendants he questioned. None of the patients had a key to the closet, so they were surely blameless.
    With his entire staff lined up outside the supply closet, Trevor scanned their faces. “Look, accidents happen,” he said tersely. “No one is in danger of having their pay docked, but I need to know when equipment has been damaged. If a patient was in distress and I didn’t have ready access to the proper equipment, it could be a dangerous situation. I don’t want any more such occurrences,” he warned.
    But this wasn’t the first time. An expensive set of scalpels had disappeared from the clinic. He thought he must have misplaced them and they would soon surface, but they never did. And last week he sensed someone had been in his office during the overnight hours. His chair was at an odd angle, and something simply seemed off. It could have been the janitorial staff, but the vague feeling of unease remained.
    He stayed late that night to change the lock on the front of the clinic. It was going to incense the hospital’s superintendent, but Trevor was paying good money for the use of this floor, andsecurity was important. He squatted on the floor and tried for the third time to wriggle the new lock into place.
    “Blast it,” he muttered as the pliers slipped off the bolt cylinder, and the new lock mechanism clattered to the floor. He yanked his hand away and sucked on the drop of blood where the pliers nipped him. One would think a man who could remove an appendix and stitch a patient back together ought to be able to replace a door lock.
    He glanced behind him. Two female attendants giggled in the corner as they pretended not to watch him make a fool of himself. It was embarrassing, but he wasn’t going to let an audience dissuade him from changing the lock. He was fairly certain someone had been prowling in his supply closet, and he was going to put a stop to it.
    Changing the lock took longer than expected, and the sun had gone down by the time Trevor arrived at the southeast side of town. He headed straight for the seediest part of the riverside, where the dank scent of rotting wood permeated the air. Most respectable people had fled the streets by this time of night, but there were plenty of sailors, troublemakers, and prostitutes loitering along the wharves. He scanned the crowds, looking for a distinctive wiry frame.
    Oskar found him first. “ Gibt es die verrückt doctor.” There’s the crazy doctor . Oskar’s voice cut through the cackling of two women arguing over a coil of discarded rope. Trevor strode toward Oskar, answering in the same language.
    “Hello, my crazy friend.” The stench coming off Oskar was unbelievable, like he had been sleeping in a cask used to marinate fish. “Do you still have a place to live?” Trevor asked.
    Oskar nodded. “A room above the cannery. You?”
    “A room above the railroad station,” Trevor replied.
    One of the tragedies of tuberculosis was that as victims became too sick to keep working, many lost the ability to pay rent or get decent food. Unless there was family willing to take them in, they found themselves on the street, where their condition deteriorated even faster. Oskar’s luck was unlikely to hold much longer. He was getting too sick to keep working, and when that happened, he would probably be sleeping on the streets.
    “Here, you will be in need of this,” Trevor said as he passed a bottle of his serum into Oskar’s hand, who slipped it into his pocket before any of the others loitering along the docks could see. These transactions were no one’s business, and it would only cause trouble for Oskar if people learned why they met.
    “Have you seen anyone new