The fluorescent over Exam Three has been buzzing all morning and nobody's put in the ticket yet. I notice it again while Aaron Bell tells me, for the second time, that he found it in the shower.

He's twenty-seven and hasn't slept. You can read that off the eyes and off the hands, which are pressed flat against his thighs like he's bracing for the table to tilt under him. The paper crinkles every time he shifts his weight, and he keeps shifting. One sock has a hole starting at the toe. He's working the other sock over to cover it, foot against foot, doing it without knowing he's doing it.

"It's on the right side," he says. "When I'm standing up it's bigger. Or it feels bigger. I read that's bad, that if it changes it's bad."

"You read a lot last night."

"I didn't sleep."

"No." I pull the chart up. There's nothing in the history, no family load, nothing he's flagged on the intake except that he smokes socially, which nobody means. "Stand up for me. Drop the shorts."

He does it fast. Boxer briefs, navy, the elastic gone soft. I snap the gloves on. The alcohol smell comes up off them from the gel, still tacky on my own hands.

"Cold hands. Sorry." I'm not. I cup and roll. Left first, because you always do the side they're not worried about first, so they've felt your hands be ordinary before your hands get to the part that scares them. Left is fine. Smooth, no mass, the cord clean under my fingers. Right, then. And there it is, up at the head of the epididymis, separate from the testis itself, soft, the give of fluid and not the give of tissue. I hold it between two fingers.

"Okay." I reach for the penlight on the tray. "Would you mind hitting the light?"

Aaron hits the switch by the door because I've nodded at it, and in the dark I press the light up against him and the lump goes to a clean amber lantern, the whole little sac lit from inside. Solid masses don't do that. Solid eats the light.

"That's a spermatocele," I tell him. "Fluid. A cyst on the tube. It's nothing."

The light comes back on. He's still got his shorts at his knees and his mouth is doing something. "It's not..."

"It's not cancer. Cancer's firm and it's part of the testicle and it doesn't transilluminate, it doesn't light up like that. This lights up. It's a bag of fluid sitting next to the plumbing." I peel the gloves off, inside out, drop them. "I'll send you for an ultrasound to confirm. But I'm not confirming anything I don't already know."

He pulls his shorts up. He's gone loose all over, the bracing dropped out of him at once, and his eyes are wet. He says thank you about four times in different words while I'm typing. I order the scan and print the after-visit summary. I let him know the front desk will call.

"Dr. Reyes," he says at the door, "seriously."

"Get some sleep, Aaron."

He goes. The light buzzes. I should put in the ticket.

The eleven o'clock is already up on the table when I step in, gown on, knees together, scrolling her phone like she's in a waiting room and not wearing a paper gown. Recurrent infections, four in eight months, the last one up into the kidney before anybody took it seriously. The chart says she's thirty-one. The referral says, in the polite code they use for it, that she's anxious, which means she asked her GP questions he couldn't answer.

"Ms. Sauer." I pull the door to. "Julian Reyes."

She looks up then. "I read your reviews. Four and a half stars, and one man who wants your license pulled because you wouldn't blast his stone the same afternoon he walked in."

"Nine millimeters and a grudge. Lithotripsy runs on a schedule."

"That's a better answer than the website gives." She sets the phone face-down on the table and looks at me then, frank, sizing me up like a contractor she's letting into her kitchen. None of the bracing the kid in Three had. Some people arrive already sure you'll be useful to them.

"Walk me through what's been happening."

She sets her hands on her thighs. "Burning. Urgency. Then it goes away for a couple of weeks and comes back." The way people say things they've already said many times. "The last one went into the kidney. I spent eight hours in urgent care."

"What triggers it."

"Sex." No lead-up, level. "It starts the day after, usually. I'm married, eight years, so."

"How long has this been the pattern?"

"Four months. Maybe five."

"Frequency of intercourse hasn't changed? No recent increase?"

"About the same."

"And they confirmed bacterial on culture?"

"When they bothered." A flat note in it, not quite angry. "The first two my GP just called in the prescription. He told me to try cranberry juice."

"What else did he say?"

"To relax."

I look up. "Cranberry juice is not a treatment. Neither is relaxing."

She makes a small sound. Not quite a laugh. "That's what I thought."

"Any other symptoms? Discharge, odor, spotting, anything else you've noticed?"

"No. Just the infections." A pause. "How many people get four of these in eight months?"

"Not many." I pull up the referral notes. "How many days of work have you missed."

"Nine." She says it like a number she's been carrying around. "I teach third grade. Nine days this year. A substitute can't run my room the way I run my room. The kids know it."

"Nine is a lot."

"Nine is a lot," she says back, same tone, no inflection.

I pull up a stool and sit. "I'm going to press on your lower abdomen first." Fingers curved, pressing slow into the suprapubic region. She winces before I've added real weight, the bladder tender up toward the dome, which tracks with the recent infection or just the accumulated insult of four of them. "Lie back for me. Knees up, let them fall out."

She does it without the small performance most people fold into it, the reflex apology, the flinch of being looked at. I drape her and glove.

The meatus is a little inflamed, red at the edges, consistent with the infection or just friction from repeated ones. I work the anterior vaginal wall with two fingers, pressing up and forward, feeling for the separate soft give that would mean a diverticulum, a pocket of dead space where bacteria park between episodes. Nothing discrete. The urethra itself is mobile, more than I'd like, and the position of it, how close it sits to the introitus, is probably the whole story. Very close. The classic setup for a mechanical pump effect during intercourse, bacteria dragged up the tract with every act, and she's been fighting it with three-day courses of trimethoprim for five months instead of a strategy that actually interrupts the mechanism.

"Tender here?" I press the urethral base.

"A little."

She talks while I work, ceiling-directed, easy.

"He wrote the referral the week after the urgent care. Like I'd needed to nearly lose a kidney."

"Tell me if it gets worse."

"My husband wanted to come today. I told him this wasn't a field trip." A pause. "He researches things on the internet. Several searches involving crystals."

"Alkaline urine."

"Was that a guess?"

"It's popular."

A beat. "You're not going to ask about my husband."

"No."

"My GP did. Quite a bit about him." She doesn't sound bothered. Just noting. "You seem more interested in the anatomy."

"That's the job."

She seems to like that well enough.

I check the periurethral glands, no fluctuance, nothing that says abscess, and finish up. The tissue is unremarkable otherwise. No prolapse. What's there is just a urethra in an unfortunate position, and a GP who treated four infections without once asking what they had in common.

I strip the glove and come back to the head of the table. "Sit up."

"What is it?"

"Your urethra sits very close to the vaginal opening. Short, mobile. During sex, the friction basically pushes bacteria up the tract mechanically, almost every time. It's not hygiene, it's not what you're eating. It's just the anatomy, and this setup is about the worst case for post-coital infection."

She takes this in. "So there's nothing wrong with me."

"There's nothing diseased. The GP was treating infections. Nobody was treating the pattern."

"And now you will."

"Single-dose antibiotic, every time after sex. Within two hours, it clears anything that got pushed up before it can colonize." I pull up her chart. "I'm sending a culture to confirm you're sensitive to what I want to prescribe, and I want imaging to rule out a diverticulum. I don't think you have one, but I'd rather have the picture." I type. "There's also a voiding component. Urinate within twenty minutes of intercourse, every time. Mechanical flush. Combined with the prophylaxis, most women with your anatomy go from four infections a year to zero or one."

She looks at me. "Why didn't he tell me that?"

"He didn't refer you sooner." I print the after-visit summary. "Post-coital UTIs in women your age are common and manageable. Almost nobody treats them right. Cranberry juice is popular."

"I want to throw it at him."

"Don't do that." I hand her the printout. "Front desk will call you with the imaging."

She sits up, gathers the gown, unbothered the whole way through. At the door she says she's leaving five stars and a review the grudge man will hate. Then she's gone. I close the chart and gel my hands, the gel cool on my palms.

The corridor between the exam rooms and my office is forty feet of the same gray-blue carpet they have everywhere, carpet that never shows anything. The oncology dietary cart is parked across half of it again, the ONCO-3 label on the side rail, same cart, same spot, the tray run back from the third floor always ends here, has for years, and putting in a facilities complaint about it would start a whole thing nobody wants. There's a sheet cake in the break room as I pass, a name in blue gel, a clutch of people celebrating a resident's birthday. I don't stop.

Refugio's got the floor scrubber going at the far end and kills the motor when he sees me. Just timing, not for me.

"Doctor." He tips his chin. "Wolves. Qué piensas."

"Están vivos todavía."

He looks at me the way he always looks at me when I say this. "Barely, doctor. Barely vivos." He adjusts the scrubber handle. "You watching Sunday?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe." He shakes his head. "You tell me ten fe. Have faith. And then maybe."

"I'll watch."

"Mm-hmm." He says it loud enough to carry. Then, a beat later: "They gonna lose, Doctor Reyes."

"Little faith, Refugio."

"Faith is for people who don't watch the tape."

I'm past him before I've stopped grinning, which is more than the cake managed.

Mark Calloway's coming the other way with two from administration, all three in a slowed-down walk, engaged in conversation. He's got the build of a man who rowed in college and let it soften on top of the frame, so it still reads as size. He peels off when he sees me, the administrators drifting on without him the way they're trained to.

"Julian. Good, I was going to email you." He never emails me. "Throughput came back on the subspecialty clinics. Yours is carrying the floor."

"People keep making stones."

"They do." He says it like we've agreed on something. "Listen, realignment's circulating a draft on referral pathways. Nothing that touches you. But I'd want your eyes on the urology piece before it goes up to the board."

"Send it over."

"I will." He claps my shoulder and goes after his administrators.

He runs the committees. That afternoon that's the whole of what he is to me: a shoulder-clap and a draft I'll see later.

My office is small and faces an air shaft. There's a window. It looks at brick. I sit and the chair gives its little pneumatic complaint and I've got the gap before the two-thirty, so I check my phone.

can you talk for a sec

Kate had sent it at 11:40. It's past two when I get to it. I call.

"Hey." Background on her end, a hallway or a lobby, that hard echo. "I didn't think you'd pick up."

"I'm between patients. What's going on?"

A beat. I can hear her recalibrate, the warmth she'd put into the hey getting set down somewhere out of the way. "I told Renata we'd come Saturday. The backyard thing at their house."

"Saturday's the case conference. I'm presenting."

"You're always presenting something Saturday."

"I'm not saying don't go." Out the window a pigeon's gotten itself onto the sill across the shaft, doing the thing pigeons do, the head, the awful little patience of it. "Go. Tell your sister I got pulled in. She'd rather have you to herself, she doesn't like me anyway."

"She likes you fine."

"She tolerates me at a volume she thinks I can't hear."

Almost a laugh, and then it's gone, the recalibration again. "I wasn't asking you to get out of it. I was telling you I'm going."

"Okay."

"I'm going to go." She stays on another second, and there's a thing she almost says, I can feel it the way you feel a sneeze that doesn't come, and what she lands on instead is, "There's chicken thawing. Don't let it sit out."

Years ago that would've been a joke between us, the chicken, she had a whole bit about how I'd let the kitchen burn before I'd improvise dinner, and she used to do it in a voice. There's a half-second where I could pick it up. Do the voice back. I know exactly where it is.

"I'll put it in the fridge," I say.

"Right." She's gone before I am.

My mother fed seven people most nights on whatever my father carried home from the site, and she never once let it look like work, and she'd have had a few things to say about a man who panics at a thawed chicken. She came up from the Sierra at nineteen, her and my tía, a town in Oaxaca too small for the gas-station maps. Zapotec was her first language and Spanish came later and English she only ever did for our sake, never liked the sound of it. I've got maybe forty words of the Zapotec left. I lose a few a year. I never catch one going, only later, reaching for it and finding the place it used to be. The losing started a long time before any of this, before medical school even, somewhere in the long climb of being the first one in the family who needed an English vocabulary nobody at home had a use for.

The pigeon's still there. I watch it do nothing for a while, then go back to the screen.

The afternoon between patients is paperwork, mostly. I co-sign two of the residents' notes, a note being, mostly, the resident showing their work, clear the imaging queue, lose four minutes to the billing office over a modifier I've explained to the same woman three times and will explain a fourth. There's a peer review on a colleague's complication that I read twice and sign once, because the man did nothing wrong and the family needs a name on a page that says so. There's a med student's eval I sandbag with praise that protects everyone and commits to nothing. The building runs on one chart. My credential gets me into most of the floors, urology and onc and the path labs and the ob floor upstairs, anybody with a badge able to pull anybody. I've never had reason to look anywhere I shouldn't. I close out and the monitor falls back to the rotating photo of the lobby fountain they put up to make the place feel calm.

The two-thirty's Dave, a urethral stricture I've followed six years, who brings oranges off his own tree every January and won't take no for an answer. I like Dave. It's an easy hour, and there aren't many.

The physician locker room is in the basement, two doors down from the morgue, which somebody found funny once. By six everyone's cleared out of it and it's mine. I change out of the dress shirt and jeans into shorts and a tee, broad shoulders, the middle gone soft the last few years, the chest flat, the hair on it, the plain ordinariness of it that I've worn so long I see it about as often as I see the color of my own eyes. I lace the court shoes.

Petrosyan's at the next bank, cardiology, toweling off from the pool. "You playing fake tennis again?"

"Pickleball."

"That's what I said." He's been making the joke two years and it lands harder for him every time, which is most of what I like about the man. "Marisol wants us to take it up. I told her my heart's a protected structure."

"From the pickleball, or from Marisol?"

"Don't," he says, delighted, and snaps the towel at the bench and misses.

He heads for the showers narrating the joke to himself, pleased with it. I sit a second on the bench in the emptied room, elbows on my knees, and let the day come off me, the patients, the screen, the call I half-had with Kate. Then I lace the second shoe and take the stairs down to B2.

The research floors are colder by a few degrees and smell like a server room, dry, faintly electric. I badge into Somatics with the card they gave me three years ago for exactly this, which is collecting Rafa.

The main vat is the first thing you see, because it's built to be: a glass cylinder the height of a man, lit from inside, the suspension in it the gold of olive oil held up to a lamp, and somewhere in that gold a few hundred thousand machines too small to see are doing the thing the grant pays for. A rabbit's vitals scroll on a monitor bolted to the frame, heart rate, a margin number, a tumor somewhere in the animal getting talked out of itself one cell at a time by the mesh they grow in here. Years off anything you could put in a person, is the line Rafa uses when people ask, but it works on the rabbit more weeks than it doesn't now, and the room has the quiet of a place that's started to believe in itself. I've watched the whole thing three years and it's stopped registering as a marvel, as ordinary to me now as my own kitchen.

What it is, officially, is a cancer program: a mesh you seed into a tumor that learns the tissue and unbuilds it from the inside, no blade, no poison, the type of result that either rewrites an oncology ward in a decade or quietly doesn't and gets written up as a promising dead end. Unofficially it's a rabbit with good margins and a lot of nights like this one. I've never worked on it. I come down here to collect my friend. The lab logs me without being asked, Reyes, J., visitor, in the flat pleasant voice they gave it. ARIA, Rafa calls it, like it's a coworker who stepped out. I've never had an opinion about that.

Rafa's down the far bay at the harvest line, headphones on, back to me, drawing suspension off one of the feeder tanks to top up the cylinder. The feeders are where they grow the stuff before it goes in the showpiece, squat stainless things with lift-off lids, nothing to look at, just plumbing. He's got a draw line running into a tray of half-filled vials and the slow careful hands of a man not thinking about anything but the next one. There's a sticker on the nearest tank, peeling, a cartoon shark in sunglasses that's been there as long as I can recall and that nobody will own up to. His protein shake is sweating a ring into a stack of printouts.

I lean back against the open feeder, cool through the tee and steady, and watch him a minute before I get my phone out. He's good at this, Rafa, better than the work asks for, a neatness to how he draws and caps and labels that the job doesn't grade. He'd have been a surgeon if the schooling had broken differently, and he'll tell you that himself after two beers, no heat in it, just the road laid out flat for you to look at. He grew up the oldest of four boys outside a tile-and-stone outfit his father still runs two hours south of here, and there's a swagger that comes standard with being the oldest of four boys that he's never quite shaken and probably never will, on the courts or off them. He pulled me into the standing game off a flyer on the breakroom corkboard a year and a half ago and has lost to me cheerfully four nights of five ever since. He's the one person in this building I'd call a friend without hesitation. I clear the day while he finishes: nine messages, all nothing, a refill, a scheduling thing, the group text fighting over whose turn it is to book the courts.

I'm thumbing through it when the phone slips.

Not far. It bobbles and I do the thing everyone does, the grab, the lunge, and my heel skids and I go sideways into the rail, and to catch myself I put a hand out, and the hand goes past the lid Rafa's got propped for the draw and into the suspension to the wrist.

Cooler than the room. That's the whole of it. Cooler than I'd have guessed, and slick, slicker than water, water with a drop of oil worked through it, and I'm out before I've finished registering being in, hauling the arm back and holding it off my shirt with the fingers spread, the gold of it running down toward my elbow.

"Whoa..." Rafa's got the headphones off his ears. "What'd you do?"

"Your floor's a skating rink." I've still got the phone in the other hand, and I hold it up to show him. "My phone."

"Did you go in the tank?" Annoyed, like I'd knocked over his coffee. He takes my wrist and turns the arm to the light and reads the sheen. "How much? Like fingers, or..."

"To about there." I show him the wet line, mid-forearm.

He pulls the laminated card around on its zip-tie and his lips move while he reads. "Okay. Exposure protocol's for immersion. Full immersion, ingestion, eyes, mucous membranes. You didn't drink it, didn't get it in your face." He looks again. "Wash it. For real, surgical, all the way up and then some. Intact skin's a barrier. It's the whole reason we can run an open harvest at all. People splash. Seo-yeon splashes."

"People splash."

"Kirk dunked a whole forearm last spring and the worst of it was he smelled like the lab for a day." He's already halfway to the eyewash sink, waving me after him. "Go. Scrub. We've got the seven o'clock and I'm not eating the booking fee because you went swimming."

I scrub. There's a brush by the sink, the orange surgical kind, and I run it up the forearm under water as hot as the tap gives, past the line and well past, and the slickness lifts off under the soap. The brown of my arm is scrubbed pink at the wrist. I dry off and roll the sleeve down.

"You know what Kirk did this morning." Rafa's capping the vials, not a question.

"What."

"Left the autoclave mid-cycle." He racks the tray. "Pulled the tray while it was still in the sterilization window because he needed it for something else. Told me it was probably fine." He sets a vial down, picks it up. "Those were the words. Probably fine."

"Fire him."

"I can't fire him, I don't have hire/fire. Vasquez has hire/fire." He peels off his gloves. "Vasquez thinks Kirk is promising."

"Vasquez is wrong."

"I know Vasquez is wrong." He drops the gloves in the bin. Nothing follows that. He's been saying it for a year.

ARIA logs the harvest in its pleasant voice as we walk out of the lab.

Rafa drives, like always, a hatchback with the gym bag still riding around back there, that smell worked into the upholstery for good now, the rear seat a midden of lab swag and one cleat with no partner. He puts on the podcast he's always putting on, two men being funny about a third man's bad opinions, then turns it down to a murmur and talks over it the whole way.

"Okay so beyond the autoclave," he says. "His harvest volume logs. You know he's been logging them off by a decimal?"

"Since when."

"April, maybe. I didn't catch it until last week." He changes lanes. "A factor of ten, Julian. If Vasquez ever actually reads the sheet..."

"Tell Vasquez."

"Vasquez will make it a whole conversation and then not do anything about it." He checks the mirror. "He's leaving in February anyway. Kirk. Going to the Bielski lab at Stanford. He told me like I was supposed to be happy for him."

The tire place goes by. Then the other tire place. The taquería's got a line even on a Monday.

He turns the podcast down a little more. Leaves a beat. "Hey. How's Kate?"

I wait a second before I answer. "Fine. Busy."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

The podcast runs, one of the men explaining something about bracket picks, an extended metaphor about hubris, and Rafa lets it go for a block.

"She reach out at all?"

"She texted. I called her back."

"Good."

He's been leaving that question open for about six months now, long enough that I know what he's noticing. I've decided not to think too hard about it. Another mile up the access road, he finds a parking spot on his first pass, which almost never happens, and he says huh at it, pleased.

The place is called Smash Park, though it isn't a park, it's a converted Lexus dealership off the access road with the showroom turned into eight courts and the service bays turned into a bar, and the man who named it should be made to explain himself. There's a forty-foot wall of garage windows they've left the original dealer sun-film on, so the evening light through it goes the color of weak tea. The whole place smells like court rubber and fryer oil and the cold of a building that used to be a building for cars. I've been coming a year and a half. I'm good here. That's not nothing to me. There aren't many places left where I'm just plainly, uncomplicatedly good at the thing, and a pickleball court in a dead car lot is one of them, which is either funny or sad.

A few of the regulars are already going on court four, the loose group that calls itself a league though nobody's ever produced a bracket. Rafa knows two of them by name and starts in on both before his bag's even down, you're going to lose to a podiatrist again, Frank, and one of them flips him off without looking up from his serve. It's a register Rafa has that I've never once seen him use anywhere else, louder, more performance in it, turned up a notch for an audience of men he's known two years and would help move a couch for at one in the morning without being asked twice. I've always found it a little funny, the volume of it, the way it switches on at the door like a light.

Rafa's a worse player than me and a better hang, which is the right ratio for a standing game.

We warm up dinking at the kitchen line, soft little touch shots back and forth over the net, the ball making its hollow plastic knock, and right away something's not landing. I'm a half-beat behind. The ball comes where it always comes and my paddle gets there late, or my feet get there late, I can't tell which. First few I write off as cold hands.

"You're slow tonight," Rafa says.

"Long day."

We play. He serves and I read it fine and move to it fine and then the last foot of it, the contact itself, my paddle face is open when I meant it square and the ball sails the baseline by a yard. I look at the paddle like it did it on its own. Next point I'm at the kitchen and a ball I'd put away in my sleep, a sitter, floating up belt-high, and I load to drive it and my weight goes to the wrong foot, my hip won't rotate through the way it's rotated through ten thousand times, and I net it. Dead into the tape.

"Shake it off." Rafa's enjoying this a little, which is allowed, he loses to me four nights of five. "It's just me. Nobody's filming."

I reset. Bounce the ball twice, the way I always bounce it twice, and serve, and the serve's fine, deep, and we trade dinks a while and the dinks are fine too, soft and flat and where I put them, and I start to think it's passing, whatever it is, cold hands, the long day, the morning still sitting in my shoulders. Then there's a ball at my backhand, a nothing ball, a put-back I've made a thousand times, and my arm comes across a beat early and the paddle's already swinging through the spot before the ball arrives at it. I miss it clean. Not a mis-hit. A miss. Air. Like the ball and my arm are reading off two different clocks.

It keeps happening. Three clean balls and then one where my body does the wrong thing on its own, the feet, the open face, the half-beat, and each clean one makes the next bad one worse, because there's nothing to adjust to, nothing I can correct for. I'm sweating more than the rallies earn. I can feel my own pulse up in my neck, and my jaw's gone tighter than it should be for a friendly pickleball game with Rafa.

He drops one short. Easy crosscourt put-away. I commit, I plant, my foot lands six inches off where I sent it, and I shank it off the paddle's edge so it skips two courts over and a guy in a pickleball-slogan tee picks it up to throw back, friendly, and I have already thrown my paddle.

The paddle's out of my hand and across the court and into the kick plate at the base of the wall with a crack that stops the courts on both sides of us, and the tee guy's standing there with my ball and his arm half-raised, and Rafa's looking at me over the net with his eyebrows up and the grin gone, because he's known me a year and a half and this isn't a thing I do.

"Dude," Rafa says. Quiet. Not a joke.

"Sorry." It comes out wrong and I'm already going for the paddle. The tee guy underhands me my ball and I catch it and say sorry to him too. He says no worries man. There's a half-step of distance in it, the space people leave for someone they've just decided to be afraid of.

I pick the paddle up. Rafa comes around the net.

"You good?"

"Yeah." I turn the paddle over. There's a chip out of the edge guard, thumbnail-sized. "Sorry. I don't know what that was."

He takes the paddle, looks at it, hands it back. "Just the guard."

"I know."

He looks at me a second longer. "You want to finish it or."

I look at the chip. The courts are loud on both sides, the plastic knock of it starting back up, somebody on six arguing a line call. All of it ordinary. "Let's just get the tacos."

"Yeah." He goes back for his bag. "Yeah, tacos."

We bag up. The tee guy gives me a nod when we pass him, wider than usual, a little extra space built into it. I nod back.

In the parking lot I roll my sleeve up and check the arm where I scrubbed it. The skin there is just skin. Nothing wrong with it at all. I roll the sleeve back down and get in the car.

---
Read the illustrated version of this chapter, with images of Julian conducting medical exams, changing in the locker room, after his exposure to the nanobots, playing pickleball poorly and examining his arm. Subscribers get access to chapters weeks ahead and to exclusive stories and other content, as well as the ability to vote on future stories.