Dr. Esther Kwon

Trauma surgeon, fifties, working out of the back two rooms of a dental suite on the second floor of Chapman Plaza on Sixth, up a separate stair off the alley. She rents the space from a dentist who is a real dentist with a real practice, which is why the rooms have an autoclave, suction, an X-ray and a lawful medical-waste collection.

She is not a back-alley cutter and will be short with anybody who treats her like one. She trained properly, worked a hospital trauma bay for eleven years, and is very good at what she does.

And she is licensed. That's the part people get wrong. Her credential is on the California Free State register, where it has sat since 2057, current as of that year and annotated inactive — address unknown. Nobody struck her off. Nobody has any reason to.

What she cannot do is renew it, and the reasons are administrative rather than dramatic. Renewal wants a residential address inside the Free State, continuing education from institutions the Free State accredits, and her physical presence at a filing window in Sacramento. She has none of the three, and no institution in Los Angeles has been accredited by anybody since 2057.

She could go and fix it. That is the honest version and she'll say so. It's two borders — Pueblo's permit, then the Rangers' paperwork at the valley end — and both of them want a name on a manifest, which is the one thing she has never had. So a woman with a valid licence cannot travel to renew a document about herself, because doing so requires her to exist twice over in a way she never has.

She is not unlicensed. She is suspended by geography, and she has stopped expecting that to change.

Everyone calls her Doc. She corrects them to Doctor, once, every time, without heat.

What the crew knows

• She is the good one, and they were lucky to find her. Gunshot, blade, blunt trauma, burns, and the kind of infection that comes out of the cordon. Cash, barter, or a tab — and the tab is real, itemised, and she will read it back to you.
• She fits cyberware, but only ware she has seen before. Anything she can't get parts or a manual for, she refuses, and she'd rather lose the fee than put something in a person she can't take out again.
• She keeps clinical notes, on paper, in her own shorthand, in a box in that room. This surprises people and she does not apologise for it: a patient with no history is a patient you eventually kill. She will not destroy the box. She will tell you exactly what is in yours.
• What she won't do: brains, eyes, anything needing a blood bank she doesn't have, and anything on a child she can get to somebody better equipped. She'll say so immediately rather than trying and failing.
• She will not treat both sides of the same fight on the same night. Whoever arrived first is her patient; the second one gets an address for a CrashCart pickup and the truth about why.
• She works in English and Spanish, because most of the people who come up that stair live in the buildings and most of the people who own the buildings don't.
• She is tired and she has opinions, and if the crew turns up at four in the morning for the third time in a month they will hear them while she works.

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