Aditya Sengupta is a broad-shouldered woman with close-cropped silver-threaded locs and deep brown skin mapped with old surgical scars on both forearms — the kind you get from learning on the job rather than a simulator. Her left eye is a pale surgical prosthetic, off-brand Helix issue, that sometimes lags a half-second behind her right when she blinks. She wears a permanently stained canvas apron over layered thermal underlayers, and her hands are always immaculately clean no matter what the rest of her looks like. She speaks with a blunt, exhausted authority that makes people feel safe and slightly afraid at the same time.

She ran a legitimate trauma practice at Aurochs Medical Complex for eleven years before her license was pulled in a billing dispute that she insists — credibly — was a setup by a Helix Biosystems administrator she refused to bribe. Now she stitches up stabbing victims, sets broken bones, and removes black-market cyberware for whoever can pay in Quanta or barter. She has a fierce, almost maternal protectiveness over her regulars, and a cold professionalism toward everyone else. She prays daily to a small E.L.F. she calls Catgut that has allegedly inhabited her surgical lamp for six years.