Rookie 3 | Ethan Ramsey

Chapter 13~ Cut From Marble

"What?" Sienna squeaked in surprise, her eyes darting over to Blue who nodded in confirmation. "He's got to know that Dr. Carrick hates Edenbrook. What made him think that he would be a good choice?"

"Correction, Tobias doesn't hate Edenbrook. He hates me." Ethan replied with a deep sigh. "But I get your point, that's where I'm coming from as well. Deliberately slotting in a doctor from a rival hospital, with the intention of disrupting the team's dynamics for the sole purpose of getting more bizarre outcomes is far from inconspicious."

"What if his purpose for doing that is to cause a distraction?" Esme spoke up suddenly. She had been listening to the senior doctors' words and had been forming her own theories in her mind the whole time.

"What do you mean?" Blue urged for her to explain.

"What if Bloom brought Dr. Carrick in to distract you guys from other stuff he might be planning." Esme elaborated. "I've heard Kepner and him talking about them lacking in candidates for a study of some sort. He has been working on a private study, is he not? What can a tech-based billionaire be interested in anything related to medicine?"

"O.A."

All of them turned to Zaid as he said those two letters.

"What?" Ethan asked.

"O.A." Zaid repeated. "The private study he has been working on is most probably intitialed as O.A. It's what most of the equpiment and set-ups for that study has been labelled.

"You're right." Blue breathed out before turning to Ethan. "Remember Suzette's study file? The one I had read and found out she was assigned the Placebo?" Ethan nodded, prompting her to continue. "The clinical trial was bolded with the intials 'O.A.' in parenthesis, so was the lab mouse I saw at the back of the advanced lab at the ninth floor."

"O.A... " Ethan trailed, his azure eyes scanning his living room before landing on the rolling whiteboard at the other end, something he had used whenever he and Blue had used it to go over Naveen's illness during her intern year. He had never had to use it except for Blue who used it once in a awhile to revise her topics for her boards whenever she stayed over at his place. He got off the couch, making his way over to the corner and rolled the whiteboard over to where the rest of them were sitting. He wrote the initals 'O.A.' right in the middle of the board. "He could have come up with much more creative names, but sure, at least we have some sort of a lead on this whole thing."

"Creative like Patient X?" Blue poked fun at her boyfriend, causing the rest of them to let out a chuckle, even Zaid. After Naveen had recovered two years ago, he had let the whole hospital know about his illness and how Ethan and Blue were the ones to save him. Even in the book that he was working on, Ethan had to narrate the whole experience of working on such a secretive case without letting anyone know. Ethan sent a playful glare at Blue. "Hilarious." he murmured, though the corners of his lips twitched upwards slightly.

Zaid observed Blue and Ethan a little, noticing the slight echoes of his relationship with Ines. Sure, it could just be a purely platonic banter between two colleagues, a mentor-mentee duo even, but the tender gaze in Ethan's eyes every time he glanced at Blue was something even a fellow-grump like Zaid could not turn a blind eye to. Either ways, he knew that it was none of his business, and even if they did have something going on, frankly, he was happy for them.

"What could O.A. stand for though?" Esme asked, feeling slightly more comfortable in raising her points amongst the senior doctors by now, as they actually seemed to value her inputs. "And what could the study be about?"

"I'm guessing... something Amoxibrate?" Sienna answered. "The PEDs wards has seen plenty of registration forms for a study testing on those conditions."