From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Before the Wires
This article is about the prequel novel. For Katita in the primary narrative, see Katita.
This work is set approximately four years before Chapter One.
A prequel following Katita's first twelve months at the makeshift surgery, studying under an elderly Indigenous surgeon (██ ) who teaches her that "surgery is negotiation with the body, not conquest of it." Each chapter documents a surgical case; a recurring motif is the failure Katita cannot prevent.
A defining trauma emerges: her inability to save a young drowning victim in her early weeks. The novel reveals, almost casually, that this was a different boy than the one Leif will later attempt to rescue in Chapter Five. The temporal slippage is never explained; the narrative simply moves on, as if this doppelganger boy has always existed in the timeline.
In the surgery's basement, Katita discovers stacked journals: meticulous plans for a future mission involving someone named "Leif," with sketches of parallel wires and three injuries. The handwriting is not hers. The plans contradict across volumes—one describes a Newcastle that does not match her memory; another references a desert interior she has never visited. When she asks her mentor about the journals, she claims to have never written them . Katita's interior monologue follows: Katita: “I don't remember writing this, but I remember writing it. And I don't think that's possible, but here it is.”. The novel closes with her burning the journals, then salvaging the ashes from the furnace, unable to untangle what she remembers from what was written before the wires.