My shirt is soaked through, the wounds on my back reopening from the strain and the heat and the tension. The blood runs warm. Down my sides. Into my waistband. Onto the floor.
“I don’t care,” I whisper.
“You need-”
“She needs me more.”
He swallows hard, nods, and doesn’t argue again.
I think that’s the moment he understands.
That they all understand.
Irrevocably.
There is nothing I wouldn’t give for her.
Nothing I wouldn’t suffer.
Nothing I wouldn’t burn.
A high, thin alarm suddenly shrieks from one of the machines.
“Heart rate crashing!”
My own heart stops.
The room erupts into more shouts.
And for a moment, the world becomes a blurred smear of bodies and movement and frantic desperation. The medic curses. A tray drops, tools scattering. I grab the nearest forearm, one of my brothers’s and squeeze so hard I could snap bone, but whoever it is I’ve got a hold of doesn’t complain, or pull away, they just let me hold onto them, supporting me the way our mother,hermother, has always wanted.
“Save them,” I choke. “Please, save them.”
The medic snaps, “We’re working as fast as we can!”
Then, a sound.
Small.
Wet.
Weak.
A cry.
Awhimper.
A startled, fragile, newborn gasp that cracks the world open.
“He’s out,” Doctor Jay says, cold, unfeeling, emotionless. “Baby is out. Get him under a lamp.”
My knees nearly give out.
“Cry, little one,” Tolly whispers at my back. “Come on, cry-”
Another sound answers.
Still tiny.
