I fought the urge to reach for him. His grief gleamed in the barely visible cracks and crevices he couldn’t hide. It united us, that sadness. Grief was something I could relate to. It was universal. This war had taken from all of us. I’d losteverything.
But losing everything meant I had nothing left to fight for. He was still fighting, which meant that, deep down, Lucas Scott still had a shred of optimism.
I wondered where he’d gotten it.
I wondered if he’d share.
In the following weeks,I distracted myself in the hospital wing or the quarantine house—busy, bloody hands tending wounds on autopilot. As one of the quickest, I treated a lot of the serious injuries.
Lieutenant Isaac Johnson—Devon’s boyfriend—was brought in one afternoon with a gunshot wound near his collarbone. I was the first to assess him, shushing Devon’s panicked pleas so I could concentrate.
“You are a lucky son of a bitch,” I said, smiling at the location. “It missed your chest cavity, and there’s an exit wound.”
He groaned out a laugh. “Doesn’t feel lucky.”
Dr. Grayson stopped by, listened to my assessment, then let me treat him. After I’d cleaned the wound and dosed him with pain meds, the tension in his body eased.
“Damn, girl,” he said after I finished tying his sutures. “I barely felt that.”
Clipping the remaining thread, I smiled. “Fast hands.”
At first, I’d been a hesitant medic, but after mere weeks in the hospital wing I’d realized that no amount of attention I gave a wound could make it worse. Now, I sped through it all just like Dr. Grayson and his years of experience as an army physician taught me.
Isaac gripped my hand. “Thank you.”
Dev hugged me, and they left after a few hours, Isaac’s arm around Dev’s shoulders. Pride welled in me as I turned to the next patient.
A while later, a woman was escorted into the hospital wing, shaking and half-dressed. Zara and I exchanged knowingglances. With a creased brow, she took a paper bag from our supply closet before leading the woman to a private exam area.
“What’s that?” I ask Dr. Grayson on my first day as a medic, pointing to a stock of paper bags in the top corner.
His gaze clouds over. “Ah, yes.” He takes one from the shelf and hands it to me. Inside are a few pills, two vials, and a single foil packet that stares up at me with the wordshCG Rapid Test Device (urine).
I swallow.
“It’s a rape kit,” he says unnecessarily.
“How often are you handing these out?” I whisper.
“More often than I like to talk about. If you need to distribute one, ask if they want an exam. Sometimes there’s tearing.”
Swallowing, I shoved that memory away to focus on my task—the next injury to patch up.
As days passed, the stories from the injured soldiers painted a darker picture of the outside world than even I experienced in my time as a soldier. Yes, Hunters were cruel and awful, but the Defiance response bordered on merciless.
In early July, I treated an acid burn on a soldier whose hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He said his unit had come across a group of children near a combat area and tried to move them away from danger. A throng of Hunter women attacked with squirt guns full of some caustic substance, and the soldiers had been forced to retaliate.
He covered his eyes with one trembling hand. “I killed two of them. Someone else got the others. In front of the children.”
A smattering of memories from my days as a foot soldier crossed my mind, and I shied away from the fear and hopelessness in them. I touched his hand. “They hurt you. What else were you supposed to do?”
“I could have—I don’t know—I could have knocked them out. They kept spraying. Got Phelim in the face. He might be blind now. But they didn’t want us touching the kids, even though we were trying to help. Didn’t want us near them. Like we were dirty.”
After thorough irrigation, I dressed his acid burns with ointment and gauze, ignoring the two silent tears that crawled down his cheek.
“The world’s gone mad around us,” I whispered, “but we’re going to win this.” Unsure whether I believed my own words, I couldn’t look him in the eye.
A bitter scoff answered me. “And then what? The country’s decimated. Nothing will ever be the same.”
