Luka wraps his tactical jacket around my shoulders like a blanket, tucking it tight.
“Press here.” He guides my hands back to Roman’s gut wound. “Maintain pressure. I’ll handle the rest.”
“Luka—”
“You saved him.” His voice is rough, something cracking underneath the soldier’s discipline. “You jumped into that river, and you saved him. I will protect you until I die for that. You understand? Until I fucking die.”
I can’t answer. My jaw is locked from shivering. But I nod, and his hand squeezes my shoulder once before he turns back to monitoring Roman’s pulse.
* * *
In the car, I stop shaking. Then I start screaming.
One moment, I’m pressing Roman’s shirt against the gut wound, counting his breaths, trying to track his pulse. Next, my whole body is shaking so violently that I can’t maintain pressure, and Luka has to take over while I curl into the corner of the backseat and try not to vomit.
Roman’s dying.
The thought keeps looping through my skull with every heartbeat.Roman’s dying.I pulled him from the river and beat his heart back to life, and he’s still dying because there’s a bullet in his gut and blood loss is a numbers game, and the numbers are not in our favor.
“Anya.” Luka’s voice. “Stay with me. You’re hypothermic. Keep talking.”
I can’t answer. My jaw is locked from shivering.
“Two minutes,” Chernov says from the driver’s seat.
Two minutes. One hundred twenty seconds. And then what? I’m not a surgeon. I know chemistry and molecular structures, and how to stabilize volatile solutions. I don’t know how to cut a man open without killing him.
And I can’t feel my hands.
The factory looms out of the darkness, all broken windows and rust and the kind of abandonment that says nobody’s been here in years. Chernov kills the headlights, and we roll through a bay door into black.
Then we’re carrying Roman inside—Luka and Chernov carrying, I’m stumbling behind them with my arms wrapped around myself, trying to generate any warmth at all. They lay him on a metal desk that’s covered in dust and old paperwork. Luka finds a generator somewhere, and the lights flicker on in sodium-yellow, and Roman looks—
He looks dead.
Skin the color of ash. Lips still blue despite the heat, I’ve been pressing against his core. Blood everywhere, soaked through his clothes, smeared across the desk, pooling on the concrete floor beneath us. The shoulder wound is a ragged hole, through and through, and I can see the entrance and the exit, and that one’s manageable. The gut wound is worse. Swollen edges. No exit. The bullet’s still inside him.
I need to get it out.
I need to cut into the man I love and dig through his organs and find a piece of metal without nicking his liver or his spine. I’ve watched field extractions in Afghanistan and assisted when MSF surgeons were overwhelmed, but I’ve never been the one holding the scalpel.
“Anya.” Luka’s standing at my shoulder. “What do you need?”
A hospital. A real surgeon. A time machine.
“Boiling water.” My voice comes out slurred and chattering. “Alcohol. Clean cloth. Did anyone grab my field kit from the dacha?”
“Got it.” Chernov holds up the bag, and I reach for it—
My hand spasms. I knock the bag sideways instead of grabbing it. My fingers won’t close.
I look at my hands. They’re blue-white, the color of marble, trembling so violently I can’t even make a fist. I couldn’t hold a pen right now, let alone a scalpel. I couldn’t cut a piece of paper, let alone cut into a man’s abdomen.
“Water,” I rasp. “Hot water. As hot as you can get it. Now.”
Luka finds a pot somewhere, fills it from a rusted tap, and sets it on the generator to heat. The seconds stretch into forever while I stand there shaking, watching Roman’s chest rise and fall in shallow breaths that are getting weaker.
“It’s ready,” Luka says.
