Hours blurred together. My hands ached. My back screamed. Sweat soaked through my uniform under the hazmat suit, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd had water.
"Bea." Pel'vix appeared at my side with a hydration pack. "Drink."
"After this patient?—"
"Now." She pressed the pack into my hand with surprising firmness. "Doctor's orders. Zorn says if you don't hydrate, he's pulling you from active duty."
I glanced across the medical bay, found Zorn watching me while running some kind of scan on a tissue sample. Even from this distance, I could read his expression: concern mixed with determination mixed with absolute unwillingness to compromise on this point.
Fine. I drank.
The water tasted like chemicals and exhaustion, but it helped. Energy returned marginally. The tremor in my hands steadied.
"Thank you," I told Pel'vix, and returned to work.
The pattern repeated. Stabilize patients. Move to the next bed. Drink when forced. Eat the nutrition bar that appeared mysteriously beside me. Keep going because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling meant falling apart in ways I couldn't afford.
Then Zorn was beside me at a patient's bed, a Thellian child, no more than six standard years, struggling to breathe through lungs that were slowly failing. I'd been working on her for twenty minutes, trying everything I knew, and she wasn't improving.
"Her oxygen saturation is dropping," I said, and hated how my voice shook. "Nothing's working. The cellular regeneration isn't taking hold fast enough."
"Let me see." Zorn scanned her vitals, his expression grave. "The pathogen's affecting her differently. Younger immune systems respond more aggressively, the inflammation is worse because her body's fighting harder."
"Then we need to suppress the immune response while treating the pathogen. But that's contradictory?—"
"Not necessarily." He pulled up treatment protocols on his datapad, fingers moving rapidly through options. "There's an experimental approach. High-risk, but given her deterioration, we don't have better options."
He explained the protocol, complex, dangerous, requiring perfect timing and careful monitoring. The kind of intervention that could save a life or accelerate death depending on execution.
I should have objected. Should have asked for alternative approaches. Should have defaulted to conservative treatment.
But the child was dying.
"Do it," I said.
We worked together, trading off interventions with the precision of a surgical team that had been operating together for years rather than hours. Zorn administered the immune suppressants while I managed the regeneration field. I monitored neural activity while he adjusted medication levels. He called out readings while I made split-second decisions about dosage modifications.
It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was the kind of high-wire medical work that required absolute trust between practitioners because one mistake meant death.
And somewhere in the middle of it, between crisis and cure, between risk and reward, I realized I trusted Zorn completely.
Not just as a supervisor. Not just as a colleague. But as a partner in this work, someone whose judgment I relied on without question, whose competence matched my own, whose presence made me better at what I did.
The realization should have terrified me.
Instead, it felt like relief.
"Oxygen saturation increasing," Zorn reported. "Neural inflammation decreasing. I think she's responding."
The Thellian child's breathing eased. Color returned to her blue-green skin. Her vital signs stabilized, climbing from critical to merely serious to actually survivable.
We'd done it.
"Good work," I said, and meant it.
"We make a good team." Zorn's eyes met mine over the child's bed, and something in his expression made my chest tight. "You're extraordinary under pressure, Bea. The way you move, the way you think. It's remarkable to watch."
The compliment hit harder than it should have. I wasn't good with praise, never had been. Criticism I could handle. It reinforced the voice in my head that said I wasn't good enough, wasn't doing enough, needed to work harder. But genuine admiration? That was dangerous territory.
