“Well, do it quickly and finish up then. It is time to get the hell out of there,” Gunnar adds. “The guards are about to start their rounds again.”
I move fast, retracing my steps to ensure nothing is out of place, and then wipe down the knob out of habit. As I slip into the stairwell, one thought keeps looping through my head. That cute little doc is in this a hell of a lot deeper than she’s letting on.
The hospital greets me with its familiar cocktail of sensory overload the moment I step through the doors. Voices overlap like a symphony of chaos, nurses calling out vitals, orderlies arguing over a gurney, and footsteps echoing down the hallway as they slap against the tiles worn thin by too many emergencies.
The lights flicker overhead, like today might be the day they finally give out. They cast everything in a washed-out glow that makes time feel irrelevant. Morning, afternoon, and night, they all blur together here.
I don’t even make it to my locker before Zahra catches my elbow. Her gaze flicks over my face, reading me the way she’s learned to over the past few months of shared shifts, searching for something I’m not sure I could hide even if I wanted to. She huffs out a breath that might almost be a laugh. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I repeat the same lie I tell her—and myself—day in and day out. I roll my shoulders once, deliberately, trying toloosen the knot that has been settled between them from the moment I woke up. “Same as always.”
And as usual, Zahra lets it pass. “Trauma is short-staffed today,” she shares as we walk. “Dr. Durand is putting you there, despite his”—she air quotes—“better judgment. You have two surgeries prepped and waiting.”
“Oh, good. A nice light start to the shift,” I jest with a smile. Busy is good. Busy means no time to think. There will be no room or time for the men who keep visiting, the—probably-not idle—threats taped to my door, or remembering what a knife pressed to my throat feels like. There is no time for Maryam, her baby, or the promises I made. There is only this patient, this moment, and their fight.
Nudging me with her elbow, she teases, “Do you need a warm-up today, Dr. Hart?”
The water is icy as I scrub for surgery.The hot water heater must be on the fritz again.My routine is familiar enough that it doesn’t require thought. Elbows up. Nails. Fingers. Rinse. By the time I finish, the world outside the operating room may as well not exist. The door slides shut with a soft squeak of the hinges, my entire world narrowing into focus. No matter how chaotic the world or my thoughts, here, everything always makes sense. There’s a problem, a body, and a solution.Or at least an attempt at one.
The patient on the operating table is young, barely older than a kid. Blood seeps from a jagged, unforgiving wound in his abdomen where shrapnel has embedded deep beneath his skin. As soon as I see the extent of the damage, something in me clicks into place. My hands aresteady as I work, years of training and muscle memory taking over. Clamp. Suction. Suture. The OR is almost meditative.
The smoke of cauterized tissue curls in the air. The smell is sharp and unpleasant, but calmly reassuring in its own twisted way.
“His pressure is dropping,” the anesthesiologist calls seconds before the monitor blares the same warning.
“I’ve got it,” I mutter evenly. “Give me another unit. I just need a few more minutes.”
Refusing to give up, I stabilize the kid, and his monitors finally settle into a steady, monotonous rhythm. He is stable, but fragile, as I close him up. I step away from the table, peeling off my gloves. Sweat dampens the collar of my scrubs, and a familiar ache burns across my lower spine.
“Good save,” Zahra praises as we strip off our gowns.
“Team effort.”
The hours that follow blur into a relentless stream of patients. Fractures set too late. Infections that have gone on far too long. Major and minor injuries from the battlefield. Complications born of scarcity and fear, from patients waiting until they are desperate for care. I move from room to room, chart to chart; all that exists is the next problem to be solved.
Around three in the morning, I grab a protein bar from my locker and drop into a seat at the nurses’ station. I barely taste the granola as I devour it in just a few bites. Beside me, Zahra leans against the counter, picking up her cup of tea that has long gone cold and drinking it anyway.
“It’s… quiet,” she observes.
“Zahra,” I huff with an overly dramatic roll of my eyes. “Youknowbetter than to say that out loud. You will jinx us.”
“I mean… quietfor you,” she clarifies with a slight tilt of her head. “No visitors.”
“Yeah. I noticed that, too.” Actually, I realized a few hours ago that something didn’t feel right. There are no strange men hovering near the nurses’ station. No unfamiliar faces observing me a little too closely from the waiting room. And—thankfully—no men cornering me with knives in exam rooms.
She studies me for a moment, then lowers her voice. “Maybe they’re backing off.”
I almost laugh, because the absence of these men looking for Maryam is unsettling. The calm before the storm. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t know what it is I’m expecting, but I know something is coming. The waiting sets my nerves on edge almost as much as their presence does. “People like that don’t give up,” I return the whisper, shaking my head. “They just figure out a different way to get what they want.”
Zahra’s mouth twists as the rest of her face grimaces. “That’s… comforting.”
With a shrug, I exhale, “Sorry.”
“I’d rather the truth for a change.”
The early-morning hours bring another surgery. Then another. Both are hard cases with too much blood loss; theteam manages to pull them back from the edge by sheer stubbornness. By the time I step out of the OR for the final time this shift, my hands ache, and my limbs are heavy. Exhaustion is crashing down on me as the adrenaline is slowly burning itself out.
Outside, the air is still cool, the heat easing just enough to be tolerable. It’ll change quickly with the sun cresting over the horizon, slowly painting the city in soft shades of amber. I board the employee shuttle and sink into my seat, my head lolling against the well-worn leather behind my head. The city drifts past in fragments, people populating the streets as they start their days, while I struggle to stay awake.
