“Fine,” he grinds out through his teeth.
“You can be honest. I won’t tell anyone.”
He winces as I tie off the suture.
There are three more stitches to place before I can close, and I place each one with the same level of attention I’d give any other wound in any other trauma bay on any other day. It is the only honest thing I can do right now. Byron is in front of me and needs to be taken care of, and the man I’m terrified for is three kilometers away and beyond anything my hands can fix. So I close the wound in front of me, and I keep listening.
“How many floors does the building have?” Katya asks from behind me. She’s directing the question at Stepan, not at me, which tells me she’s been thinking about it for a while.
“Four,” Stepan replies. “Main operations are on the second and third.”
“And Lev’s team is on the second.”
“Last confirmed position.”
I put a fresh dressing over Byron’s thigh and tape it down with three strips, then help him straighten his leg. “Keep weight off it for the next forty-eight hours,” I tell him. “If it swells or the dressing soaks through before then, find me.”
He thanks me as the young soldier helps him to one of the chairs along the wall. I strip my gloves and pull on a fresh pair, because that’s the protocol, and I stand at the supply table and wait, trying not to look at the clock on my phone every thirty seconds.
It’s 12:17 when I notice the radio has gone quiet, and this silence feels different from the earlier ones.
Before, the gaps between check-ins carried the background static of a live feed. Distant sounds I couldn’t identify. The occasional burst of something I couldn’t quite decode. Now the frequency is clean, which means Stepan has lost the relay or the relay has moved, and neither option is comforting.
“What happened to the feed?” I ask.
Stepan adjusts the dial. “Interference. It’ll come back.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
I turn back to the supply table and rearrange items that don’t need rearranging. Sasha appears at my elbow with a hand wrapped around my forearm, not pulling, just resting there.
“He knows what he’s doing,” she insists.
“I know that.”
“Then stop trying to organize the gauze into a shape that will somehow change the outcome.”
The radio comes back at 12:33 with a burst of static, and then Boris’s voice cuts through flat and businesslike. “Teams two and four confirm east and south exits are sealed. We’ve got movement on the tunnel.”
Good. That means Boris is cutting off the exits exactly the way they planned, which means the plan is working, which means Lev’s intelligence held up, which means I should feel relieved.
I don’t feel relieved. I feel nothing from the neck down.
The minutes stack up. Boris checks in at 1:11, again at 1:29, and both times the update is the same. Operation ongoing. Interior teams not yet confirmed clear.
Lev’s voice doesn’t come through.
I keep waiting for it. I’m not sure when I started expecting it. At some point in the last hour, without deciding to, I started building the next sixty seconds around the possibility of hearing it, and when it doesn’t come, the next sixty seconds feel like standing in a room where the floor has gone soft.
Katya comes to stand beside me. She doesn’t say anything. She’s trained for silence the way I’m trained for action, and right now, her silence is the most useful thing she has to offer.
At 1:43, Boris’s voice comes through again, and this time, it sounds different.
“Does anyone have eyes on Lev?” A short pause, followed by static. “Lev’s team has gone dark inside the building. Requesting confirmation of his position.”
No one answers.
