“Sloane, we need you in three!” Kevin shouts from across the floor, his scrubs already painted red. Dr. Kevin Mercer, my favorite attending, is the only one who doesn’t treat nurses like glorified waitpeople, even if he does make googly eyes at me occasionally.
“Little busy here, Kevin!”
“She’s got about ninety seconds before she flatlines, and you’re the only one with hands free.”
I glance down at the kid beneath my palms. His pulse is thready, fading. But the bleeding is slowing. Not because I’m doing anything right, but because there’s almost nothing left to bleed.
Dammit, he’s already gone.
The thought hits me cold and certain, the way it always does. I don’t know how I know. I just do, and have done, since I was a kid.
Some people get feelings about the weather or traffic.
I get feelings about death.
So goddamn macabre.
“Take over,” I bark at Tam, one of the newer nurses hovering uselessly by the supply cart. She startles, then rushes forward as I step back, peeling off my gloves with a wet snap.
I’m already moving toward bay three before she asks what to do.
The woman on the gurney is maybe forty, face the color of old newspaper, lips blue-tinged. Clearly an overdose. Her daughter is at her bedside, seventeen, maybe eighteen, mascara tracking black lines down her cheeks.
“Please,” the girl begs, grabbing my arm with trembling fingers. “Please don’t let her die.Please!She’s all I have.”
I meet her eyes, red-rimmed, desperate, drowning in despair, and something in my chest cracks open. Not sympathy, something deeper, something that hurts.
“We’re doing everything we can,” I tell her, even though we both know it’s a lie. Even though I can already feel that cold certainty settling in my bones like a winter’s frost.
She’s already gone too.
Kevin is at the woman’s head, bagging her chest manually, counting compressions under his breath. Another nurse, Suzie, is pushing meds through the IV. The monitor flatlines with a long, unbroken whine that never gets easier to hear.
I step up to the bedside and place my hands on the woman’s chest, feeling for the lower half of the sternum, preparing to take over compressions.
The moment my skin makes contact, heat floods through me.
Not normal heat.
Something else.
Something starts deep in my core and rushes outward as though I have wildfire in my veins. My vision whites out for half a second, and I swear I see a woman with dark hair and eyes resembling bleeding rubies, reaching for me, saying my name as though it is a prayer.
“Sloane!”
I blink, and the vision is gone.
Kevin stares at me, concern creasing his forehead. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” My voice sounds far away, as though I’m hearing it through water. I shake my head, clearing the fog. “Let’s go. One, two, three…” I start compressions, falling into the rhythm that’s been drilled into me since nursing school. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Thirty compressions, two breaths. The woman’s ribs crack under my weight, and I push down the nausea that always comes with this part.
You never get used to the feeling of breaking someone to save them.
Except she’s not being saved.
The monitor stays flat.
Another round.
