Miles lies beside me in the dust. “That her?”
“Yeah.”
Clay settles on my other side. “She looks friendly.”
“She looks like trouble,” I say.
Lucas checks his watch. “Movement on the east road. Two vehicles.”
I bring the binoculars back up.
Black SUVs.
No markings.
Too clean for aid workers. Too deliberate for civilians.
Regime.
My pulse goes cold and steady.
“We’re out of time,” I say.
And down below, Dr. Olivia Taylor rises to her feet like she’s ready to go to war with her bare hands.
64
Olivia
The little boy’s fever finally breaks just after sunset.
I feel it in the cooling of his skin beneath my hand, in the way his breathing eases, in the tiny sound his mother makes before she covers her mouth and starts crying anyway.
I sit back on my heels, exhausted clear through to the bone.
“He’s stable for now,” I tell her softly. “Keep giving him sips of water. Small ones. If the bleeding starts again, come get me immediately.”
The woman nods over and over, clutching my hands in hers like I’ve done something miraculous.
I haven’t.
I’ve done what I can with too little medicine, too few bandages, not enough sleep, and the kind of fear that lives in your bloodstream after long enough.
Around us, the old schoolyard has become a patchwork of suffering.
Blankets spread over dirt.
Children with smoke-damaged lungs.
A girl no older than eight with burns down one arm.
A teenager with shrapnel still buried in his thigh because I don’t have the anesthesia to do more than numb the edges and pray.
This place wasn’t meant to survive a war.
None of us were.
But the children didn’t ask for any of this.
