Olivia points toward the children being rushed inside. “I’m not abandoning them.”
“You’re not helping them dead.”
“They need medical care.”
“And you think they get more of that if the regime puts a bullet in your head on camera?”
She flinches.
Not much.
Just enough to tell me that it hit where it was supposed to.
Good.
Maybe fear will do what common sense hasn’t.
Lucas appears at my shoulder. “We have three minutes before reinforcements hit this sector.”
Clay looks around the room, taking in the injured children, the panicked mothers, the overturned supplies. “Maybe less.”
Olivia plants herself between me and the hallway. “There are kids here who can’t be moved.”
I lower my voice, not because I’m calm, but because if I let the full force of my temper off the leash, I’ll scare everyone in the room. “Listen to me carefully, Doctor. We were sent in here to extract three American nationals before the regime got to you first. They’re here now. That means the mission changed. We are out of time.”
Her chin lifts. “Then leave.”
For a second, I just stare at her.
Miles actually laughs from the doorway. “Oh, I like her.”
I don’t.
That’s the problem.
I should be annoyed. Should be focused solely on the job. Should be moving already.
Instead I’m standing there noticing things I have no business noticing—like the way she positions herself slightly in frontof the nearest child even while she’s arguing with me. Like how exhausted she looks without ever seeming weak. Like the fact that somewhere along the line, courage and stubbornness became so tangled up inside her I’m not sure even she knows where one ends and the other begins.
“Dr. Bowers and Dr. Cole are moving,” Lucas says. “They’re ready.”
Olivia whirls. Hannah and Stephen stand near the back, both pale but determined, each carrying what supplies they can.
“Olivia,” Hannah says, voice shaking, “please.”
Stephen’s expression is grim. “We can’t stay.”
She looks wrecked for exactly one second.
The children notice it.
A little girl on a blanket begins to cry.
And that, more than anything, breaks the stalemate.
Olivia drops to her knees beside her, smoothing a hand over the girl’s hair and speaking softly in broken Farsi. I don’t know all the words, but I know comfort when I hear it. I know goodbye when it hollows out a person’s voice.
The girl clings to her.
