As expected, they’re not great.
I shout some orders, and Brody wheels in the ultrasound, and we get to work.
I run the probe against the distended area. The image blooms on the monitor.
“It’s an active arterial bleed,” I say. “If we don’t open him up and ligate it in the next ten minutes, we’re going to be writing a report, not doing surgery.”
“Patel is on his way in to assist,” Lena says.
“Good. Tell him to scrub fast. Hannah, how’s his plane?”
“He’s under. Reflexes are absent. End-tidal reading is where I want it.”
“Keep him there. If he so much as twitches, I want to know about it.”
These bastards can be tricky when it comes to keeping them sedated. Too much and they die, too little and we do. It’s a delicate act with very little wiggle room.
“Yes, Doctor.”
Brody draws a dotted line in surgical marker along the flank, following my instructions, mapping out the incision.
“Scalpel.”
The blade is in my hand in the second.
I make the first cut long and deep, through the scaled dermis and into the muscle beneath. Blood wells up. Brody is at my shoulder with suction. Lena has retractors in her hands, and I dive in.
I’m working by touch as much as by sight, my gloved hand deep in the cavity, tracing the curve of the descending aorta toward the bifurcation.
There.
I feel it.
There’s a ragged tear along the lateral wall of the artery, and the awful rhythmic pumping of blood into the cavity.
“Vascular clamp. Make it the long-handled,” I bark.
The dragon’s flank jumps under my hands.
It’s a small movement, the kind that means a reflex arc is firing somewhere deep in his spinal cord. In a human patient, itwould mean almost nothing. In a six-ton apex predator, it means everything.
“Hannah.”
“I see it. I see it. Deepening him now?—”
The second flinch is bigger. His tail shifts against the floor with a dull, heavy sound. His chest hitches. The beast under my hands is trying to climb out of the anesthesia.
“Hannah, talk to me.”
“He’s metabolizing the meds faster than I can deliver them.”
I have the clamp seated. I have the bleed controlled. But the tear in the aorta is still there, and if he wakes up with my hand inside his body, he will kill me. He will kill all of us. And he will die doing it.
“Give me the etorphine. Full dose, IV push, through the second line.”
Hannah’s eyes meet mine across the drape. She’s already reaching for the syringe, even though she knows it’s risky.
I nod, and she pushes the drug.
