A hand came down into my line of sight.
I looked up.
My father was crouched beside me. He pulled me up easy, the way a stronger man pulled a smaller man up out of a hole. He was stronger than I remembered him being.
I got my legs under me.
The pier was gone. Where the yacht had been, there was a black orange roar half-collapsed into the harbor on what was nolonger a pier, a fire team working it in the tight choreography of a team that did this for a living.
"Where's Rebecca?"
"Clinic. She caught a nasty cut on her leg. She'll be fine."
"How bad?"
"Looks worse than it is. Bleeding pretty good when they got her up. They're cleaning it under sedation. You should get checked, too."
"I'm fine."
"Tommy."
"I've been knocked out before. No harm, no foul."
He didn't argue. The man had been a soldier once.
"What happened?"
"Best guess, somebody came in underwater."
"And these men." I tipped my chin at the lawn. "They're my brothers?"
He nodded.
"I want to see Rebecca."
"You should let them check you?—"
"Walk me."
He looked at me a beat. Then he nodded.
He fell in at my elbow. We crossed the lawn. The men nodded at me as we passed. Small, precise nods, the kind I knew the shape of from the inside of my own life. I gave each one back and didn't stop.
We went into the house. He took me past the foyer, down a corridor I hadn't been down, and then down a service stair I hadn't seen, and the corridor at the bottom opened on a clinic.
Not a medical bay. Not a first-aid room. Aclinic. Two trauma bays. A counter with monitors. Past that, a glass partition behind which I could see a smaller room laid out the way a clean room got laid out when surgery happened in it.
Dominion Hall had a goddamn surgical suite.
The resources.
Rebecca was in the second bay. Two nurses settling her on the bed. Her eyes were closed. Her left pant leg had been cut away at the knee and a thick wrapping of gauze ran from her ankle to her mid-thigh, with bright fresh red on the outermost layer.
I went still.
A doctor straightened up at the foot of the bed and gave me the medical pivot of a man trained to read the face of the person who came inwiththe patient.
"She's going to be fine, Mr. Dane."
