Chapter 58: Field Hospital

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Field Hospital

In another world, the war had been ending for three days.

Everyone in the field hospital at Carrow Ford knew it. You could hear it in the guns, which had stopped coming from the east and started coming from every direction at once. You could see it in the officers, who had stopped giving orders and started burning papers. The front had broken on Monday. By Wednesday there was no front at all, only mud and rain and the long grey road west, choked with carts and stretchers and men walking with their eyes half closed.

Hana Aldren had stopped counting the days. She counted pulses instead.

She knelt in the mud beside cot nineteen with two fingers on the inside of a boy’s wrist and the little steel watch pinned upside down to her apron so she could read it. Fifteen seconds. She counted the beats and multiplied by four. One hundred and thirty. Thready. Fast. The tourniquet on his thigh was holding, but only just, and his lips had gone the color of the rain.

"Stay with me," she told him. "Stay with me. I’ve got you."

He was sixteen, maybe. They were all sixteen now.

The tent held forty cots and two lamps. The surgeons had gone with the last wagon at noon. They’d taken the ether and the good saws and most of the orderlies, and they’d left Hana with thirty-one men who couldn’t be moved, a crate of bandages and carbolic, and a promise that someone would come back.

Nobody was coming back. She’d known that when she said she would stay.

The tent flap snapped open.

They weren’t her side’s soldiers. The coats were the wrong color, the helmets the wrong shape. There were six of them, soaked and muddy to the knees, rifles up, and the officer at their head had the flat, hollow face of a man who’d spent a week walking through burning villages and had stopped seeing them.

He looked down the rows of cots. Thirty-one wounded men in the uniform he’d been killing for four years.

"Step away from them, nurse," he said.

Hana stood up.

She didn’t have a weapon. She had never carried one, not once in four years, not when they’d offered and not when they’d ordered. She had a pair of bandage scissors in her apron pocket, her watch, and her two hands.

She walked to the middle of the aisle and stood there, between the rifles and the cots.

"These men are my patients," she said. "So were yours. I’ve treated eleven of your soldiers in this tent. Two of them are still here, in the back row, under blankets. Would you like me to step away from them too?"

The officer’s face didn’t change.

"Last time," he said.

Hana didn’t move. Behind her, she could hear the boy on cot nineteen breathing, fast and shallow. She thought, with perfect clarity, that if she just had one more minute, she could get his pressure up. One minute. If only she could have all the minutes back. Every one she’d ever lost.

The rifle fired.

The watch on her apron stopped.

And all at once, the rain stopped falling.

On the roof of Merridan General, it started to rain.

Not on Elias. He felt nothing. But out of the torn seam of canvas above the helipad, rain was pouring down in a narrow grey curtain, splashing onto the concrete inside the yellow circle, and through it a young woman fell to her knees as if she’d been pushed.

She landed with her hands out flat in front of her, pressing down on nothing, the way you’d press on a wound.

Then the tear closed. The rain stopped. The car horn in the street below finished its long, impossible note and cut off, and the beacons on the railing blinked on time again.

She was small and soaked through, twenty-four or twenty-five, in a grey dress and a stained white apron, with dark hair coming loose from its pins and a smear of someone else’s blood across one cheek. A little steel watch hung upside down from her apron, stopped. Just above it was a hole in the cloth with scorched edges.

There was no wound underneath. Just the hole.

She looked at her hands. Then she looked up, and her first words weren’t a scream, or a question about where she was.

"Where are they?" She was already on her feet, turning, searching the roof. "My patients. Cot nineteen, he’s bleeding, his tourniquet—where are my patients?"

"They’re not here," Elias said gently. "I’m sorry. You’re not there anymore."

She stared at him. At the knight in plate, the soldier, the cook, the older woman in a white coat. At the lights of a city she had never seen.

A pane of light opened in front of her. Elias saw her flinch from it, then read it.

[Class awakened: Chrono Medic.]

[Origin Skill awakened: Rewind.]

"Rewind," she whispered.

Her eyes fell on Elias’s right hand, where blood was still welling from the cut he’d made for the offering. Before he could say anything, she’d crossed the circle, taken his wrist exactly the way Lena once had, and turned the palm to the light.

"You cut yourself," she said. "Why would you—hold still."

She laid two fingers over the cut.

Elias felt it go backward. There was no other word for it. The blood on his palm crawled back into the wound. The sting faded, sharpened, faded again in reverse. The edges drew together from the far end to the near, as if someone were zipping time shut, and then there was nothing there at all. No scar. No line. Just his palm, as it had been a minute ago.

[Rewind: Target restored to its state 52 seconds prior.]

Behind him, Lena made a small noise that might have been professional jealousy.

"I was going to dress that," she said.

Something ticked.

It was a small sound, almost lost under the hum of the city. Elias looked down.

His father’s watch lay on the concrete in the middle of the yellow circle, where he’d set it for the offering. The crystal was whole. Not mended or patched, but whole, as clear as the day it was made. And the second hand was moving.

Forward, now.

He picked it up. It was warm. The hands read 3:46, one minute before the sky had torn open over their street, and the second hand swept steadily on toward a time that, for this watch, had never come.

Hana was watching him. Her face had gone careful.

"Is that yours?" she asked. "I’m sorry. I think I touched it, coming through. I didn’t mean to. It was broken, and I—" She stopped. "Was it supposed to be broken?"

For a moment he couldn’t answer. He turned the watch over and saw the old scratches on the case back, the ones his father’s wedding ring had made over the years. They were all still there. Only the break was gone. Only the stopping.

"No," he said finally. His voice came out rough. "It wasn’t supposed to be."

He fastened the old strap around his own wrist. It fit, just about. It ticked against his pulse.

Aveline put a hand on his shoulder and said nothing at all, which was exactly right.

Hana looked from the watch to his face, and then away, at the hospital lights below the railing.

"This is a hospital," she said. It wasn’t a question. "I can smell it, even up here." She turned back to him. "Why did you call me? Who’s dying?"

"My sister," Elias said.

"Four floors down," said Lena. "Gate-mana poisoning. Ten years established, systemic. I can extract it. But when I do, everything it’s holding together will start to fail."

Hana listened the way Elias had seen Lena listen: completely, without interrupting, filing every word.

"Then why," she said, "are we standing on a roof?"

They took the maintenance stairs. Nurse Ruiz was on nights, and she looked up from her station at the sight of a girl in a soaked grey dress and a bloodstained apron walking beside Elias. She opened her mouth. Then, after one look at Lena, she closed it again.

Hana stopped at the glass.

Mira lay in the bed by the window, small and pale under the monitors. The blue lines on her neck pulsed with every breath, faint light moving under the skin.

Hana went in without asking. She knelt beside the bed the way she’d knelt beside cot nineteen, laid two fingers on the inside of Mira’s thin wrist, and reached, out of habit, for the watch on her apron.

It was stopped. She frowned.

Elias held out his wrist.

Hana glanced at his father’s watch, ticking, and nodded once. She counted. Fifteen seconds. Her lips moved silently.

"Ninety-eight," she said. "Weak. Irregular." She looked up at Lena across the bed. "When you start, how long before her heart goes?"

"Minutes," Lena said. "Maybe less."

"And how long will you need?"

"Hours."

Hana looked down at Mira for a long moment. Then she took Mira’s hand in both of hers, gently, the way you’d hold something you meant to keep.

"Then I’ll bring her back," she said. "As many times as it takes."

Across the bed, the surgeon and the nurse looked at each other. Two pairs of hands.