“Okay,” I said carefully. “That’s smoke.” As soon as I acknowledged it, I felt my heart start to race.
“How are we doing?” asked Corrigan, his voice calm but strained.
“Halfway there.”
We kept working. After another five minutes, I started to notice my hands were sweating under my gloves. Corrigan’s forehead was glistening. The room was warming up.
The door suddenly crashed open and a cloud of smoke rolled in. A firefighter emerged from it. “Out!” he ordered, holding the door and pointing to the hallway.
I looked at the smoke and fought down the rising panic. The hospital is on fire. My safe little sanctuary was being destroyed. I shook my head. “We’re not leaving.”
He frowned at me, then stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. “Don’t argue with me, we got gas lines and oxygen cylinders and all sorts of shit on this floor. The whole place could go up.”
I kept working. “Your job is to save lives?” He nodded. “Well, so’s mine. And she’s going to die if I don’t keep going.”
The firefighter glared at me, then looked down at Krista’s face. He had gray eyes and thick, black hair and was quite good looking, if you liked the rough look.
“You go and do what you need to do,” I told him. “But I’m not leaving her.”
He looked at me, looked at Krista again...and then nodded and left. More smoke and scalding hot air rolled in before the door swung closed, gathering in clouds near the ceiling. I coughed. “I can manage on my own,” I told the others. “You should go.”
Lina shook her head, silent and stoic as always. Adele’s eyes were huge and scared, but she shook her head, too. I looked at Corrigan.
He frowned at me disbelievingly. Then he slowly shook his head. “You really don’t get it at all, do you, Beckett?” he asked. And those blue eyes fixed me with such a look of deep, aching love that my chest went tight.
I pressed on. The room was getting hotter, now. Adele stuffed some sheets under the bottom of the door, but the smoke got thicker and thicker: it was becoming difficult to breathe. Outside, we could hear heavy boots and the hiss of hoses, shouted orders and—wait, was that... was the fire close enough that I could hear its roar, or was it just my imagination?
If I’d been the person I was a week ago, there’s no way I could have kept working. But all that time in the ER had taught me to shut things out. I worked on, Corrigan dabbing away the sweat as it coursed down my forehead. And finally, just as the smoke became unbearable, I tied off my final suture and we were done. Now the moment of truth: would Krista’s heart beat on its own? “Internal paddles,” I said, my voice high and tight. Then, “Clear!”
Krista’s heart contracted as the current coursed through it. Relaxed... and then grudgingly began to beat on its own. “Attagirl,” I breathed, my eyes suddenly full of tears.
The firefighter burst through the door again. His face was grimy with soot and his uniform reeked of smoke. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said, “fire’s out.” He nodded at Krista. “You save her?”
I nodded weakly.
He held up his fist. I blinked at it for a moment, and then mimed fist-bumping him, stopping short so I stayed sterile. I’ve never done that before. It felt good.
I closed Krista up and Lina and Adele took her downstairs to the critical care beds. Apparently, the ER had escaped the fire: the mostly-empty parking garage beneath it had acted as a fire break and the flames had spread outward and upwards instead. The surgical floor had actually come off worst. I stared open-mouthed at the blackened walls right outside the OR. The surgeon’s lounge had been destroyed, the fancy coffee machine a melted wreck. “Looks like you’ll be joining the rest of us downstairs for a while,” said Corrigan.
I slumped against his shoulder. I was utterly exhausted, plus I was a little shell-shocked at seeing my burrow laid to waste. “We should go see if they need our help,” I mumbled.
But he shook his head, took me by the hand and marched off along the hallway, towing me behind him. “Bartell is down there organizing everyone. He’ll come get us if he needs us.”
I had to almost run to keep up. I’d never seen him like this before. He was a man on a mission. “But—”
“No buts.” He pulled me into one of the other operating theaters.
The air was fresher and cooler, here, because the door had stayed closed. With the lights off, the only light came from the moon, shining in through the window. He hauled me towards the center of the room and I looked around, confused. “What are we doing in—”