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Zeth takes the tweezers out of my hand and stalks around the other side of the kitchen table, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Sloane. Sloane, look at me.”
I don’t. I can’t. I’m staring at the pallid face of my baby sister, watching as death closes its fist around her slight frame. I know I’m crying but I can’t feel the tears. Can’t feel my rasping breaths. My body isn’t my own at the moment; it’s been taken over by a force way greater and far more powerful than me: grief.
“Sloane!” My ears ring as my head whips around. Zeth slaps me so hard I see stars. The look on his face is grim and determined. “Sloane, she’s dying. You have to think. What do you need to do?” He shakes me hard.
“I don’t know which part of her is damaged inside. It could be…it could be her heart. But then it could be…her liver. Or her kidneys. I don’t know.”
“Okay, well, we have to use logic. Her lips are turning blue. What does that mean?”
“Hypoxia. Lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“And what causes that?”
“Cardiac arrest. Punctured lung. Massive strain on other organs.” Anything. It could be anything.
“It’s not a punctured lung, we already know that. And trajectory of the wound is down and away from the heart, so it’s unlikely to be damage there, either. Cardiac arrest could come from damage to the liver and the kidneys?”
“Yes. Caused by excessive bleeding.”
“Okay. So either way we need to open her up, Sloane. We need to see what part of her is bleeding and we need to fix it.” He hands me the knife the kid found for me—mercifully it’s a scalpel. And a sharp one at that. I have no idea who this belongs to or why they have it, but it’s a small mercy. If the only instrument available to me were a vegetable knife then I would give up here and now.
“You can do this, Sloane. All you need to do is concentrate.”
I’m glancing wildly around the room, trying to think something I can do, anything, to prevent the need to cut into my sister. But there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing I can do. Zeth takes my face in his hands and holds me still, locking me in his steady gaze. “You’ve got this,” he says.
I’m still freaking out. Still shitting myself, but the solid way he tells me that gives me a flicker of hope. I can do this. I have to.
A ragged gasping sound from the table steels my nerves. Alexis is dying. Alexis is fucking dying, and I’m not about to let that happen. Not after all letting her down so badly when she was taken. She needed me then and I couldn’t do anything about it, but I can do something about this.
“Okay. Okay, alright. I’m ready.”
The next few moments happen in fast forward. I drench my hands in the alcohol, and then I turn Alexis, giving her back one last look to make sure I haven’t missed the exit wound.
“Holy shit!” Zeth hisses.
It’s a good job I’ve checked. Since bringing her in, a massive, violent purple bruise has developed all over her back. Total renal failure and definite internal bleeding. In the weak yellow light from the pendant in the kitchen, I haven’t noticed a discoloration of her skin, but when I lay her flat and check here eyes, the jaundice is clear to see.
“Kidneys,” Zeth says. It seems he’s not completely unfamiliar with the workings of the human body. I nod, feeling a mild rush of relief. At least when I cut now, I know where the hell I should be cutting.
I make the incision, a bold deep line about four-inches long, horizontally across her abdomen on her right-hand side, and everything changes. This always happens when I operate. The world narrows down and fades, so that the short breadth of my attention is focused solely on the flesh beneath my fingertips. The panic, the delirious fear, the paralysing doubt—it all recedes, leaving a cold, clinical calm in its wake.
It takes time to inspect Lexi’s abdominal cavity. There’s a lot of blood, and I have no nursing team to provide suction or swab. I do have Zeth, though. He moves with a surety that bolsters my confidence, and when he applies pressure with the torn shreds of towel, clearing away the blood so I can see what the hell I’m doing, I’m not worried that he’ll damage her. In another world, in another entirely different reality, Zeth would have made an excellent surgeon. He is unshakeable. Completely fucking bombproof.
I soon begin to find shrapnel. The relief is like a punch to the gut. I could literally cry as I tweeze the small, wickedly sharp pieces of twisted metal from my sister’s stomach. As soon as I lay eyes on her right kidney, that relief vanishes, though. This is where I remove the largest bullet fragment from her body; it’s nestled in amongst the ruins of the organ, completely and utterly destroyed.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Zeth places his hand over mine, fixing me with that look again. He can see the mess just as well as I can, but he’s not frozen solid with fear. “She’s still breathing, Sloane. She still has a heart beat. And she still has another kidney, right?”
“Right.” But it’s not as simple as all that. Removing a kidney is a massive operation; one people die from on a relatively regular basis, and those operations take place in ORs designed to deal with complications. But what choice do I have? None.
So I do what I have to do. I remove the decimated organ, stitching it neatly with a regular needle and thread from the sewing kit, and then I cuaterize the wound. After that it’s a case of cleaning out her abdominal cavity and sewing her back up. I take a look through my supplies and I don’t find what I need now.
