I bring the binoculars back up.
Black SUVs.
No markings.
Too clean for aid workers. Too deliberate for civilians.
Regime.
My pulse goes cold and steady.
“We’re out of time,” I say.
And down below, Dr. Olivia Taylor rises to her feet like she’s ready to go to war with her bare hands.
2
Olivia
The little boy’s fever finally breaks just after sunset.
I feel it in the cooling of his skin beneath my hand, in the way his breathing eases, in the tiny sound his mother makes before she covers her mouth and starts crying anyway. She’s already lost her daughter and husband.
I sit back on my heels, exhaustion settling deep into my bones.
“He’s stable for now,” I tell her softly. “Keep giving him sips of water. Small ones. If the bleeding starts again, come get me immediately. Try and get some sleep.”
The woman nods over and over, clutching my hands in hers like I’ve done something miraculous.
I haven’t.
I’ve done what I can with too little medicine, too few bandages, not enough sleep, and the kind of fear that lives in your bloodstream after long enough.
Around us, the old schoolyard has become a patchwork of suffering.
Blankets spread over dirt.
Children with smoke-damaged lungs.
A girl no older than eight with burns down one arm.
A teenager with shrapnel still buried in his thigh because I don’t have the anesthesia to do more than numb the edges and pray.
This place wasn’t meant to survive a war.
None of us were.
But the children didn’t ask for any of this.
That’s the part I can’t walk away from.
Not when they still look at me like I might be able to fix things.
Not when their mothers press babies into my arms and whisper please like the word itself might keep death outside the walls.
Not when leaving feels too much like abandoning them.
“Doctor.”
