I look where she pointed. The top of the pharmacy tent is visible from here, but the direct route cuts straight through a knot of activity — nurses moving between the holding tents, a group clustered around a supply cart, techs wheeling equipment across the path. It's a bottleneck, loud and crowded, and I don't feel like shouldering through it.
So I go around.
I cut left, away from the main path, and follow the tree line along the edge of the meadow. It's quieter out here.
The tents thin out, replaced by storage units and equipment staging areas. Tarps draped over pallets of bottled water, stacked crates of MREs, coils of extension cords piled on folding tables. The generators are louder this close to the perimeter, their diesel groan vibrating through the ground under my boots.
The shade is thicker too. The pine trees press in close, their branches knitting together overhead. It makes thetemperature drop a few degrees. Not enough to offer much relief, but I’ll take what I can get.
And that’s when I see her.
A young woman is leaning against the side of a storage tent, half-hidden in the shadow between the canvas wall and a stack of plastic crates. She's wearing black scrubs, her dark hair stuck to her neck and temples in damp strands, the rest of it falling loose around a face that stops me for a second despite everything. Sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and full lips pressed together in concentration or pain, I can't tell which. She has one hand pressed flat against her stomach and the other braced on the crates, holding herself up.
She looks sick. Or hurt.
My first thought is heatstroke.
It's ninety-something degrees, and she's flushed and swaying and breathing in these short, shallow pulls that make her shoulders hitch.
“Hey.” I slow down. "You okay?"
The beta’s head lifts, looking right at me, and my gaze sweeps over her face. The line of her jaw, the dark sweep of her lashes against flushed cheeks, the fullness of her lower lip.
She’s really pretty, but her dark eyes are glassy and wide, unfocused, as if she's looking through me at something behind my face. A bead of sweat slides down her temple and catches in the hollow of her throat.
"Do you need help," I ask when she doesn’t say anything. "Do you need me to get someone? A medic?"
Her mouth opens, then closes. Her brow creases like she can’t remember how to speak.
“No,” she finally mumbles as her hand slides off the crates and she sways to the left.
“Shit.”I curse when she stumbles toward me. “Let me find someone to help you.” I glance over my shoulder.
The path behind me is empty. The nearest cluster of people is a good sixty yards back, half-hidden by tents. There’s no one close enough to flag down without leaving her or yelling, and this is not the kind of place you want to cause a scene.
“Stay here,” I say. “I’m going to—” I turn back around and jolt, startled to find the young woman standing directly in front of me.
Her eyes are locked on my chest, her nostrils flaring. There's something about the trance-like way she's looking at me that trips a wire in the back of my brain.
I take a half-step back. Not because I think she's dangerous. But because she looks genuinely sick.
Her skin is flushed and damp, and her breathing is getting worse by the second, and there's a fine tremor running through her hands that tells me this isn’t heatstroke.
I need to get her help.
"Ma’am?" I angle my head down, trying to catch her eye. "Can you tell me your name? Or what tent are you working out of?"
But instead of answering me, she drops her head forward. Her forehead hits my sternum first, then her nose, then her whole face turns sideways and pushes into the fabric of my T-shirt. Her hands come up, pressing flat against my ribs as if she's trying to feel my heartbeat through the fabric.
Fuck.
My hands fly up. One palm open, fingers spread, the other still holding the clipboard. I hold them out like I'm being frisked. My eyes cut left, then right, scanning the tree line, the path, then back to where my pack is waiting for me.
I need Cliff.
I should have asked him to come with me.
He’d know what to do.
