"Hewitt, brace."
My hands are on the resistance station's manual release before I've finished saying his name. The hydraulic lock requires a two-handed pull on the safety lever beneath the seat, and my palms close around the metal and wrench it toward me with a force that comes from somewhere deeper than muscle.
The lever resists, catches, and then releases with a pneumatic hiss that drops the resistance to zero.
Hewitt's knee sags into the freed position, and the grunt he makes is pain and relief compressed into a single syllable.
"Stay still. Do not move that knee."
My hands are on his thigh, stabilizing the joint through the fabric of his workout shorts. The patellar tendon is taut under my fingers, loaded but intact. The lateral ligaments are stable, the crepitus absent. The joint held, and if the joint held then the repair held, and the woman who just pulled a hydraulic release lever with her bare hands is going to have a very interesting set of blisters to explain later.
Across the floor, Boone is already at the parallel bars.
He covers the distance from the medical station in a stride that rewires every nerve ending I own.
The speed and the economy of motion, the way his body moves through the room like the room is a problem he has already solved, all of it registers somewhere primal andimmediate. This man in full operational mode is the most devastatingly attractive thing I have ever seen in a room full of emergencies, and the awareness is inappropriate, unstoppable, and entirely Boone's fault.
He reaches Okafor as the sergeant's grip on the bars starts to fail, and the hands that were on my body last night catch a full-grown operator mid-fall with a controlled strength that makes the effort invisible.
He lowers Okafor to the floor with the practiced efficiency of a man who has laid wounded operators on surfaces ranging from sand to helicopter decks.
His hands check the cervical spine alignment with quick palpations, and his voice, that calm, measured tone he uses when the stakes are high, tells Okafor to stay flat and breathe.
Even now, in the middle of an emergency, the sound of that voice does things to me. The reaction is inconvenient and entirely his fault.
The therapy pool temperature is climbing.
The digital readout on the east wall keeps ticking upward, and Reyes is in water that is approaching the threshold where soft tissue damage begins.
"Reyes, out of the pool. Now. Use the ladder on the south side."
My voice carries across the treatment floor with the authority I built in this room, the same authority that has talked young operators through pain they didn't think they could survive.
Reyes, trained to respond to commands, moves to the ladder without hesitating.
Boone's eyes find mine across the room.
The look is not tender. It is the flat, focused assessment of a tactical partner confirming the next objective, and the trust embedded in that look is worth more than every poem he has ever written in every notebook he has ever carried.
I will tell him so later, when my hands stop shaking and my patients are safe.
"Station four," he says.
"I've got the pool. Kill the secondary."
He is already moving toward the utility closet on the east wall.
He counted the steps this morning, and the fact that this man counted them at 0600 because he wanted to be prepared for a scenario I hoped would never happen is either the most romantic or the most tactical thing anyone has ever done for me.
With Boone Aldridge, those categories have been the same category since the first week.
The temperature override panel is on the opposite side of the pool.
My hands find the panel cover and pry it open with my fingernails because the release latch is jammed, and the metal edge bites into the pad of my index finger as the cover pops free.
The manual shutoff for the heating element is a red toggle behind the panel, and I flip it with a hand that is bleeding and does not care.
The temperature readout holds, then begins to drop.
