Page 20 of Legacy Ascended

“Benny and Elise are protected,” I tell him. “From everyone. Starting now.”

“Yes.”

"Everything else in the morning."

"Yes," he says.

Then Jon tells the lot of them to stop making me talk.

Someone brings a stretcher. They wrap me in coats and start carrying me down toward the track, because the physician is meeting us at the vehicles and Jon wants me off this mountain immediately. Ander takes the front corner beside my head. Torres walks alongside with his fingers laced through mine, letting go at the rough ground and finding my hand again on the other side of it.

I turn my left wrist over.

Four arcs.

"You spent months making sure this didn't happen," I say.

Ander looks down at me over the edge of the stretcher. "I did."

"And you came anyway."

He doesn't look at the mark. He looks at me.

"I came because I chose you. I’m done fighting this."

Chapter four

Jessica

The physician is waiting at the bottom of the track with a lamp and an open medical case.

Everybody calls her Doc. She's about sixty, with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair and the first thing she says isn't to me.

"Put her in the back of the second vehicle with the lights on and the doors open. I'm not working by torchlight on frozen mud."

The second thing is to me.

"Can you tell me what happened, in order?"

So I tell her, in order, while she cuts my sleeve away and Jon holds the lamp at the angle she tells him to hold it. The road that morning. Four darts. The wound in my flank, torn open twice since. The strap that took the skin off my thumb. The shift I chose, and the shot that went across the top of my shoulder while I was in it.

"Good," she says, when I've finished. "That was the assessment. You were making sense the whole way through and I wanted to see if you could do that."

"Sneaky."

"Extremely." She irrigates the shoulder and I stop thinking.

It takes about twenty minutes. Doc works quickly, warning me before everything she does.

“This is going to be cold.”

It is.

“This will sting.”

It does considerably more than sting.

“I’m closing the worst of the torn edges. The bullet channel stays open, cleaned, and covered until they’ve imaged it. You’ll feel pressure here, but you shouldn’t feel the needle. Tell me if you do.”