Page 16 of What We Become

Fury doesn’t stir. Her breathing rattles—shallow, uneven, the sound of lungs that are working but not happy about it. The foam residue around her mouth has dried to a pinkish crust. I grab my shirt and wipe more of it away.

We wait. Holden sweeps the rest of the house—cataloging, photographing, doing the cop work that keeps his brain from collapsing.

I hear him on the phone again downstairs, his voice clipped and cold, relaying details to Odin’s people like he’s filing a report on someone else’s tragedy.

Micah and I stay with her. He’s got her hand now. I’ve got the rest of her, her body curled against my chest so I can feel every breath she takes.

“Chopper’s here,” Micah says, lifting his head.

I hear the rotors before I see anything. At first, I think it’s my pulse howling in my ears, but it builds, rises, the chop of rotors cutting the salt air. Light sweeps across the ceiling from outside, white and surgical, and for a second the room looks like an operating theater.

“That’s us,” Holden says from the doorway. He’s got his phone in one hand and his gun in the other, and his face looks like it was carved out of the bluff outside. “They’re landing on the south lawn.”

I stand with Fury in my arms, one hand beneath her knees and the other spread across her back.

Micah is already moving for the stairs, clearing the path, and I follow with her head tucked against my shoulder and her breath against my collarbone, warm and rattling and alive.

The helicopter is on the grass when we get outside. Black. No markings. Rotors still spinning, the wash flattening the hedges and throwing grit against my face.

Two people in medical gear jump out before the skids have fully settled—a woman with a trauma bag and a man wheeling a collapsible stretcher across the lawn.

“Put her down,” the woman orders, already snapping gloves on.

I don’t want to. Every cell that knelt on that floor holding this woman together refuses to put her on a stretcher and let strangers touch her.

But the woman’s eyes are sharp and certain and her hands are already reaching, and I know—the way I know threat vectors and exit routes and the weight of a blade—that Fury needs what this woman can give her more than she needs me right now.

I lay her on the stretcher. The medics move fast, fitting an oxygen mask over her face, starting an IV, and clipping a monitor to her finger. Numbers spit out, but I can’t read them from this angle.

“Pulse ox eighty-one,” the man calls out. “Tachycardic. Breath sounds diminished bilaterally.”

“Get her on the bird,” the woman says. “Now.”

They wheel her toward the helicopter. Micah and I follow.

Holden stands on the lawn with the rotor wash tearing at his clothes, watching us board, and the look on his face is the second worst thing I’ve seen tonight.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he shouts. I barely hear it over the rotors.

I nod, climbing into the helicopter after Fury, and the door closes.

I grip Fury’s hand as we lift into the deepening dusk.

Breathe.

FIVE

MICAH

The helicopter is a sound that moves in and stays—a low, grinding roar that gets inside your chest and replaces your heartbeat with its own. The rotors chop the air into something thicker, harder to breathe.

Or maybe that’s my panic.

Sage is on the stretcher between us, strapped down at the chest and thighs, and the medic—Clarke, her name is stitched on her jacket—is so fucking calm it’s obscene. She’s done this before. A lot.

I hate that for her, but I’m grateful for it, and I can’t think about either because the monitor next to Sage’s head is a blur of blips and fractions and percentages. It’s the percentage that keeps dropping.

Eighty-one. Eighty. Seventy-nine. Eighty.