Page 17 of What We Become

“What does that mean?” I have to shout it. My voice disappears into the rotor noise.

Clarke doesn’t look up. She’s adjusting the oxygen flow, her fingers moving on the dial. “Blood oxygen saturation. We want it above ninety-five. She’s hypoxic.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

Clarke meets my eyes for half a second. She’s deciding how much truth I can take.

“We’re managing it,” she says, which isn’t an answer, and we both know it.

Knox is across from me. He takes up most of his side of the cabin—knees braced wide, hands flat on his thighs, shoulders hunched forward under the low ceiling. He hasn’t spoken since we lifted off. He hasn’t looked anywhere but her face.

I want to reach for her hand. My fingers twitch toward the stretcher rail, toward the gauze wrapped around her wrist, toward the IV line taped to the back of her hand. But Clarke is working on that side, and there’s a pulse oximeter clipped to her finger and wires running from her chest to the monitor. Every inch of Sage that I could touch is occupied by something medical and necessary.

So I sit. Three feet from the woman I love, close enough to see the foam residue in the creases of her ears, and I can’t touch her.

My hands are still covered in the stuff. The foam. It’s dried on my forearms in a thick, pinkish crust that pulls at the hairs when I move. I can still feel the tackiness between my fingers, the chemical heat of it. And underneath that, underneath the industrial stink and the dried bile, I can still feel her mouth.

Her mouth not breathing under mine.

Her chest not rising.

The compressions. My palm on her sternum once we got her to the floor, pressing down while Knox breathed for her. Thirty. Two breaths. Thirty. Two.

A rib gave beneath my hand—a small, sick crack I felt all the way into my teeth.

But I kept going. Stopping would have killed her.

I hate that I had to hurt her to save her.

The helicopter banks. My stomach drops, and the stretcher shifts on its rails. Knox’s hand shoots out, steadying it before the motion reaches Sage.

I’m supposed to be the one who holds people together. It’s what I do. I know what it is to be shaking, bloody, broken, so I stay. I give people whatever steadiness I have until they can find their own again.

But I can’t hold this. I can’t reach Sage. I can’t make the numbers climb. All I can do is sit and watch and feel absolutely, completely useless.

Eighty. Eighty-one. Eighty.

“Can you give her more?” I shout.

Clarke shakes her head. “She’s at maximum flow. The bronchodilator needs time. We’re fighting the inflammation from what she inhaled.”

That means it’s inside her lungs. The damage is inside her lungs.

I close my eyes. Open them. The numbers haven’t changed.

Knox catches my eye. Just a simple look, shifting from Sage to me and holding. I know. I’m here.

I nod. Then he reaches out one of those big hands and holds on to mine. A gentle squeeze. I almost break down right there.

I’m supposed to be the one who holds people together.

The helicopter tilts again, and the landscape below shifts from dark coastline to darker hills. We’re heading inland. Away from the ocean, away from the beach house, away from all that’s familiar.

I think about Holden down there, alone, managing a crime scene in a house where he found our girlfriend cemented into a wall. I think about Eli back at the house waiting for a call that’s going to wreck him. I think about Milo at his screens, running traces, trying to piece together the events that led to Sage in a wall.

Everyone has a job.

Mine is sitting still.