Chapter 74.
Wyatt carries the young girl most of the way to the public hospital. When he occasionally gets too tired and has to stop, Jack wordlessly lets him hand the girl over. Hannah stays close and tells her not to worry, it’s going to be okay.
“I don’t know if you can understand me,” Hannah says, “but you couldn’t be in better hands.”
They are gradually making their way through the streets. Sirens wail somewhere, closer now.
As they make their way up to the hospital’s entrance, they see that members of the other group have beaten them here.
Carlos Lopez’s forehead is bandaged. One eye is completely swollen shut.
Lin Zhi holds the door open for Wyatt and the girl.
No one stops to talk. They move her inside like she’s the last fragile thing left in the world.
Lopez starts to say something, but Jack and Alek and Wyatt push him aside, walk past him and into the triage unit that the lobby has become: gurneys, bloodstained sheets, doctors shouting, volunteers running.
“If this little girl didn’t die in that fire,” Alek says, “there is no way she’s dying on us now.”
A white-bearded doctor takes the girl from Jack, speaking a lilting English that bends around the words. Wyatt forces himself to explain.
“Found her in a bathroom,” he says. “Parents . . . in the living room.”
He doesn’t say what he saw. He doesn’t need to.
The doctor grips Wyatt’s shoulder—firm, grateful—and nods. “She goin’ be fine,” the doctor says.
The doctor affectionately places the girl on a gurney and pushes her through double doors.
“We did it,” Wyatt whispers to Alek.
“You did it,” Alek says quietly.
“No, we did,” Wyatt says. “We worked together when it mattered.”
Then Alek sees Hannah standing just inside the entrance. She’s staring down at something on the floor of the lobby. Her hand is covering her mouth.
After all the poise she had shown as they teamed up to save Wyatt and the girl, after the way she had calmly organized the team, Hannah is crying.
Jack is next to Hannah, slowly shaking his head, unable to hide his grief. It’s not like Jack, who usually hides everything so well.
When Alek gets to them, she sees what they’re seeing:
On the floor, on an Army blanket, lies Amos Meyers. Someone has had the good grace to fold his weathered hands across his chest. An orderly appears, reaches down, and pulls the blanket all the way over Amos’s face.
Next to him is the young local soldier Jack saluted earlier. He’s not much older than Hannah is. What a waste of a life.
Zhi walks up behind Alek. “Lopez tried to tell you. When you rushed past him.”
“What happened?” she responds.
Zhi recounts their arrival. They all came into the hospital lobby much the same way.
It wasn’t just triage then, as a wave of people running from the violence had flooded in—it was a stampede.
A second wave of civilians came after them, pushed in as a nurse tried to unsuccessfully shout order into the chaos.
Amos saw and heard it first. Not the screaming. Not the blood. The small, wrong sound under it all—a dull clink on tile. A metal cylinder rolling.
A grenade.
Some of the opposing forces must have chased the people down and didn’t care it was a hospital. For half a second, nobody understood what they were looking at. A mother froze. A little boy just stared at it like it was a toy.
Amos didn’t freeze.
He was already across the lobby before anyone could even shout. He kicked the grenade toward the thickest wall he could find—behind an overturned gurney—and threw himself down over the boy and the mother, shoulder to shoulder with two orderlies who reacted a heartbeat after he did.
He didn’t look up.
He just said, almost calmly, “Down.” Everyone took cover, even those on the team in the room. Zhi among them.
The blast didn’t tear the building apart. Objectively and relatively, it was minor. But it was all pressure and shrapnel in a crowded room. When the smoke cleared, the boy coughed—alive. The mother started screaming—alive.
And Amos was lying on his back, eyes open, not seeing. Blood soaking through his shirt in a spreading, unstoppable bloom. By the time Zhi got to him, it was too late.
Jack salutes them both one last time. He does it fast, like if he holds the salute too long, he’ll break apart. Then he turns and walks out before anyone can see what’s in his eyes.
Alek leaves Zhi and steps closer to Hannah.
And Hannah—who held it together through fire and falling and screaming—finally cracks. Alek holds her as her tears come, hot and unstoppable. It hits Alek in the ribs—same grief, different uniform. When her sister died . . . it was all too much.
It isn’t just the horror.
It’s the cost.