Chapter 38
Brooke
I was already on the floor when the fire hit.
Not flames. Not heat.
Something worse.
Wet and alive and digging. My left side lit up from collarbone to ribs, a hot animal burrowing under my skin. I jerked, and something heavy bit into me, locking the fire in place like a vise.
Get it off! Get it off!
I pulled at whatever was on top of me. But it was stuck.
“Doc! Hey! No! Stop!” Hands caught mine. Gloves. Rough. He pinned my wrists to the concrete. “You’re making it worse.”
“Get it off!” The words tore out of me in a scream. My helmet slid to the side, the chinstrap cutting into my jaw. The room tilted. Lights strobed. Somewhere behind me, metal clanged, and boots pounded, and a voice yelled for a bird.
A bird?
The chemical stung the back of my tongue, sweet and metallic and wrong. My brain threw labels at it—chlorinated something, arsenic, not what we’d been looking for—then shorted out under the pain.
I twisted. The weight on my chest didn’t budge.
My plate carrier!
Shit, get it off! Get it off!
“Hold her,” the same voice snapped. A blade flashed. A ripping sound at my shoulder. Cool air hit my neck where the strap had been. The fire flared, fatter, meaner, as if it could breathe now. I arched, a sound I didn’t recognize erupting from my mouth.
“Where’s she hit?”
“RSDL, RSDL!” another voice shouted. Boston accent. Dr. Norris? “It splashed her! It’s localized.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block everything out. But the pain didn’t go anywhere.
“She wasn’t shot.”
Plastic tore. Boots scuffed near my hip. A palm landed on my sternum, weight anchoring me to the floor. “Breathe, Doc. Look at me. In. Out. Good girl. Keep breathing.”
Rav.
I tried reaching for him, but my arms were pinned. “Hold my hand, Rav.”
He took one of my hands from whoever had grabbed them. Then the sound of Velcro tearing. The weight lifted off my chest. “We got you, Doc. Just breathe.”
It wasn’t Rav. His French accent was missing.
And he wouldn’t have called me Doc. Not now. That’s what the SEALs called me when we were working.
A new sound cut through my brain—metallic, steady, snipping. Shears. Someone was working on a different body. “Pressure here. Hold. Hold for fuck’s sake!”
The words faded in and out.
Another pulse of the fire through my body, and the scent of geraniums finally hit me. “Gloves! You need gloves! It’s not sarin, it’s Lewisite!”
“Doc?” said the man next to me. “You’ve been hit by some chemicals, and we need to cut you out—plates, shirt, bra—all of it, now. You tracking?”
A moan that wasn’t mine came from somewhere close. A wet cough.
“Where’s Rav?” Panic splintered through me, almost enough to shove the pain aside. “Rav! Where—”
“He’s fine.”
He’s not fucking fine!
He’d knocked me over. Jumped in front of me? Something.
“It’s just your team here.” The hand on my sternum pressed harder.
A second strap gave way, fabric scraping my burned skin.
Tugging at my shirt. Cool metal sliding across my chest, and my bra popped open.
A knee nudged my hip, levering me enough to drag all my clothes away.
“We’ll cover you back up as soon as we can. ”
Cold stung my bare back when it touched the floor. Relief. Followed by my eyes snapping open when a new kind of agony flooded my body. Oxygen fed the chemical eating into me.
“Rav!” I screamed again. Or maybe that was my inside voice this time. I could barely tell anymore.
“Brooke.” My name bounced around as if it had more syllables than it owned. “Hey. Stay with me.”
I rolled, gagged. The hand on my sternum pushed again. “No rolling. Flat. We’ve got you.”
“Get back.” My throat was raw. “Don’t! Don’t touch it! Lewisite!”
Through tear-streaked vision, I spotted a green pouch being ripped open. The RSDL—Reactive Skin Decontaminant Lotion. The pad that hit my shoulder was cool at first, then flared.
Another scream.
Why had I come here? Why didn’t I go into a research lab at home?
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, and the taste of blood grounded me for a heartbeat. The pad moved lower, over ribs, over the curve of breast, and around my side. The sound in the room got smaller, sucked away through the little window.
“Doc.” Another hand, warm and sticky like nitrile, slid under my neck to lift my head.
Water splashed on my lips. I gulped and choked.
The water spilled down my chin, down the hollow of my collarbone, and the drops that found the chemical sizzled against my skin.
I turned my head from the bottle, knocking it from whoever held it. Hands caught it before it rolled.
“Bird is ten out,” someone yelled—not at me, at the air. “Push nine-line again. He’s crashing.”
He.
Not me.
“Rav.” The name was barely sound on my lips. “Tell me—”
“Hey.” The SEAL above me—Hart, yeah, that was his voice—brought his face into my narrow field of view. Dark beard. Eyes that didn’t blink. “You’re going to be okay. You hear me?”
“Rav,” I said again, because everything else felt optional now. Voices swam. A crack in the ceiling over my head doubled.
“He’s okay.” The lie didn’t sound any more convincing this time. “Look at me.”
I tried. His face kept moving. The pad worked its way lower, left side, each press a new electric slice. My hand wrenched free and found the front of Hart’s plate carrier. Fingers hooked the webbing; I held on like the room would drop me if I let go.
“Morphine,” someone said. “She’s at ten.”
“Doc, you’re getting a jab,” Hart warned, and then a sharp punch to my thigh.
A warmth blossomed, heavy and slow. The edges of the pain softened, turned from a knife to a rough stone.
Still there. Less eager. The room stretched wider, sound returning in pieces—the fan buzz, a voice praying under his breath, hemostats clacking, someone dragging a table that squealed against the rough floor.
Someone removed my hand from Hart’s plate carrier.
I knew this phase. The softening. The trick my brain played when it couldn’t hold two things at once—pain and detail. As the pain receded, the detail began to bleed back in.
My memory found the room before everything had gone to shit: long benches scavenged from a school or a clinic, brown reagent bottles with hazard diamonds half-scraped off, glassware in a crooked lattice.
A smell like body odor and pennies. An old fan rattling in a window.
Voices down the hallway. Percival opening a door with the back of his wrist, rifle high. Rav’s shoulder an inch from mine.
We’d found the lab. We’d actually found it! It wasn’t just rumors. It was real.
Then movement had caught my eye. Something dark in the window. A rifle.
Rav had slammed into me, and we hit the floor. Gunshots. Before or after Rav knocked me over? He landed on me, then rolled. The shelf beside us pitched. Glass slid and shattered. A sharp smash against the wall and my neck and my shoulder.
Heat that wasn’t heat.
Another voice—Percival now, close. “I’m good. It’s just the arm.” The words carried a tremor he probably thought he’d hidden. His sleeve was dark to the elbow. He kept the arm lifted away from his body like it didn’t belong to him.
“Get his sleeve cut. Flush. Then decon,” someone said, not asking. “You. Sit. Now.”
“I can stand.”
“Sit,” the voice repeated, flat enough to make even Percival drop onto the plastic chair.
I turned my head. Too fast. The room yanked sideways. I fought a swallow. “Rav?”
“Eyes here.” Hart tapped two fingers gently between my eyebrows, and my gaze obeyed. “He’s not your job. Your job is to stay with me.”
Not your job. Rav had said something like that in the truck, months ago, when I apologized for being in the middle of the convoy’s protection bubble.
‘You’re my job,’ he’d said.
The heat in my face when he’d said that was rain compared to this wildfire. The memory flickered and went.
“Doc.” Hart again. Patient. Annoyed. The exact mix that got through when nothing else could. “Name.”
“Dr. Brooklyn McAllister,” I said. “Canadian liaison—biochem—” The sentence chose not to finish.
“Good. Date?”
“No thanks, I’m taken.” I was taken, wasn’t I?
We’d been stealing moments for weeks. Quick kisses here and there. Sneaking into my quarters more than once. Having quiet talks alone when I claimed to need help carrying things. He was my bodyguard, so he was my shadow. Our government had said we needed to stay together. It was a good cover.
I let my head roll to the side again, searching for Rav. But all I could see were the bodies crowded around someone out flat, and Rav wasn’t one of the crowd. He was the one crashing.
What if he didn’t make it?
“Humor me.”
I fished for the detail Hart wanted, dragged it up through molasses. “June?”
“Close enough.” He chuckled as he spread something over my chest. He asked something else. About pain? About clothes?
Was his question even to me?
Was it even a question?
More voices filled the room, but I couldn’t latch on to any of them. I cast around for Percival, but my vision blurred, each shape swimming into the next. “Percy?”
Someone let go of my hand, and Percival grabbed it. “Helo’s here. Litters are coming in.”
Each breath took too much energy. Swallowing took too much energy. I needed sleep, but I needed something else first. “Promise me he’s okay?”
“Of course he will be.” Percival must have leaned closer, because his voice was quiet, but perfectly clear. “He’s got too much to live for not to be okay.”
He meant me, didn’t he?
Didn’t he?
And with that…
The darkness pulled me under.