31. Ember
EMBER
I don't remember the rest of the slope. One moment I'm watching Gideon fold and the next I'm on the porch with my hands on him, easing him down, and the gray morning's gone quiet around us, the shooting stopped, the fight finished while I ran.
"Inside," Cass says. He's there, blood on him that isn't his, lifting Gideon's other side. "Table. Go."
We get him in. We get him onto the kitchen table, the same table where I cleaned the rifles, where I drew the map, where two days ago he unrolled a child's drawing and told me the worst of his life.
I get his hand off the wound and the blood comes faster and my stomach drops, but my hands don't shake, because my father drilled the shake out of me a long time ago and for once I'm grateful for the whole rotten gift of it.
"Talk to me, Gideon." I'm already cutting his shirt away. "You're the medic. So be the medic. Tell me what I'm looking at."
His eyes are glassy but they're open, and he drags them to mine, and the training in him surfaces through the pain the way mine surfaces through fear.
"Knife." His voice is thin but it's there. "Sutter. Got me before Cass got him. Left side, below the ribs."
"He came through the door for the heart of the house." Cass's voice from the window, flat, not turning from the glass. "Gideon put a scalpel through his forearm before the knife landed. It's the only reason I got there in time."
A breath that costs Gideon. "Tell me if it's bright or dark. The blood. Bright or dark."
"Dark. It's dark, not bright."
"Good." His eyes slip closed and open again. "Bright's the artery. Dark means I'm not going to bleed out in the next five minutes, means you have time to do this right. Kit's on the counter. Rhys?—"
"Here." Rhys is already there, the kit open, his hands fast and sure. He's done this before, with Gideon, the two of them have stitched a hundred wounds in this kitchen, and now Gideon has to talk his own hands' work out through someone else's hands.
"Shift," I tell him, because the thing that's never once worked for me works for everyone else in this house. "You're a shifter. Shift and let it knit."
"No." Even half-gone there's no give in it. "The change knits what it can reach, and it charges the body up front. Blood. Heat. Everything I don't have. This deep, this empty, the shift kills me faster than the knife did. You shift early or you stitch." A breath that costs him. "We stitch."
So that's what we do. The medic directs his own surgery from the table, his voice fading and returning, and Rhys and I do the work he tells us to do.
Clamp here. Pack this. Flush it, more than that, it'll feel like too much, it's not enough.
He talks us through finding the bleeders and tying them off, through cleaning a wound that wants to kill him, through the long careful business of closing a man up, and every time his voice drops too low I say his name sharp and it comes back, because Gideon Bramwell has spent his whole life refusing to let the program have the last word and he's not about to let a Marlowe knife have it either.
Halfway through, it nearly goes. A bleeder I've tied off lets go, and the dark blood wells up fast and fills the wound and hides everything I need to see, and Gideon's voice has gone too thin to guide me through it, and for one white second the panic comes up the back of my throat the way it came up in the snare two winters ago, the same animal certainty that the thing I'm fighting is going to win.
And then my father's voice, where it always is, flat and cold and merciless in the back of my skull: Panic is a luxury. You don't have time for it, so you don't get to have it. Find the bleeder. Slow is fast. Your hands already know.
I hate that voice. I have hated it for twenty-four years.
And it's the thing that drops my heart rate, steadies my fingers, and walks my hand back into the wound to find the vessel and pinch it closed while Rhys ties it off blind on my word.
The shaking I'm not allowed to do, I don't do.
The man tried to build me into something that could open a throat without flinching.
What he built, it turns out, can also close a wound without flinching, can hold steady inside the body of a man I want to keep alive more than I've wanted anything, and there is a bitter justice in that I will turn over for the rest of my life.
I stitch him. My hands, his instructions, Rhys's steadiness.
The needle in and out, the boot-stitch he taught me to recognize the first night now coming out of my own fingers, neat and tight and holding.
It takes a long time. It takes forever. But the dark blood slows and then mostly stops, and when I finally tie off the last suture and sit back, my hands red to the wrist, he's still breathing, ragged and shallow but steady, gray as ash but alive.
"You did it right," he murmurs. Eyes closed now. "I felt it. Good hands. Whoever taught you?—"
"Don't." I don't want my father in this room. Not now. "Save it. Rest."
Cass has been at the window the whole time, watching the yard, watching the treeline, letting me work because the work was mine to do.
Knox comes in, blood on him, none of it his by the way he moves.
Then Rhys is at the window too, and something in the set of all three of them changes, goes from the after-the-fight quiet to something tighter, and I look up from Gideon with the needle still in my hand.
"It's done," Knox says. "The ones that lived ran. Three down for good, the rest scattered down the mountain." He's not relieved. None of them are. "But Ember."
"What."
Cass turns from the window. His face does the nothing it does, but his eyes have gone to a place I haven't seen them go.
"Sutter was the spearhead," Cass says. "Not the point of the spear.
A man like your father doesn't send his right hand and not come to see the work himself.
" He looks at me. "Sutter coming through that door wasn't the attack.
It was the message that the attack already happened and didn't get the job done. "
"Malek's coming." My voice comes out flat and certain and very far away. I've known it, I realize, since the trip line sang. Some part of me has been waiting for it my whole life. "He's coming himself."
"I know," Cass says.
And as he says it, far down the road, faint through the morning, I hear it. An engine. A single vehicle, unhurried, climbing the grade toward the cabin at the exact speed of a man who has never once in his life had reason to rush, because the whole world has always waited for him.
Headlights swing across the kitchen window.