Chapter 76.
When the doctor is back in the lobby, he waves Alek over, and the two have a lengthy conversation. They talk fast, close, trying to hear each other over the sirens and the crying and the constant churn of bodies being dragged in.
When they finish, Alek says to Wyatt, “They’ve got her in one of the operating rooms. Performing what’s known as a bronchoscopy, basically looking down her airway with a scope, checking for smoke damage. And checking to see if she suffered any internal injuries when the two of you . . . landed.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her, I—”
“No one thinks that,” Alek says. “You saved her.”
Wyatt swallows. “Her name?”
Alek points toward the double doors. “Jelena.”
“Jelena . . . please be okay,” Wyatt says. “She’s just a kid.”
Alek puts a hand on his shoulder. She hasn’t just seen uncommon valor from Wyatt today, it’s the same valor she’d seen from him in the water in Antarctica, when Hannah was the one he was trying to save. And she’d seen something else today: Wyatt’s great heart.
He looks around the lobby, finally seeing what he hadn’t let himself see before. Kids. Too many kids. On stretchers. On blankets. In arms.
Alek touches his shoulder. “Look around, Wyatt,” she says. “There are a lot of Jelenas in here.”
Wyatt’s voice is rough. “This is insane.”
Alek’s face hardens, and it isn’t anger—it’s memory.
She leans closer. “War and conflict don’t care how old you are. If it did . . . my sister would still be alive.”
Wyatt walks away from her, his breathing still painful from the fall, trying to find a patch of the lobby that isn’t overrun.
So his back is to the door when it’s flung open again and Zhi and Carlos come running in, Gabrielle and Fumio behind them, all screaming on top of the others as they scramble to get themselves and everyone else to safety.
“Get down!”
“Take cover!”
“They’re back, the soldiers are back!”
Wyatt locks eyes with Zhi when he yells, “GRENADE!”
Wyatt whirls—
He sees it. A small dark cylinder skittering across tile.
Time does that awful stretching thing.
And then, a flash. A concussion that punches the breath out of everyone at once. And something small goes flying across the lobby, weightless and wrong.
Another kid the war doesn’t care about being blown across the lobby of the public hospital:
Rupert Chadwick.