Chapter Eighteen #2
“This wasn’t a mistake,” Margaret says, voice still hushed, but Anna can see the sliver of doubt darkening her bright blue eyes. “You didn’t have a pulse.”
Anna has no other explanation for her, not right now. Instead, she changes the subject even though she knows it’s cowardly of her. “Where is my help most needed?”
Margaret stares at her, her gaze unnervingly sharp. After a tense moment of silence, she answers. “Julianne needs some additional help rolling bandages. We’re using them faster than we can prepare them.”
Anna nods, swinging her feet from the bed and adjusting her uniform. It’s a mess, and her cap has gone missing, but she won’t waste time changing into her spare. Not when she can hear the pained moans in the beds beside her.
Not when she’s certain some of them come from the same young women she’s worked with.
Khiran comes that night, the way Anna knew he would. He’s never not checked on her after a trauma. He arrives wearing the form she favors, his eyes dark and his expression haggard.
Tired.
Anna knows the feeling. This war has been something unlike any other she’s experienced, and she knows it’s not just because she’s part of the effort.
The scale in which it’s affecting the world, the seemingly never ending battles fought in the rat infested trenches, the use of biochemical weapons in place of bullets …
she can’t imagine the strings he must be trying to pull.
Can’t imagine how tangled he must be in all of them.
“How are you?”
Anna sits up in her cot, eyes flitting over to her neighbors. They remain asleep—exhausted by a day of death and trauma. Anna has learned that they lost five of their own in the attack. “Will they wake?” she whispers.
Khiran shakes his head, sitting on the edge of her mattress. “No.”
She tucks her knees to her chest. “I would have died today,” she says, voice soft.
“You would have died long ago,” he counters, but he doesn’t deny it, and that’s what makes Anna certain that it’s true. His gaze shifts, Anna can feel it hovering over where she felt the pain. “How’s your head?”
There’s still a phantom ache, but it’s easily forgotten. How strange that she’s come to the point where near death feels more like an inconvenience than a threat. “I have other concerns.”
He lays across the foot of her bed, his long legs draped over the side and his arm thrown over his eyes. “Those being?”
Anna hesitates—she hasn’t seen him look this tired since Spain—but she knows better than to believe he’ll let her drop it for his sake.
“Margaret saw. She checked my pulse and didn’t find it.
I know she can’t explain it, but she knows something isn’t right.
I can see it in her expression every time she looks at me. ”
“So leave.”
The words are curt, but Anna doesn’t take offense. “I’m considering it.”
Khiran runs a hand through his hair, neck craning and looking out the cracked panes of her window.
The moonlight plays with the shadows on his face, highlights bruises under his eyes that Anna knows aren’t there.
“It may be for the best. There are so many moving parts in this war, so many players, I’m struggling to keep up with what’s coming.
” He shakes his head. “I can’t be in enough places. ”
“There’s still more for me to do here.”
He scoffs, the sound as soft as the shadows. “There will always be more to do. More people to save.” He turns to look at her, the weight of his gaze carrying thousands of years of hardship. “That doesn’t make staying the right choice. Not this time.”
Anna looks at him, questions building. “How bad is it out there?”
She’s only seen this side of the war—only treated those who managed to survive long enough to make it to them.
He releases a breath, slow and measured, and tips his head back. Throat pale and exposed under the moonlight, he looks up at the ceiling as if the faces of all the dead stare back at him from the plaster. “They keep finding new ways to make it worse.”
Anna doesn’t have to ask what he means. She’s seen the faces maimed by shrapnel, chemical burns, the trench foot. She’s heard the stories the soldiers tell of having to fight beside their dead because they can’t get the reprieve they need to remove them.
She hugs her pillow to her chest, fingers digging into the cotton. “Do you think it will ever get better for a change?” The words leave her, as weak and hopeless as she feels.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. “I used to be jealous of the ones who could see into the future,” he murmurs. Soft, like a confession. “I thought, if only I had been given such a gift, I would have the power to prevent so much tragedy.”
“And now?”
“Now, I wonder how any of them can do anything when they see this kind of future behind their eyelids.” He looks at her, the ghosts of a hundred wars haunting his eyes. “Today … today I’m tired, Anna.”
The words are so similar to the ones she gave him while she watched her home burn under a night sky. The night she shattered, the night he pulled the pieces of her back together.
She lays on her side, knees curled around her pillow and brushing against his arm. Their faces are only a foot apart. “Tell me a story,” she says, a breath above a whisper. “Something fantastic. Something true.”
He frowns, confusion lining his face. “You want me to tell you a bedtime story?”
“No. I want you to tell me something you’ve seen that’s so beautiful, it sounds like a fairytale. I want … I want to forget the ugliness of the world.”
He stares back at her, the tiniest of smiles touching his lips. Anna thinks it looks a bit like hope.
He tells her of black sand beaches and ocean waters so warm and clear one can see a forest of coral fifty feet below the surface.
He describes a canyon carved so deeply into the earth they go for miles, of glaciers so large they resemble mountains, and pyramids older than he is that jut up from the desert sands and seem to touch heaven.
Some of these places Anna has heard of, some she hasn’t. She soaks up each and every one regardless, closing her eyes and listening to the way his voice gradually softens into something that echoes wonder.
Anna doesn’t know what wakes her.
Maybe it was a nightmare she can’t remember, or maybe it was Charlotte’s snoring. But once her eyes open, she finds herself unable to fall back asleep no matter how long she stares up at the ceiling. There’s an anticipation humming under her skin, making her restless.
She rises, slipping her arms through her robe and pulling it tightly over her chest. Her bare feet are silent on the floor as she leaves the nurses’ quarters and steps into the cold.
She feels like a ghost going through the empty walkways connecting all the wards.
She reaches the scene of the demolished ward.
The bombing was a few weeks ago, most of the debris cleared, but the dust and grime sticks to the bottoms of her feet, the cold seeping through her thin nightgown. Her breath fogs.
Her eyes fall to the place she fell. There’s still blood staining the floorboards. She’s still not convinced that it’s hers.
Is this why she woke up? Some unconscious need to face what would have been her death?
“Anna!”
The sound of her name, sharp and echoing down the empty hall, startles her. She turns, but there are already arms pulling her in, a hand cradling the curve of her skull and a military uniform pressed against her cheek. German. A German uniform.
She looks up, catches the fear and determination rimming his brown eyes, just as blistering heat blooms across her back and the world shifts around her—twisting and turning, expanding contracting—so fast that she feels like they left her lungs behind.
Frigid cold replaces the heat, the sound of empty silence replaced with distant explosions.
They’re in the field between the hospital and the railway, the sound of explosions and screaming echoing around them.
Anna turns her head and sees the hospital on fire and knows, immediately, the damage is so much worse than what they saw a few weeks ago.
She releases a shaky breath, a tremble dancing across her skin. She knows it’s more than just the cold.
She breathes his name into the dark. A question. A thank you. “Khiran?”
He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t let his hold loosen.
The German officer pin presses, uncomfortably sharp against her collar.
She can feel the points of it through her nightgown with every heavy rise and fall of his chest. His cheek presses against hers, his hand still cradling the back of her head and his shaky breath whispering against her ear.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “These bombs—and last time—I’m not certain. I couldn’t risk you.”
Anna’s heart stutters.
She thinks of the blood stain on the floor, the way her fingers came back slick and red. She thinks of the horror in Margaret’s face—her insistence that she couldn’t find a pulse.
“It was mine,” she breathes, not understanding. She looks up at him, relieved when the face she looks into is the one she’s familiar with. He’s shed sandy blonde hair for his dark, shoulder length curls and brown eyes for the shade she’s grown so attached to. “The blood was mine.”
His hands rise, palms hot against her cheeks. “I was wrong. I thought—” Cringing, he rests his forehead against her own and drags in a ragged breath. “I didn’t think anything could touch you. Not physically. But this—”
This is different. Bombs and chemicals. What is a magical peach compared to the horrors of war?
“I don’t know where the line is anymore, Anna.”
His admission rattles her. She has never known him to be unsure of anything.