Epilogue
Petra
Four months after the bout, I am stitching a kid's eyebrow at two in the afternoon and listening to him try not to cry, and I think: this is my life now.
The kid is nineteen. His name is Beau. He is one of the second cohort of trainees, came up from a Mississippi pack that does not have a working medical line, and he caught an elbow to the orbital ridge during sparring drills with Toby this morning because he flinched the wrong way.
Standard split. Six stitches. He's going to have a scar that he will, in about three years, lie about the origin of. They all do.
"Hold still," I say.
"I am holding still."
"You are not."
"Ma'am, I'm holding still."
"Beau. Your left eyelid is twitching like a wire. I am inside your face. Stop moving."
He stops moving. I finish the stitch, tie it off, snip the suture.
I have done this so many times my hands do it while I think about other things.
I am thinking, right now, about the order of magnesium I need to put in before Friday, about whether Toby is ready to start running solo trauma sims with the cohort, about the fact that Damon left for the booth twenty minutes ago and the booth is two minutes from the medical wing, which means he has detoured, which means he is coming here, which means I have approximately ninety seconds before he walks through the door with two coffees and that particular look on his face that he gets when his wolf has decided it needs to lay eyes on me before it can settle for the afternoon.
I have learned to clock him in increments now.
He is a man of intervals. Every two to three hours, his wolf wants a sightline.
He does not announce it. He simply appears, sets a coffee on the corner of my desk, looks at me for the length of one breath, and leaves.
I used to think it would feel like surveillance.
It does not. It feels like a hand on the small of my back from across the compound.
The door opens.
"Beau," Damon says.
"Boss."
"Eyebrow?"
"Eyebrow, sir."
"Tomorrow's drills, watch your left guard. You drop it when you reset."
"Yes, sir."
Damon sets one coffee on my desk. He looks at me for the length of one breath. He nods. He leaves.
Beau watches him go and then looks at me with the particular wide-eyed reverence that all the trainees use when they have just witnessed Damon Serrano speak more than four words to anyone. "He talks to you," Beau says.
"He does."
"He doesn't talk to most people."
"I know."
"How'd you get him to talk to you?"
I tie off the last stitch. "I told him his wolf was going to eat him alive if he kept caging it."
Beau blinks. "And that worked?"
"Eventually."
I clean the area, dress it, and send him out the door with instructions to ice it for forty minutes and report to Toby in the morning.
Then I sit down at my desk and drink the coffee Damon brought me.
It is the good kind, the one Hex orders from a roaster in Asheville.
Damon has, since the bout, started doing things he did not used to do.
Drinking coffee in front of people. Eating two meals a day.
Sleeping more than four hours at a stretch.
The wolf in him, Jo says, is integrating.
That is the clinical term. The non-clinical term is that he has stopped trying to outrun a thing that was never going to leave him.
He has gained eleven pounds. I weighed him last Tuesday. He laughed about it. That was laugh number nine.
I keep counting. I think I will keep counting forever.
—
The medical wing has six beds now. We added two in February when the second cohort came in and I realized I had underestimated the rate at which trainees from underequipped packs would come to me with old, untreated injuries that should have been addressed in the field two and three and seven years ago.
I have set bones that healed wrong. I have re-broken a femur in a controlled environment so it could heal correctly, and I have done it with Jo's hand on my shoulder because she could see I was angry at the pack that had let it heal that way the first time.
I am angry a lot, in this work. I am also, I have come to understand, useful in a way I was not useful before. On the circuit, I caught people on the way down. Here, I am teaching them how to land.
There are fourteen trainees now across two cohorts.
Twelve will go back to their packs in the spring as accredited combat medics.
Two — Wren and Toby — have chosen to stay.
Wren is patched in and works the Pit as my primary assist on bout nights.
Toby is running the second-cohort sims and looking at building out a field-medicine certification curriculum that we can take on the road.
Hex has already built the LMS. Hex builds everything before I ask.
The trauma wing is not a project anymore.
It is a thing that exists. It has my name on the door, which I objected to and lost. The plaque says PETRA KAZAN, M.D.
— Director of Combat Medicine, Bone Hollow Sinners.
I am not, technically, an M.D. I have an EMT-P and twenty-three years of trauma practice and a stack of certifications that no medical board has ever asked to look at.
Jo signed off on the plaque anyway. Jo said, Out here, the title means the work, and the work is yours.
I let her keep the plaque. I do not look at it most days.
I do, sometimes, look at it.
—
Cade Whitlow came back in March. The Virginia beta.
The one who survived. He arrived in the prospect SUV at four in the afternoon with a duffel bag and no announcement, and Wren brought him to me, and I stood in the doorway of the medical suite and looked at him and he looked at me, and after a long second he said, "Ma'am. You said when I was ready."
"I did."
"I think I'm ready."
"All right."
He is in the third cohort. He starts in June.
He is going to be a very good combat medic, because he knows, in his bones, what it is like to be on the wrong end of a bad bout and have someone in the pit who knows what they're doing.
There is a particular kind of fighter who becomes a particular kind of medic, and he is one of them. So am I.
I told Damon the night Cade arrived. We were on the porch of the cabin.
The cabin is, increasingly, our cabin, although neither of us has said the word moved in, and my apartment in the medical wing still has my clothes in it for the look of the thing.
Damon listened to the whole story — Cade, Tennessee, the second save, the long winter — and at the end of it he said, "Four became three. "
"Yes."
"And the three are not coming back."
"No."
"But the work is."
"Yes."
He sat with that. He sat with it the way he sits with things, which is to say completely, without fidgeting, the wolf in him still and attentive. Then he said, "I am proud of you."
I had not known I needed to hear that. I had not known anyone had ever said that to me in those exact words.
My father, before he died, used to say good job, kid, and my old crew chief in Roanoke used to say clean work, and the four names in my margins never said anything because they were dead before they could.
But I am proud of you — in Damon's voice, in his particular formal-when-emotional register, on the porch of the cabin with the dark coming in — I had not had that one before.
I cried a little. He let me. He did not make it a thing.
He just put his hand on the back of my neck and held it there, the way he does, and the wolf in him went very still, the way it does when I am upset, the way it has done since the first night in the medical suite when I told him about the four names and he laid himself flat on the examination table and let me work.
The four names are still in my margins. I am not going to take them out.
They are the spine of how I learned. Henry, Brick, Jameson, Theo.
They taught me what failure feels like. They taught me what to never do again.
They taught me that no fighter is replaceable but every fighter is mortal, which is a sentence I now make every trainee write on the inside cover of their field journal in their own handwriting on day one.
I make them write it because it is true.
I make them write it because I want them to look at it for the rest of their careers and remember that they will lose one.
They will lose one. And the work is what they do with that loss.
I will not lose another the way I lost Theo. I might lose one. I will not lose one that way. That is the box I built. The box holds.
—
In April, Damon and Spite went down to a sanctioned bout in Knoxville.
Spite fought a heavyweight from a Carolina pack and won in the third on a technical.
Damon was in the corner. I was in the wing.
I do not travel for bouts, generally. The trainees need me here, and Jo will not let me travel until we have a second senior medic on staff.
Toby is being slow-walked into that role and will, I think, be ready by fall.
Damon called me from the parking lot after Spite's win. He said, "He didn't drop his guard. Not once."
"Good."
"He counted his breaths in the corner the way I taught him."
"Good."
"He looks at me, between rounds, the way I used to look at my coach."
"Damon."
"I know."
"You are a good coach."
"I am learning to be."
He came home the next afternoon. He drove the truck up the mountain road and parked it at the cabin and sat on the porch with me and drank a beer and watched the trees and said almost nothing for an hour, and that was, I have learned, his way of being completely happy.
Spite proposed to his girlfriend in May.
Damon was at the proposal. He told me about it that night, in detail, and when he described the moment her face changed his own voice changed, and the wolf in him made the soft sound it makes when it is moved by something, and I thought: he has so much capacity for this.
He has been carrying so much capacity for this and not using any of it for so long.
I am married, by the way.
We did it in February. We did it in the chapel that the Sinners keep up the ridge for funerals and the occasional wedding, with Conrad presiding because Conrad is, technically, ordained, and with Reaper and Lena and Jo and Cole and Hex and Amara and Luca and the two cohorts and the prospects and the patched members, and with the cabin behind us, and with a pair of vows that Damon wrote out by hand on the back of a training schedule because he could not, he said, get the words to sit still on a clean page.
The vow that I remember best, the one I will remember when I am old, is: I will hold the ground for you.
I will be the ground. I have stopped running too.
I wrote mine on a prescription pad. I told him I would count his pulse for the rest of my life.
I told him I had stopped running because of him and I would stop running with him and we would build the ground together, day by day, and the work would be the work, and the love would be the love, and the wolf in him and the medic in me would, together, hold.
We did not make a big thing of it. We made exactly the size of thing we wanted to make.
Conrad cried. I did not know Conrad could cry.
He cried in that strangled way that very large men cry when they have not done it in a long time.
Damon noticed. He went and stood next to Conrad after, the way he does when his Vice Pres needs him, and Conrad clapped him on the shoulder and said something I could not hear, and Damon said something back I could not hear, and then they both looked at me at the same time, and they both smiled, and I thought: I am the reason for that.
I am the reason these two men are looking at me with their faces open.
I have done a lot of useful work in my life. I have not, before this, been the reason for that particular thing.
—
Tonight, I am closing the wing at nine. Toby is on call. The cohort is at dinner. The compound is, in the way the compound is on weeknights, quiet. The pit is dark. The mine shaft is dark. The watchtower is lit. The cabin, up the path, is lit.
I lock the wing. I walk up the path. The air smells like spruce and woodsmoke and the particular ozone-and-iron smell that the mountain makes when the cold comes down at night.
I have learned the seasons of this place.
I know what the air smells like in February when the snow is coming.
I know what it smells like in June when the dogwoods come in.
I know what it smells like tonight, in early September, with the year turning.
Damon is on the porch. He has two glasses. He has the bourbon I like, the rye, the one with the green label. He has the wool blanket. He has his shoes off.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
"How was your day."
"Good. Spite drilled clean. Wren ran the booth solo for the first hour of evening watch. Conrad and I went over the spring schedule. Yours?"
"Six stitches on Beau. Three new intake forms. Hex built me a thing I did not ask for and now cannot live without. Toby is ready to run sims solo. I told him."
"How did he take it?"
"He cried a little. He did not let me see."
"Good kid."
"Good kid."
He pours me a glass. He hands it to me. He pulls me down onto the bench next to him and puts the blanket over both of us.
The wolf in him is, I can tell without looking, settled.
The wolf in him has been settled, mostly, for four months.
It still wakes up occasionally and wants a sightline. I let it have one.
We sit on the porch.
We drink the rye.
The mountain is dark and the cabin is warm and my hand is on his knee and his arm is around my shoulders and somewhere down the ridge an owl is calling, and somewhere down the path the prospects are running their last lap of the night, and somewhere in my field journal the four names are written in the margin and the box is closed and the ground is holding and the ground is going to keep holding because the ground is us, and we built it, and we are building it, every day, the two of us, on this porch, in this cabin, on this mountain, in this compound, with these people, for the rest of our lives.
"Petra."
"Mm."
"I love you."
"I know."
"Say it back."
"I love you."
"Say it again."
"I love you. I love you. I love you."
He laughs.
That is laugh number forty-one.
I am still counting.
I am going to keep counting.
The ground holds.