“This is her, isn’t it? What are you doing?” Zeth’s voice is the only one in the room, now. I hadn’t noticed everyone leave while I worked, but I’m thankful for the silence.
“Yeah. This is her.” I quickly tell him what the blonde told me, while I hold my hands over my mouth, watching and waiting. I count to twenty, with my hand resting on Lexi’s chest, checking to make sure she’s still breathing.
“Sloane?”
“I need to find out if her lung’s been punctured. If it has, air will be escaping through her lungs. The plastic bag will inflate as it leaves the wound.” Another five seconds. Ten. Alexis is still breathing, but the plastic doesn’t inflate.
“Her lung’s fine,” I say, ripping the plastic bag and tape from her skin. Shame I can’t do a similar sort of triage test to tell if her heart’s been grazed. The tachycardia could mean that it has, but it could also just mean that she’s in shock. Which she definitely is.
“Now what?” Zeth’s not panicking. His eyes are fixed on me, steady, focused and alert.
“Now I have to try and find the bullet.” I press down Lexi’s stomach, waiting to feel the firmness that signals peritonitis—that there’s an internal bleed somewhere. I don’t feel it, though. This means I can just follow the trajectory of the wound with the tweezers I’ve been given and hopefully, if fate is on our side, I’ll find the bullet and not have to open her up to assess the damage visually.
Zeth reacts swiftly and decisively, handing me what I need when I ask for it. I run into problems pretty much immediately. The tweezers are too short; they’re regular cosmetic ones and only reach a couple of inches into the wound. The alcohol they’ve given me to sterilize with is fucking schnapps. I have to send Zeth in search of something with less sugar and added crap; he comes back with high-grade Russian vodka and I feel like kissing him. But then, Lexi worsens further, topping everything off with agonal breathing—gasping, labored breaths, a desperately bad sign that tells me either her heart is under massive strain or she’s in renal or liver failure.
“Fuck. I don’t know what to do. Fuck!” I’m cracking. I can’t fucking do this. She’s going to die. I’ve been worried for years that she’s dead, but she hasn’t been, and now the most colossal irony of all is that she’s dying right in front of me and I can’t do a fucking thing about it.
Zeth takes the tweezers out of my hand and stalks around the other side of the kitchen table, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Sloane. Sloane, look at me.”
I don’t. I can’t. I’m staring at the pallid face of my baby sister, watching as death closes its fist around her slight frame. I know I’m crying but I can’t feel the tears. Can’t feel my rasping breaths. My body isn’t my own at the moment; it’s been taken over by a force way greater and far more powerful than me: grief.
“Sloane!” My ears ring as my head whips around. Zeth slaps me so hard I see stars. The look on his face is grim and determined. “Sloane, she’s dying. You have to think. What do you need to do?” He shakes me hard.
“I don’t know which part of her is damaged inside. It could be…it could be her heart. But then it could be…her liver. Or her kidneys. I don’t know.”
“Okay, well, we have to use logic. Her lips are turning blue. What does that mean?”
“Hypoxia. Lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“And what causes that?”
“Cardiac arrest. Punctured lung. Massive strain on other organs.” Anything. It could be anything.
“It’s not a punctured lung, we already know that. And trajectory of the wound is down and away from the heart, so it’s unlikely to be damage there, either. Cardiac arrest could come from damage to the liver and the kidneys?”
“Yes. Caused by excessive bleeding.”
“Okay. So either way we need to open her up, Sloane. We need to see what part of her is bleeding and we need to fix it.” He hands me the knife the kid found for me—mercifully it’s a scalpel. And a sharp one at that. I have no idea who this belongs to or why they have it, but it’s a small mercy. If the only instrument available to me were a vegetable knife then I would give up here and now.
“You can do this, Sloane. All you need to do is concentrate.”
I’m glancing wildly around the room, trying to think something I can do, anything, to prevent the need to cut into my sister. But there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing I can do. Zeth takes my face in his hands and holds me still, locking me in his steady gaze. “You’ve got this,” he says.
I’m still freaking out. Still shitting myself, but the solid way he tells me that gives me a flicker of hope. I can do this. I have to.
A ragged gasping sound from the table steels my nerves. Alexis is dying. Alexis is fucking dying, and I’m not about to let that happen. Not after all letting her down so badly when she was taken. She needed me then and I couldn’t do anything about it, but I can do something about this.