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“Then say the true thing before I ask you to leave.”

“There’s a truck coming up behind me.” He didn’t move from where he stood. “My brother’s in it with a hole through his right shoulder. Through-and-through. He’s been bleeding for forty minutes and the man driving has a rag on it that isn’t holding.”

The floor did something under me. “Take him to a hospital.”

“A hospital calls the police inside the hour. That’s not me being dramatic, that’s the statute.” His voice didn’t move at all. “You’ve got anesthesia. You’ve got suture. You’ve got saline and a table that drains and no legal obligation to report a gunshot wound in a human being, because humans aren’t your patient population.”

“That’s not a loophole, that’s a species.”

“I’m aware of what it is.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to…”

“Yes.” Just that. No decoration on it. “Every part of it. And I’m asking anyway, because he’s got about twenty minutes and you’re the only room in three counties.”

Headlights swung across the wall.

Both of us turned. A truck came off the county road too fast and into the gravel sideways, and even through the glass I could hear the engine and the stones going out from under the tires.

I was through the door before I decided to be. The cold hit. The gravel bit through my shoes.

The truck was full of blood. Dark and wet, it caught the light and threw it back red. The volume of it hit me like a physical thing. More blood than a body should be able to lose and still have a pulse. In the center of it was a man. Curled on his side. One arm bent across his chest. The other hanging loose over the edge. His clothes were soaked black. His face was turned away, and I couldn’t see if his eyes were open.

“He quit talking about four miles back,” he said.

The silver-haired man went up over the side without a word and got his forearms under the man’s shoulders, and that was the first blood that ever got on him in front of me.

I rushed back into the clinic and my hands were already moving. I didn’t decide to move them. They decided. My right hand found the crash cart key on the ring in my pocket. My left hand was reaching for the supply cabinet before my brain had finished processing the truck bed. The blood. The volume of it. The fact that a human being was lying in it and the man in my doorway had brought him here instead of an ER and I was about to open drawers I had no business opening for a species I had no license to treat.

The key turned in the crash cart lock. The drawer slid open. Gauze. Bandages. Saline bags. Scissors. Things that had names and purposes I understood in one context and was about to apply in another.

I turned toward the procedure table. Stitch was still there. Asleep. Unmoving. I would have to move him. I would have to clear the table. I would have to put a bleeding man where a three-legged cat had been sleeping ten seconds ago.

My hands kept moving. They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for fear. They reached for the cat because the cat was in the way of the thing that needed doing, and the thing that needed doing was the only thing that mattered.

Chapter Three

Patch

The surgical suite was narrow. Stainless tables built for animals that weighed more than men. Overhead lights that hummed when they warmed. It smelled like antiseptic and rubber.

We had him halfway onto the table when she turned around.

“Table. Now. On his good side. Left side down.”

We shifted him. Freak groaned. His eyes were open and finding nothing, and his color had gone the gray-white I have seen exactly twice before and did not care to see again.

She pointed at Brazil. “You’re on the far side. When I hand you something and say hold, you hold it exactly where I put it and you don’t move your hands for any reason.”

Then she pointed at me. “You. Instruments. Hand me what I ask for when I ask for it. Don’t hand me anything else. Don’t talk unless I ask you a question.”

I nodded and left it there.

Nobody had given me an order in that tone in twenty years. She did it without once registering that it was unusual, which I understood later was the whole of her, and understood right then only as a thing that made the room feel steadier.

She leaned over Freak. “I’m putting you under. You’re going to sleep. You’re going to wake up with a drain in your shoulder and antibiotics in your system and a headache that will make you wish you’d died. Questions?”

His mouth moved. Nothing came out.