Page 63 of Blood & Ash

Marcus capped the first syringe. He labeled it in his slanting handwriting. COLE. 10:47 PM. The time mattered. The suspension set in six hours. They had until dawn.

He reached for the second vial.

Behind him, Delphine was on her knees.

She had moved from the anchor point to the center of the clinic floor, one hand braced against the concrete and the other pressed flat to her sternum. Her breathing was wrong, too shallow and too fast, and the rhythm stuttered. One full breath, then two short ones, then a pause that lasted too long. Her head was bowed. Her dark curls hung around her face. Blood from her palm had smeared across the front of her shirt. The cut was still open. It hadn’t begun to close.

Marcus turned from the workbench and crossed to the diagnostic rig. The screen showed her vitals in real time. Heart rate: one hundred and thirty-four. Blood pressure: ninety over fifty. Oxygen: eighty-seven and dropping.

“Del.”

She didn’t look up. Her hand pressed harder against her sternum. Her breathing hitched. She took one short inhale and released nothing on the exhale, then gasped, and the sound hurt to hear.

Marcus moved to the crash cart. He pulled the blood pressure cuff from its hook. The Velcro made a sharp sound in the quiet. He crossed to Delphine and knelt beside her. His knees hit the concrete hard.

“Give me your arm.”

She lifted her left arm. The right stayed pressed to her chest. Her fingers were cold. Marcus wrapped the cuff around her bicep and pumped. The gauge climbed. One-forty. One-sixty. One-eighty. He released the valve and the needle dropped to ninety over forty-eight, much too low.

“Oxygen tank,” he said. He said it to the room. Delphine was the only one there. Her eyes had closed. Her head tipped forward. Her breathing had gone to twenty-eight per minute, shallow and fast, the kind of breathing that preceded something worse.

Marcus reached for the portable oxygen unit beside the crash cart. He hauled it across the floor. The wheels caught on the concrete. He dragged it. The tank clanged against the leg of the workbench. He didn’t stop. He got the mask. He fit it over Delphine’s face. The elastic caught in her hair. He adjusted it. The hiss of oxygen filled the clinic. The monitor showed eighty-four. Eighty-three. Eighty-two.

“Breathe,” he said. “Del. Breathe with it.”

She tried. Her chest rose, fell, and rose again, but the rhythm was wrong: two short pulls, a pause, then one long one that didn’t reach depth. The monitor showed eighty-one. Eighty. Seventy-nine.

Outside, the night held its quiet. The clinic held the hiss of oxygen and the sound of Delphine’s breathing fighting against something her body couldn’t name.

Marcus checked the IV line he had placed twenty minutes earlier. The site was clean. The drip was running, normal saline at one hundred milliliters per hour. He adjusted the rate to one-twenty. Her pupils answered his penlight, equal and sluggish.

“Talk to me,” he said.

Delphine’s lips moved under the mask. No sound came out. Her hand slid from her sternum to the floor. Her arm buckled at the elbow. She caught herself on her palm. The cut reopened. Fresh blood welled and pooled on the concrete.

The monitor showed seventy-seven. Seventy-six. Seventy-five.

Marcus reached for the phone on the workbench. His hand closed on the receiver. He lifted it. Put it down. Lifted it again. He dialed three digits. Stopped. Set the receiver back in its cradle.

He would handle this himself.

Delphine’s collapse happened without warning.

One moment she was kneeling. The next her arm buckled at the elbow, and she went down sideways. Her body hit the concrete floor. The sound was hollow, bone against hard surface with no give and no cushion: just the flat impact of a body with no strength left to catch itself.

Marcus was across the room in under two seconds. His boots left the floor. He covered the distance between the workbench and Delphine’s body in one long stride. He dropped to his knees beside her. The concrete bit through his pants. He didn’t feel it.

Her lips were going gray. The color drained from them in real time. Pink to ashen to the gray white of compromised perfusion. The monitor above the crash cart registered the change before his eyes did. The heart rate alarm went off first: a high, insistent beeping that climbed in pitch as the number on the screen spiked. One-forty. One-fifty. One-sixty. Then it crashed. The number dropped. One-twenty. Ninety. Sixty. Forty. The alarm changed to a lower pitch and longer intervals, then the flat tone, sustained and unbroken, the kind of sound that didn’t stop until someone turned it off or the heart started again.

Marcus put two fingers to Delphine’s carotid. He held them there for five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Nothing: no pulse, no movement under his fingertips, only the cool skin of her neck and the absence where a heartbeat should have been.

He moved immediately.

He set the heel of his right hand on the center of her chest and locked his left over it, elbows straight, shoulders over his hands. He pressed to full compression depth, two inches, maybe two and a half, and counted.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

His voice was stripped of everything except the count: no volume, no emotion, only numbers delivered in a flat rhythm that matched the compressions. Thirty compressions at a hard, steady pace. His shoulders drove the motion. His back stayed straight. The technique was automatic. He had done this a thousand times. On kitchen tables. In the back of ambulances. On clinic floors with the overhead lights humming and a flatline tone filling the room.