“Don’t be so sure,” Rachel said. “You don’t seem to know—”

“Max!” Amina’s scream cut through the air with the force of a gunshot. “Max!”

“Down!” Max pushed Rachel to the ground and crouched over her, her rifle on her shoulder. She panned the perimeter, expecting a surge of rebel forces or a barrage of gunfire. Nothing moved. She listened. Nothing. “Clear! Come on.”

As soon as Max let her up, Rachel grabbed her rifle and they sprinted to the tent. Max burst inside, searching for enemy. Amina knelt by Grif, both hands pressed to his thigh. Scarlet streaked her arms.

“What happened?” Max dropped her rifle and squatted across from Amina.

“He woke up and started thrashing. The bleeding started so fast…” Amina’s breath caught. “There’s so much.”

“Don’t move.” Max pulled her med kit closer and dug around for drugs and bandages. She was running low on both.

Grif jerked, nearly throwing Amina aside, and shouted, “Contact! We have enemy contact!”

“It’s okay, Grif,” Max said calmly. “I’m here. You’re okay.”

Grif pushed his big body up with surprising strength, bracing himself on his arms. He stared from one to the other, his eyes glazed with confusion. Sweat rolled down his face, rivers of tears coursing through the paint and grime. “They’re shooting. Fuck. Shooting everywhere. Deuce!”

“I’m here. Keep your head down, buddy. You’re okay.” Max drew up an ampoule of Demerol, slid it into the IV, and pushed it home. “Everything’s okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

For an instant, Grif’s eyes cleared and he focused on Max. “Fuck, Deuce. I don’t want to die out here.”

“You’re not going to.”

“Tell Laurie I love her.”

“Fuck, no.” Max gripped his shoulders, her face close to his, and pushed him back down. She looked into his eyes as the Demerol started to take him away. “You’ll have to do that yourself. I hate that kind of thing.”

He grinned. “No wonder you never get any women.”

“Yeah. Like you would know.”

His lids fluttered closed and his body relaxed. Wiping sweat from her eyes, Max shifted down to where Amina held both hands on his thigh. Blood welled between her fingers and puddled on the floor. She’d run out of time. “Rachel, can you get that propane light from that table over there and figure out how to get it to work?”

Rachel crouched a few feet away, her pupils black and big as dimes. A pulse hammered in her throat. “Yes.”

Her voice was firm.

“Good. Prop it on that chair.”

For once, Rachel didn’t have a single question. She bent over the lantern-shaped light, ignited the propane, and brought it back. “What are you going to do?”

Max nearly smiled at the question, welcoming the familiar in the midst of chaos. “I need to explore this wound and get the bleeding stopped. I need both of you to help me.”

“In here?” Amina asked. “In the hospital ten—”

“Believe me, I’d like to have a nice clean OR table to put him on and a full set of shiny instruments, but we can’t move him. Right now, getting the bleeding stopped is our number one priority.”

“I’m sorry,” Amina said.

“Don’t be.” Max knew she sounded gruff and didn’t have time to worry about it. “You saved his life.”

“What can we do?” Rachel said.

Max pulled off her jacket and gear and dropped it next to her rifle. “Find that big pack of medical instruments we brought over from the hospital. Open it up next to me.”

While Rachel hunted for the instruments, Max tore open a foil container of Betadine, swabbed her forearms, and pulled on gloves from her kit. “Amina, get ready to take those scissors and cut the bandage free. Keep pressing down in the center of his thigh with your other hand. Rachel, put on a pair of gloves and open the gauze packs. I’ll need you to keep the field clear.”

“I…” Rachel glanced at Grif’s face. “Will he know?”

“Not consciously, but he might react. If he does start moving around, I want you to kneel on his lower legs and keep them still.”

“Okay,” Rachel whispered.

“I need you to do exactly what I say when I tell you to do it.”

“I will.”

Max looked across at Amina. Her jaw was set, her mouth a thin tight line. “You ready?”

“Yes.”

“You see those two small right-angle retractors that look like little scoops about two inches wide?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to use them to hold the wound open so I can see inside.” The less time she gave them to think about what they were about to do, the less likely they were to get nervous. “I’m going to take the bandages off, put the retractors into the wound, and you’re going to hold them apart. You’ll need to pull. You won’t hurt him. We’re going to save his life.”

Amina swallowed visibly. “All right.”

“Good. Now.” Max removed the field bandage, and bright red arterial blood immediately welled up and spilled down Grif’s thigh. Max slid the right-angle retractors into the center of the crater with their slim, eight-inch handles sticking out either side. “Amina, take these and pull. Rachel, keep the field as dry as you can. Just keep mopping it up.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, “I’ve got it.”

Max grabbed a hemostat and a gauze pad and studied the depths of the wound. The round had passed through the thick inner thigh muscles, missing the bone. The femoral artery ran deep between the muscles, coursing from the groin down to the knee where it branched to supply the calf and foot. The deep femoral branch came off the main artery a few inches below the groin crease to supply all the big muscles of the thigh. That had to be what was bleeding. She just had to find the tear in the artery and fix it.

The key to finding a bleeder in the midst of a pool of blood and shredded muscle was to look—to see, to distinguish the border between the damaged and the undamaged. There, at the edge of destruction, the natural planes of the body remained, even in the worst trauma, pristine layers radiating out from the injury. Carefully she swabbed, ignoring the small bleeders that would eventually stop on their own. She identified the various muscles, tracing the course of the artery in her mind. It should be here, diving beneath the adductors toward the femur, but it wasn’t. The round had probably taken out a segment of the vessel along with a sizeable chunk of muscle. She’d have to look higher to find the proximal end, the one leading from the main artery. If she could control that, the hemostatic gauze packs and pressure bandage would eventually take care of the rest of the bleeding until they could get him into the operating room and clean up the wound. She couldn’t fix it if she couldn’t see it.

“Amina, pull harder.”

Amina sucked in a breath and did as Max asked. Grif groaned and his thigh tensed. The undamaged muscles flexed, blood squirted, and the field disappeared under a pool of red.

“Rachel,” Max snapped, “keep him still.”

Rachel straddled both of Grif’s lower legs, a knee on either side of his calves, and held him down with her body. Leaning forward, she swabbed, her gloves drenched with blood.

Max put a finger deep into the wound, pulled back a ragged flap of muscle, and widened her field of vision, letting the filmy strands of fascia separating one band of muscle from the other guide her eyes along the native planes. A tan ring the width of a pencil pulsed in the depth of the wound like a tiny heart. “There you are.”

Only five millimeters wide, the pliable artery jumped with every beat of Grif’s heart, pumping out blood in a steady stream. Max slid the open jaws of the hemostat on either side of the severed vessel and clamped it closed. Immediately the bleeding slowed.

“Oh my God,” Rachel murmured. “Is that it? Did you get it?”

“Almost.” Max kept her gaze fixed on the end of the fragile vessel and supported the instrument in her palm. If Grif came to again and thrashed around, that artery would shred like wet Kleenex. “Just keep him still a minute longer.”

“I will.”

“Rachel, the blue foil pack. Pass it to me.” Max opened the 4.0 nylon suture pack, gently rested the hemostat on Grif’s thigh, and loaded the curved needle into the jaws of a blunt needle holder. Holding the hemostat steady again, she passed the suture through the vessel above the hemostat, brought the ends of the nylon around the instrument, and tied them down. When she eased off the stat, the stump of the severed artery filled with blood and throbbed as if it were alive and trying to escape. But the ligature held and the bleeding stopped.

“There you go, you bastard.” Max took the first full breath she’d had in five minutes. She found another hemostatic bandage and packed it into the wound. After wrapping his thigh, she gave him another dose of antibiotics. She glanced from Rachel to Amina. They both looked a little dazed. “You did great. Both of you. Rachel, you can get off his legs now. He’s out for a while.”

Rachel stood and pulled at her blood-caked gloves. “It’s so hot in here. Isn’t it? I—don’t feel…”

Max grabbed her as she started to sway. “Easy. You’re okay. Just a little too much sun.”

“I’m fine,” Rachel muttered, leaning against Max’s side. “I’m not usually—”

“This isn’t usual. Come on. Lie down over here.” Max kept her arm around Rachel’s waist and guided her to the cot. “That’s it. Close your eyes.”

Rachel stared up at her. “I don’t believe you did that. It was…amazing.”

Max smiled. “Thanks, but not really. It’s what I do.”

“All the time?”

“Yes.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I know. It is.” Max pulled an IV bag from the supplies she’d pilfered earlier. “You’re dehydrated. I’m going to give you some fluid. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”