Chapter 13: Terms

By dawn the silver was off him, and he was a man again on my cot.

Marla and the old woman had helped me drag him in from the porch on a bedsheet.

I had cut the chain out of the fur of his shoulders with bolt cutters.

The links had left raw ribbons of burn from his neck to his shoulder blades.

I had cleaned them, packed them and bound them, and I had not once let myself look at his face.

Now I sat on a stool beside the cot with a chart on my knee, and his eyes opened.

They went to the ceiling, then to the shelves of gauze and the bare bulb, then to me.

"Brennan," he said.

His voice was a rasp.

"Dr. Brennan," I said. "This is my clinic."

He tried to sit up.

I put two fingers on his breastbone and pushed, and he went back down onto the pillow.

That frightened me more than the silver had.

Three months ago he could have lifted the cot with me on it.

"Where am I?" he said.

"Georgia. A rogue clinic, on a cot, in my scrubs, bleeding on my sheet."

"You're alive."

"Obviously."

His hand came up off the blanket toward my face and stopped in the air, an inch short.

It stayed there, shaking.

I took his wrist, because that was my job, and counted.

His pulse had been sixty an hour ago.

Under my fingers it jumped to a hundred and ten.

Fever, I told myself, and laid his arm back down.

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