They Left Her to Bleed, So She Healed the Untouchable novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Shed
Four million people watch Colson lock Susanna in a freezing shed, bleeding. Reborn in that second, she packs her own wound without a tear, and Keir Halverson, whom nobody may touch, reaches for her leg.
Millions of people watched my brother lock me in the shed.
I knew because the viewer count glowed on the camera bolted over the door, beside a small red light.
The shed was an old drying hut on the ridge, with one boarded window and a floor of packed dirt.
My left thigh was torn open from hip to knee where the rusted fence wire had caught it.
Blood filled my boot and ran out under the door into the snow.
Colson stood outside in his blue show jacket, the one with the logo on the chest, and eased the door shut with both hands, the way you close a door on a sleeping child.
Then he slid the iron bar across.
"Ten minutes, Sue," he said through the gap. "I'll send the medic back. I promise."
He said it warmly, with his famous jaw tipped toward the lens.
"Please let me stay with her," Tiffany said behind him.
"You're in shock," Colson told her. "You're coming with me."
Tiffany crouched at the crack under the door. Her big pale eyes were wet.
She pushed a grey wool scarf through the gap. "Keep pressure on it. I'll make him send someone, I swear."
Her boots were dry to the laces, and mine were soaked to the knee.
I noticed it and let it go, because I was bleeding.
Then Colson turned back to his camera and used his hero voice. "Folks, I love my sister. But she cut our team's food rope to farm votes, and tonight she finds out what that costs."
His footsteps went down the hill, and Tiffany's soft crying went with them.
The bar clicked home, and I remembered everything.
I had already died in this shed once.
The first time I screamed for my brother until my throat tore. I begged the camera. I cried until I couldn't see the door.
Nobody came, and before morning I stopped being cold.
This time I lay on the dirt and waited for the crying to start.
It didn't.
My eyes stayed dry. I had spent every tear on that family, and none of it had ever bought me one kind word.
The first time I never looked up. This time I did.
Bundles of dried yarrow hung from the rafters, tied with string by whoever had kept this hut.
My grandmother Ada raised me on a mountain and taught me that yarrow closes a cut.
I pulled my belt out of its loops and cinched it high on my thigh.
I dragged down three bundles, crushed the dry flowers in my fist and pressed them into the wound.
It hurt so badly that the whole floor went white.
I wrapped Tiffany's scarf over the packing and knotted it with my teeth.
Then I breathed until the white went away.
I had spent one whole life crawling toward my family on my knees.
So I stopped waiting for him.
I turned my head and looked up at the red light over the door.
"You all watched that," I said. "Remember it."
My voice came out cracked and flat, and the counter on the camera did not move.
Then boots crunched in the snow outside, more than one pair.
"Sir, the producer says nobody goes in there," a woman whispered.
"Open it," a man said.
The bar scraped up and the door swung wide on a square of white sky.
A man stood in it in a dark suit with snow on his shoulders and black leather gloves on both hands.
He had grey eyes and a hard, tired face, and scar tissue showed at his wrist where the cuff had ridden up.
Behind him Ben Rask, the camera operator, reached for the switch on his rig.
"Keep it live," the man said, without looking at him.
The clock under the counter on the camera said I had been alone twelve minutes.
The man took in the belt, the crushed yarrow, the grey scarf knotted over my leg.
"Susanna Wyland," he said. "You did this yourself."
"Nobody else was here," I said.
His jaw moved. He came in and knelt on the dirt beside my leg.
"Mr. Halverson, don't," the woman behind him said. "You can't."
Everyone on that ridge knew the rule. Nobody touched Keir Halverson, and he touched nobody.
He pulled off his right glove with his teeth.
Then he put his bare hand on my leg, and it was shaking, and he did not take it away.
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