Chapter 6 6

The trauma bay was a slaughterhouse. Her uncle lay on the gurney, his face grey, a piece of rebar protruding from his abdomen.

A young resident was standing over him, hands shaking. "The attending is in with the pileup victims! I can't... I don't know where the bleeder is!"

The monitor screamed. Her uncle's blood pressure was tanking. 60 over 40.

Bronwyn looked at the wound. Her brain shifted gears. The noise of the room faded. The panic vanished. All that was left was anatomy.

"Spleen rupture," she said, her voice cutting through the noise. "Descending aorta compression. If you don't clamp it, he's dead in ninety seconds."

The resident looked at her, eyes wide. "You can't be in here! Family has to leave!"

Jennings was standing by the door. He watched Bronwyn. He saw the shift in her posture. The way her shoulders squared.

Bronwyn ignored the resident. She grabbed a pair of sterile gloves from the box on the wall and snapped them on.

"Give me the Kelly clamp," she ordered.

The authority in her voice was absolute. The resident, terrified and out of his depth, looked past her towards the door. Jennings gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod. The resident handed her the instrument.

Bronwyn stepped up to the table. She didn't look at her uncle's face. She looked at the blood.

She plunged her hand into the open abdominal cavity.

Jennings watched, mesmerized. She wasn't fumbling. She wasn't guessing. She was moving with the precision of a machine.

"Suction," she commanded.

She felt the tear. She guided the clamp blindly, by feel alone. Click.

The monitor's screaming alarm stopped. The rhythm steadied.

"BP is stabilizing," the nurse said, sounding shocked.

Bronwyn withdrew her hand. Her gloves were soaked in red. She stripped them off and tossed them into the biohazard bin.

"He's stable," she told the resident. "Pack it and wait for the attending."

She turned and walked out of the trauma bay. Her adrenaline crashed instantly. Her knees buckled.

She leaned against the wall in the hallway, closing her eyes.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

She opened her eyes. Jennings was standing there. He wasn't looking at her like she was trash anymore. He was looking at her like she was a puzzle he couldn't solve.

"Classified," she said, her voice flat and hard. She pushed herself off the wall.

"Bullshit," Jennings said. "You did a blind clamp on a ruptured spleen. That's not a residency skill. That's the kind of high-risk maneuver whispered about in black-market clinics. They call the surgeon who can do it 'The Ghost'."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, walking faster toward the exit.

Jennings kept pace with her. "You're lying. Who are you, Bronwyn?"

"None of your business."

The hallway started to tilt. The lack of food, the stress, the sight of blood-it was too much. Black spots danced in her vision.

She stumbled.

Jennings caught her elbow, his grip firm, stopping her fall but keeping a careful distance. He didn't pull her against him. He held her upright like a piece of valuable, but potentially contaminated, equipment.

"You look like a corpse," he said.

"Let me go," she mumbled.

"Shut up," he said. He signaled to one of his bodyguards who had been waiting silently down the hall. "Take her to the car. I'm not having her collapse in a hospital my family funds."