By the time Arthur Vance reached the twelfth patient—a twenty-two-year-old comms specialist named Jacob Torres—the medical stronghold was running with the fluid smooth speed of a major trauma center.
Toby was cycling sterile saline bags through the warming heater. Meanwhile, Sarah Lin, who had recovered enough strength to walk on her own, was administering oral rehydration electrolytes and vitamin cocktails to the steadied soldiers. In the corner of the room, Grimm lay resting his heavy jaw across the boots of three young scouts, his slow, rhythmic breathing and heavy presence providing a deep psychological anchor that kept the shell-shocked soldiers from spiraling into panic.
Pip was perched atop an emergency locker, his third talon gently picking at a stray wire, his golden feathers streaming a gentle, radiant warmth that kept the bunker’s surrounding heat at a perfect twenty-two degrees.
But when Arthur placed his hands on Torres’s lower-back spine, his fingers froze.
Beneath the young soldier’s thin flight tunic, along the lower-back bones, Arthur felt a hard, waving mass roughly four inches long. It wasn’t a blood bruise or a displaced bone fragment. It was moving with a sickening, rhythmic pulse beneath the skin.
Arthur tapped his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe, switching to subsurface infrared deep ring:
