The continuous flatline tone screamed through the perforated steel grille of the Rauland console.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
Elena Rostova knelt on the green terrazzo tiles behind Nurse Station 4B. Her forehead pressed against the varnished oak rail, her knuckles white against her mouth.
The air in her throat tasted of ash and salt.
In her mind, the sterile white tile of Operating Room Three rose up like an unhealed wound: November fourteenth, twenty-nineteen.
Her seventeen-year-old brother Anton had arrived with a torn femoral muscle from a cycling crash on the marsh road. It was supposed to be a routine twenty-minute irrigation.
Then came the sudden drop in blood pressure. The foul, grey fluid bubbling from the surgical incision. The surgical team shouting across the blood-soaked drapes.
And then came Director Evelyn Cross, stepping into the scrub room with a red biohazard folder, looking down her aristocratic nose at the twenty-two-year-old intern nurse.
