The long oak table in the center of the lobby had been stripped of magazines and covered with three plastic shower curtains and a clean white sheet from the laundry reserve.
Ada Bell lay on the linen with her head propped on a folded wool blanket, her boots removed and set neatly beneath the table. In the pale morning light cutting through the frosted lobby windows, her skin was the color of skim milk, her lips dry and cracked with cold.
Luis worked with a grim, rhythmic economy. He had cut away the rest of her flannel shirt, exposing her thin, bruised chest. Two heavy pressure dressings, soaked completely through with dark venous blood, were taped across her right collarbone and ribcage. From a steel coat hook clamped to the wall, a single five-hundred-milliliter plastic bag of normal saline dripped through a clear plastic tube into a vein in her left forearm—the last bag of fluid Luis possessed.
Mara stood on the other side of the table with an enamel basin of warm well-water and a rag, washing the frozen road mud from Ada’s knuckles.
“Luis,” Mara murmured, keeping her voice beneath the hiss of the saline line.
Luis didn’t look up from his tape. His hands, gloved in thin amber latex, were trembling slightly with exhaustion. He had placed a second decompression cannula between Ada’s fourth and fifth ribs, but only a thin, dark froth seeped from the plastic valve.
