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Not a punch. A shoulder, low and heavy, driven up under his arm the way a man moves a piece of furniture he has decided is in the wrong place. The polite man went sideways into the end table. The lamp went with him. The other man didn’t follow it up. He just stepped over and stood between the armchair and the couch with his empty hands down at his sides and looked at the door instead of at the man on the floor.

The shot came from somewhere to my left. Loud. Flat. The crack of a round that hadn’t been meant for the room it found. It went wide in the chaos. Traveled through space that should have been empty. Found me instead.

I went down hard.

Laminate against my hip. My left hand caught myself. Palm flat. Fingers splayed. The impact traveled up my arm and into my shoulder. My right hand went to my side before my brain registered why. Found warmth. Found wet. Found the wrongness of skin that had been whole a second ago and wasn’t anymore.

The burning started immediately. Left flank. Below the ribs. A line of fire that wrapped from front to back in a shallow arc. Not deep. Not the hit that drops you because something vital has quit. This one burned and kept burning because the round had taken a path through tissue that had plenty of nerves and nothing that needed to keep you alive right this second.

Blood under my fingers. Warm. Slick. I pressed. The pressure sent a fresh wave of burning along the wound track. I held it anyway. Pressure was procedure. Procedure was what happened when thinking stopped.

The breach continued around me.

Shouted commands. Someone in the kitchen. Glass breaking. A voice I didn’t recognize calling clear. Then another voice, somewhere behind the couch. Low. Unsurprised. Russian, and resigned.

I kept my hand pressed to my side. The blood seeped between my fingers. Warm. Steady. Not pulsing. Good sign. Arterial bleeding pulsed. Venous bleeding seeped. This was seeping.

I started talking.

Low. Fast. The way I always talked when I was frightened and there was no one to hear it except me. The words came out in the register I use for suture counts and medication doses and instructions delivered to people twice my size who needed to move now.

“Entry point left flank. Below the ribs. Anterior to posterior track. Approximately eight inches in length. Depth variable. Superficial anteriorly, deeper posteriorly where it exited. Exit wound present. I can feel it.” My fingers found the soft place below my ribs, around toward my back. Pressed. The same burning. The same wet. “Missed the spine. I can move my legs. Both extremities responsive.”

I flexed my left foot. Then my right. Both answered. Toes. Ankles. Knees. The signal traveled. Nothing interrupted.

“Breathing unimpeded. No shortness of breath. No coughing. No blood in sputum. Lung intact.” I took a deliberate breath. Held it. Released. The burn along the wound track flared. The lung expanded fully. No catch. No hitch. “Diaphragm functional. Liver possible but unlikely given trajectory. Spleen possible but…” I pressed deeper. The burn intensified. “…spleen tenderness would be more diffuse. This is localized to the wound track.”

Shock would mask damage. I knew that. The body’s first response to trauma is to lie about it -- endorphins, adrenaline, the whole chemical generosity of it. I have watched a dog hit by a truck get up and walk to its owner across a parking lot, wagging, and be dead inside the hour.

I couldn’t trust what I felt. I could only trust what I could verify.

“My fingers are shaking.” My right hand trembled against the wound. Adrenaline. Vasoconstriction. The misfire of a nervous system that had just been introduced to something it hadn’t expected. “That’s normal. That’s shock. I need to keep assessing.”

More boots. More voices. The overhead light caught movement above me. Someone passed. Didn’t stop. The breach had priorities. I wasn’t one of them. Not yet.

Blood pooled under my hip on the laminate. Warm. Spreading. I could feel the slickness of it against the fabric of my scrubs. How much was too much? I didn’t know. I’d never been the one bleeding before. The math was different from this side.

“Pulse.” I found my carotid with my left hand. Pressed. Counted. “One-oh-eight. Elevated but not tachycardic. Skin cool. Dry. That’s good. That’s compensatory. Not decompensating yet.”

Decompensation would come. Blood loss had a timeline. I knew the numbers. Twenty percent loss, compensatory mechanisms. Thirty percent, decompensation begins. Forty percent, unconsciousness. Fifty percent, death. I was nowhere near fifty. Nowhere near forty. Maybe twenty. Maybe less. The pool under my hip was concerning but not catastrophic. Yet.

I needed to slow it down. Pressure on both wounds. Anterior and posterior. My right hand pressed the entry. My left reached behind me, found the exit, pressed. The burn doubled. White light behind my eyes. I held it. Counted through it. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three.

“Both wounds packed. Pressure maintained. Bleeding controlled for now. Need elevation. Need…” I stopped. The room tilted slightly. Not much. A degree. Maybe two. The sway of a vestibular system recalibrating. “Need to stay flat. Flat is good. Flat is where the blood pressure lives.”

Someone shouted. Close. A name I didn’t catch. Boots moved past. The kitchen door swung. Glass crunched. The breach was still happening. I was still on the floor. My hands were still pressed to my side and my voice was still running because the voice was the only thing keeping the rest of me together.

“Vitals stable. Breathing stable. Neurologic intact. Bleeding controlled. Shock present but compensating.” I said it to the ceiling. To the overhead light. To whoever was listening. No one was listening. That was the point. The talking wasn’t for them. It was for me.

The laminate was cold against my cheek. The blood under my hip had reached a temperature that felt like nothing. Room temperature. The neutrality of fluid that had been outside the body long enough to forget it had a job.

I kept my hands pressed. Kept my voice running. Kept cataloging the same facts in the same order because order was the only thing I had left and I wasn’t giving it up.

I was the only one in the room right now who knew exactly what she was doing.

And I wasn’t going to stop knowing it.

Chapter Fifteen