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She capped the dropper, set it beside the mortar, and reached for a fresh slide from the rack. Her movements were automatic. Her body knew the sequence. Her mind was elsewhere. Somewhere between the blood measure written in the ledger and the look on Marcus’s face when she had said enough that I may not survive it. The two things didn’t connect. They sat in separate parts of her chest and refused to speak to each other.

Marcus straightened. His hands came off the table. The wood held the impressions of his fingers for a moment before the grain settled back. He reached for the instrument case on the shelf above the worktable. He opened it. The hinges made a soft sound. Inside, the needles lay in their slots, sterile, packaged, twenty-gauge, the kind he used for blood draws. He selected three and set them on the table beside the mortar.

“We’ll need more than three,” Delphine said.

“I know.”

He selected three more and set them down, his movements measured and deliberate, the country doctor going through the motions of preparation because the motions were what he had. His hazel eyes tracked Delphine’s hands as she measured a second batch of sodium thiosulfate. Seven grams. The weights clicked. The white powder poured fine and steady into the second mortar.

“How much blood,” he said.

The question was flat and practical. His voice had found its register again, the one that asked useful questions and waited for useful answers.

“Four hundred milliliters for six doses,” Delphine said. “Eight hundred for twelve.”

Marcus absorbed this. His jaw worked once. Eight hundred milliliters was a lot of blood. More than a standard donation. Enough that the body noticed. Enough that the body sometimes didn’t recover.

“We’ll monitor vitals throughout,” he said. “I’ll set up the portable unit. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Oxygen saturation. If any of them drop below threshold, we stop.”

“We can’t stop.”

“We can and we will.” His voice didn’t rise. It carried the weight of someone stating something that wasn’t negotiable. “The counteragent needs a living heart. A dead one does us no good.”

Delphine didn’t argue. She measured two milliliters of distilled water for the second batch, and the liquid caught the lamplight, clear and waiting.

Outside, the night pressed against the window. The glass was black, the sky emptied of stars and moon both, nothing but the deep dark that came before the earliest hint of dawn, the kind of dark that had texture to it. The kind that held.

Marcus moved to the diagnostic unit against the east wall. He powered it on. The screen lit blue. He connected the blood pressure cuff, the pulse oximeter, and the leads for the EKG. His hands moved through the setup without hesitation. He had done this thousands of times, in exam rooms, in the back of ambulances, on kitchen tables when someone called him at three in the morning because their child had a fever that wouldn’t break.

He finished the setup and turned. Delphine was measuring the silver nitrate for the second batch, one milliliter at a time, drop by drop. The white suspension formed. She capped the dropper, set it down, and reached for a third mortar.

“That’s enough for six doses,” Marcus said.

“We need twelve.”

“Twelve doses from an eight-hundred-milliliter draw isn’t a standard donation, Del. It’s close to an exsanguination for someone your size.”

“I know what it is.”

She measured the sodium thiosulfate for the third batch. Seven grams. The weights clicked. Her hands were steady. The dried blood under her nails had flaked away from the movement. Her cut had reopened somewhere during the measuring. A thin line of red welled along the crease of her palm. She wiped it on her jeans and kept working.

Marcus watched her wipe the blood. His expression didn’t change. He crossed to the sink and ran cold water over a clean cloth. He brought it back and held it out.

“Your hand,” he said.

Delphine took the cloth. She pressed it against the cut. The cold bit. The cloth came away pink. She set it on the edge of the sink and returned to the mortar.

“Two hours and forty minutes,” she said.

Marcus checked his watch. He nodded once. His hazel eyes held hers across the worktable. The lamp threw his face half in shadow. The lines around his mouth were deep. The stubble along his jaw was gray. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept in two days, which he hadn’t, and like someone bracing to watch a person he cared about bleed out on his own exam table, which he was.

He didn’t say anything about either of those things. He picked up a fresh slide from the rack, turned it between his fingers, and set it down. “I’ll set up the chair.”

Chapter 17

The steel tray sat on the lab bench between them. Six needles, sterile, packaged, laid out in a neat row. Del had done it herself while Marcus was rinsing the centrifuge. He came back to the bench and stopped.

His jaw went tight.