4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
She Shouldn't Be Here
A stranger arrives through the Portal—tall, blonde, professional. A doctor, Luke announces, as if that explains everything. But Jamie wakes mid-surgery, pinned down and screaming while hands he doesn't recognise extract something horrifying from his chest. Outside, Luke clutches the dogs and listens to every cry. Inside, Glenda works with a t-shirt for a cloth and no anaesthetic. Four people, one emergency, and the grey mess on a ruined shirt that proves how close death had come.
Some rescues look nothing like salvation from the inside.
Jamie surfaces from unconsciousness into white-hot agony. Strange hands press him down. A woman he's never seen leans over his chest, doing something that makes him scream. Duke growls, attacks, draws blood that isn't blood. By the time the charcoal splinter emerges—long and black and trailing grey infection—Jamie has already decided: She shouldn't be here. And neither should I.
Luke experiences it from outside the tent, banished with the dogs while the man he loves howls in pain. Every scream lands like a blade. Duke writhes in his arms. Henri whimpers. Luke rocks them both, whispering prayers he doesn't believe, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face. Please be okay. Please be okay.
Glenda works with what she has: a clean t-shirt, steady hands, years of training that strip medicine to its essence. No sterile field. No anaesthetic. No guarantee. Just a festering wound that will kill her patient if she doesn't act, and a small dog's teeth in her arm as thanks. The job isn't about being liked. It's about being needed.
Paul holds Jamie down, watches pus and charcoal emerge, fights his own nausea while defending the woman his brother somehow convinced to cross dimensions. When Jamie wakes hostile and ungrateful, Paul delivers the truth no one else will speak: If she wasn't here, you'd be bloody dead within a few days.
Four perspectives. One surgery. The moment everything changes.
