The antiseptic smell was the first thing Ethan noticed, which was stupid, because the whole world smelled of rot now and the only reason he could still catch a trace of alcohol swab was that he was carrying the last case of it.Was. He had been carrying it."Lena," he said. "Put the case down."She didn't. She stood in the doorway of the supply room with the crate hugged to her chest, the way she used to hold her tablet on ward rounds, and she did not look at him. Behind her, Dr. Marcus Hale had already gotten the shutters up on the loading bay. Cold air came in, thick with the sound of the horde, a wet, dragging murmur, like a river made of throats.Three years. Ethan had spent three years of the end of the world sewing this team together. He had set Marcus's broken wrist in a gas station bathroom. He had given Lena his own antibiotics when her cut went red. He had asked her to marry him on a rooftop, with a ring made from a surgical clamp and a strip of copper wire, and she had laug

By dawn, the horde had drifted.He'd watched them go the way you watch weather leave: slowly, with a sort of suspicion that it might change its mind. Without whatever the System had done, without that bell tolling in the dirt, they would have torn him apart. Now they wandered off in loose clusters toward the highway, drawn by some other call, and left him sitting against the wall of the depot with a fever, a stolen scalpel, and a head full of questions.He checked the interface.It wasn't a screen so much as a thing he could think open, a pale ledger hanging at the edge of his vision.Name: Ethan Vance Occupation: Physician Level: 1 Vitality: 31% Lifespan: 38 years (base) Skills: Basic Diagnostic Eye Tools: Spectral Scalpel (E)Thirty-eight years. He was thirty-four. He tried not to think too hard about what that arithmetic meant.Water first. Then somewhere to hide. Then, if he was very lucky, a plan.The depot's office had been looted but not burned. A vending machine still stood up

He did the prep in nine.Behind the counter, in a drawer someone had missed, he found a box of nitrile gloves and a half-dozen sealed gauze packs. In the stock room there was a bottle of isopropyl alcohol that had not evaporated, three out-of-date ampoules of lidocaine, and a headlamp with a dying battery. Not much. He'd operated with less, once, in a school gymnasium, during the second week, by flashlight, on a girl who had been hit by a car.She hadn't made it. He hadn't forgotten that either."Roll him on his stomach," Ethan said. "Head turned left. Put the rolled blanket under his chest."Tamsin did it with a care that told him she'd done this before, in other places, for other people. When she was done she stood with her hands hanging."What do you need me to do?""Hold the lamp. Keep it steady. Whatever you see, don't make a sound, and don't move it.""I've seen worse.""No," Ethan said, gently. "You haven't seen this."He scrubbed his right hand to the elbow with alcohol, pulle

Garrick Voss woke on the second morning, slowly, the way big animals do.Ethan was changing the dressing when it happened. He felt the change in the man's breathing first: the shallow pull deepening, the muscles under his fingers going from slack to attentive. When he looked up, Voss's eyes were open and fixed on him, clear and brown and a good deal sharper than a man two days from death had any right to be."Don't sit up," Ethan said."Wasn't going to." The voice was a rasp, like a rusted gate. Voss swallowed, tried again. "Where's my sergeant?""Here," said Tamsin, from the doorway, and the way she said it, flat and careful, told Ethan she'd been standing there for some time. She crossed the room in three strides and stopped beside the bedroll, her hands twitching like she wanted to touch him and didn't dare. "Captain.""Reyes." Voss looked her over, the shaved head, the grime, the exhaustion cut into her face. "You look like hell.""You look worse."Something that was almost a smil

The man's name was Brannock. He lived another ten minutes, which Ethan thought was generous.He didn't enjoy it. That was the thing he kept turning over, afterward, with the sun climbing slowly over the dead street and the bodies of the Rustjaws lying where they'd fallen. He had expected to feel something big. Vindication, maybe, or horror. Instead there was only the flat, clean tiredness of a long shift, and the strange knowledge that he'd stopped counting people as people somewhere around the second knee.Tamsin stood beside him with her hands in her pockets. "They'd have killed us.""I know.""They'd have eaten what was left.""I know, Tamsin.""Then why do you look like that?"He turned the scalpel in his fingers and watched the blue light catch on the edge. "Because I think I'm getting good at this," he said. "And I don't know if that's a thing I should be."She was quiet for a long while. Then she said, in a voice almost too low to hear, "Nobody's good at this. We're just still