Chapter OneZero

The kid was bleeding through his third dressing, and the countdown on the dashboard said 00:41.

"Pressure," I told myself, which was also what I told Sam, and also what I told the dressing, because at three in the morning I'll talk to anything. "Firm, steady pressure. That's all we're doing. We're pressing on things. I'm very good at pressing on things."

"Your hands are shaking," Sam said.

"That's the ambulance."

"We're not moving."

He had me there. We were parked crooked across two lanes of Calder Street, hazard lights clicking, because every screen in Harbour City had switched on at the same moment and Jonah had braked so hard my head hit the cabinet. The dashboard display had gone black and then white and then shown a number. So had Jonah's phone. So had mine, in my pocket, buzzing against my leg like it wanted to tell me something urgent and had forgotten the words.

00:38.

"Mo," Jonah said from the front. He's been doing this job for twenty-six years and his voice has one setting, which is calm. Hearing it come out thin made my stomach drop. "Mo, the billboards."

I looked. Through the windscreen, past his shoulder, the big screen over the Halliday junction had stopped advertising car insurance. It showed the same number as everything else, in the same plain white font, ticking down. So did the screen above the pharmacy. So did the bus shelter. The whole street was counting.

"Probably a hack," I said. "Some kind of... Wi-Fi thing." I have no idea how Wi-Fi works. I passed my exams three weeks ago and the exams were not about Wi-Fi.

"Is it the end of the world?" Sam asked.

He was nine. He had a gash down his left shin from a broken patio door, a Harbour Hawks shirt three sizes too big for him, and the specific calm that kids get when the adults are panicking and they've decided to be polite about it. His mum was following in a taxi. I'd promised her he'd be fine. That's a thing you're trained not to promise.

"No," I said. "It's a Tuesday. The world doesn't end on a Tuesday. That's a rule."

"Who made the rule?"

"Me. Just now. Hold this." I pressed his hand flat over the fresh pad. "Push like it owes you money."

He pushed. Good kid.

00:21.

I checked his pulse because checking things is what I do when I can't control things. Fast but strong. Cap refill fine. Skin warm. He'd lost some blood, not a scary amount, and the bleeding was slowing now that someone with a firm grip was on it. Airway, breathing, circulation. All present. All accounted for. If the world was ending, it was going to have to end around my patient, because my patient was stable.

"Jonah," I said, "can we keep going? Harbour General's six minutes away."

"Lights are out at the junction." He had the radio handset to his mouth. "Control, this is Medic Fourteen, do you copy? Control?"

The radio answered with a low tone. Not static. A tone, pure and patient, like a hearing test.

00:09.

Every phone in the city made the same sound at once. I heard it through the ambulance walls, from the flats above the pharmacy, from a car somewhere behind us. One soft chime, a thousand times over.

Sam's hand found my sleeve.

"Okay," I said. "Okay okay okay. You know what we're going to do? We're going to look at me. Not the screens. Me. I'm extremely boring to look at. Ask anyone."

"You have a cool hair tie."

"It's from the hospital. They have a whole bucket of them. I'm basically a thief."

00:03.

00:02.

I don't know what I expected at zero. A bang, maybe. A flash. The power cutting out.

What happened was that the air went heavy, like the second before a thunderstorm, and then something came through the windscreen.

---

It was the size of a big dog, if a big dog had been put together by someone who'd only had dogs explained to them over the phone. Too long in the back. Grey hide that looked wet. A head that was mostly mouth. It hit the glass with its shoulder and the whole windscreen came in at once in a sheet of little cubes, and Jonah went sideways out of his seat and didn't get up.

Above its head, floating in the same plain white font as the countdown, hung a name and a number: Hollow Hound, Level 2.

My brain made a small, polite noise and left the building.

This happens to me. I don't know if it happens to everyone. In training scenarios, in the first few seconds, I go completely still while a voice in my head reads out a list of every way I'm about to fail. It's a long list. It's very well organised. My instructor called it "buffering" and said I'd grow out of it.

I had not grown out of it.

The hound pulled itself over the dashboard, glass crunching under its claws, and swung that terrible head between the front seats, and looked at Sam.

And Sam, who was nine, made a very small sound.

That did it. That always does it. The list in my head just stopped, mid-item, like someone had pulled the plug. Because there was a person in front of me who needed something, and I knew what to do with that.

I grabbed the first heavy thing I could reach. It was the oxygen cylinder, the small one, still in its bracket, so I yanked bracket and all. "Sorry," I said to the ambulance, and swung it at the hound's face.

It was not a good swing. I have never played a sport. But the cylinder weighed four kilos and I had panic on my side, and it caught the thing across the snout with a clang that rang through the whole vehicle. The hound jerked back. Its claws skidded on the glass. It made a sound like a bin lorry reversing.

"Sam," I said, "under the stretcher. Keep your hand on that leg. Pressure."

He went. He kept pushing. Bless him forever.

The hound came back.

This time I didn't have a plan, only a cylinder and the narrow space between the stretcher and the cabinets. It lunged through the gap between the seats and I jammed the cylinder crossways into its mouth. Its teeth closed on the metal. It shook its head like a terrier with a toy and nearly took my arms off, and I hung on, and the voice in my head said very calmly, You are going to die in a Medic Fourteen on Calder Street and nobody is going to play your mum's voice notes back for you.

Then the world stopped.

Not really. The hound was still there, jaws locked, eyes rolling. My arms were still screaming. But a panel opened in front of me, right in the middle of everything, clear as a phone screen and just as rude.

The System welcomes you, Mara Okafor.
Select a combat class: Blade · Bulwark · Hunter

Three options. Three little glowing boxes. Under each one, a picture, the way a game shows you a picture. A woman with a sword. A man with a shield like a door. Someone with a bow, in silhouette, aiming.

I want to be clear that I did think about it. For maybe half a second. A sword would have been very useful right then.

But my eyes went past the panel, the way they'd been trained to do in a room full of noise, to the floor behind the stretcher. Sam was under there with his hand clamped to his leg, exactly as I'd told him, and blood was coming between his fingers again because the dressing had slipped when he crawled.

A sword would not help with that.

"No," I said out loud. "No, thank you. I'm busy."

The panel flickered. If a rectangle could look offended, it did.

The boxes went grey, one by one, and a single line of smaller text crawled across the bottom of the panel: searching for a compatible path.

"Brilliant," I said. "You do that."

I let go of the cylinder with one hand. The hound's head whipped sideways and slammed me into the cabinet, and something in my shoulder said ow in a way I was going to hear about later. I didn't care. I dropped to my knees, grabbed the trauma shears off my belt (I call them Steve, which is a long story and not a good one), and reached under the stretcher.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, it's me. Boring Mo. Let's swap hands."

I put my palm over the wound. Pressure. Real pressure, the kind you lean your body weight into. I felt his pulse jump under the heel of my hand, and I talked to him the whole time, the way you talk to someone who is frightened. Easy, nothing words. Good. That's it. You're doing brilliantly. You're the best patient I've had all week, and I've had a man who swallowed a key.

Behind me, the hound spat out the cylinder.

I heard it hit the floor and roll. I heard the claws. I did not turn around, because the bleeding was nearly under control and if I let go now we'd start again from nothing.

"Sam," I said, "close your eyes."

He didn't. He was looking past me. His eyes went very wide.

Something warm ran down my arms, from my shoulders to my hands, like stepping into a hot shower. Under my palm, the bleeding just stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The edges of the gash pulled together like a zip.

[Class acquired: Triage Warden · Lv 1 · Ember Tier]
Skill: Pressure Point (touch to stabilise). Lives saved feed you.
+10 XP: Life Stabilised (Moderate) · Next: Lv 2 at 20 XP

I read it in about a second, because that's all the time I had. Triage Warden. It sounded like something off a hospital door. Lives saved feed you. I didn't know what that meant, and I didn't have time to wonder, because the hound was right behind me, breathing. I could smell it. Wet stone and old pennies.

I grabbed Steve and turned, and drove the shears at the only part of the hound I could reach, which was the soft place under its jaw.

Steve is not built for this. Steve is built for cutting jeans off people. But I have spent a year learning exactly where the big vessels run in a neck, and a neck is a neck. The cylinder had split the hound's lip and left it shaking its head, half blind on one side. I went under the jaw, where the hide was thin and the pulse would be, and put my whole weight behind it.

The hound shrieked. It reared back, hit the roof, and dropped. It twitched twice and lay still, half on the stretcher, half in the gap between the seats, grey and wet and finally, very definitely, not getting up.

A faint +1 drifted up from it and faded, the smallest number I'd ever been insulted by.

One. Ten for healing a nine-year-old, one for killing a monster with my own hands. Even the System thought the scissors were the less important part.

"Is it dead?" Sam whispered.

"I think so." My voice had gone very high. "I'm going to be honest, I've never checked a monster for a pulse. I'm not going to start now."

"You did magic."

"I did first aid," I said, "and then some magic happened near the first aid. It's different." I sat back on my heels. My shoulder throbbed. I was shaking all over, properly shaking now that it was over. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm going to shake for a minute, and then I'm going to be fine. Can you keep your leg very still?"

"It doesn't hurt anymore."

"That's... great. That's really great." I looked at his shin. Clean pink skin where the gash had been, with a thin line that looked a week old. Twenty minutes ago I'd been thinking about stitches. "Don't tell your mum about this part. She'll think I'm showing off."

He laughed. Actually laughed, a little hiccup of it, and I felt it in my chest like a hand unclenching.

Then I remembered Jonah.

---

He was in the footwell of the driver's side, curled on his side, his radio still clipped to his chest. I climbed over the dead thing and got my fingers on his neck.

Pulse. Slow and steady. He was breathing. There was a lump coming up on his temple where he'd hit the door frame, but his pupils reacted when I lifted his eyelids, both of them, equal.

"You absolute unit," I told him. "You're fine. You're just having a nap. All those years and you choose now to nap."

I put my hand on his forehead, half because I wanted to and half because I wondered. The warmth came, softer this time. Jonah grunted and frowned in his sleep, and the lump went down a little, though not all the way.

No numbers floated up this time. He hadn't been dying, so I supposed he didn't count, which was the System's loss. I didn't want to know what a concussed fifty-three-year-old was worth to a magic game anyway.

Through the empty windscreen, Calder Street had gone strange.

The billboards were dark now. The street lamps were still on, but their light looked thinner, as if someone had turned the colour down. A car was on its side outside the pharmacy, horn stuck on a long, low note. Somewhere close, someone was screaming, and somewhere further away, lots of people were. Over the rooftops, towards the river, there was a glow that wasn't streetlight.

And above the city, high up where there should have been clouds, pale letters the size of tower blocks spelled out Harbour City, Ember Tier, and something about a floor sequence that I decided not to read twice.

"Right," I said. "Right."

Then, because nobody else was awake to hear it: "I'm not qualified for this."

Nobody argued.

I counted things, because counting things helps. One patient, stable. One partner, out cold but stable. One paramedic, three weeks into the job, with a hurt shoulder and a class that sounded like a door sign.

Harbour General was six minutes away. It had a resus bay, a CT scanner and at least forty people who were better at this than me.

"Sam," I said, "how do you feel about a road trip?"

---

Jonah's weight is mostly shoulders. Getting him into the back took Sam pulling on his belt and me lifting, and a lot of apologising from me, mostly to Jonah. Then I dragged the hound's corpse out by one leg and kicked it off the bonnet into the road. It lay in the street. I didn't look at it again.

The engine started. I've only driven the ambulance twice, both times in the depot car park, both times badly. I put it in gear and pulled out with the wind roaring through the empty windscreen and the hazard lights still going, which felt correct.

Calder Street, Halliday junction, left onto Marsh Road. I drove slowly at first, then faster when I saw something moving in the alley by the laundrette. Sam sat on the floor with Jonah's head in his lap, holding the oxygen mask on his face like I'd shown him.

"You're good at this," I told him in the mirror.

"You're bad at driving."

"I'm aware."

We passed people. A man in a dressing gown with a cricket bat. A bus stopped dead with its doors open and nobody in it. I wanted to stop for every one of them, and I knew if I did, I'd never get Sam and Jonah anywhere.

"I'll come back," I said, to nobody. "I'll drop these two off and I'll come back."

The hospital came into view at the top of the hill.

Harbour General is a big ugly block of grey from the seventies with a new glass wing stuck on the side, like someone put a hat on a fridge. I'd done my placements there. I knew which lift got stuck.

It looked wrong.

Every window was lit, every floor, in the same thin colour as the street lamps. The glass wing shimmered like heat over tarmac. The ambulance bay doors, which are never fully closed, stood wide open, with warm yellow light pouring out.

"Mo," Sam said. "Is it safe?"

I didn't answer straight away. I drove down the ramp into the bay because I had a concussed partner and a child and nowhere else to take them. The bay was empty. No trolleys. No staff. No other ambulances, which was the part that made my skin crawl, because there are always other ambulances.

I braked. The engine ticked.

Behind us, with a long metal groan, the bay doors came down. All the way down, to the concrete, and locked with a sound like a bank vault.

The ground shifted. Not an earthquake. More like the whole hospital took one slow breath in, and somewhere above us, in the floors I knew, a lot of things started moving at once.

The PA system crackled.

I knew the PA system at Harbour General. It's a tired woman's recorded voice telling visitors which car park is closed. This was not her. This voice was soft and pleasant and terribly kind, like a nurse in a film just before something awful happens.

"Good evening, and welcome to Floor One."

Sam gripped my hand.

"Our Floor Boss is the Matron. She will be with you shortly." A pause, and then, almost fondly: "Visiting hours are over."