The Fallen Sequence (92 page)

He reached for her, his hand quaking. She wanted to scream or vomit, but all she could do was cover his hands and press them back over the gaping hole in his gut. Another boom rattled the ground and the boy lying on it. Fresh blood seeped through the web of Luce’s fingers.

“I am Giovanni,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Please. Help me. Please.”

Only then did Luce realize she wasn’t in Moscow anymore. The ground below her was warmer. Not snow-covered, but a grassy plain that was torn up in places, exposing rich black soil. The air was dry and dusty. This boy had spoken to her in Italian, and just as she had in Moscow, she understood.

Her eyes had adjusted. She could see searchlights in the distance, roaming over purple-hued hills. And beyond the hills, an evening sky was flecked with bright white stars. Luce turned away. She couldn’t see stars without thinking of Daniel, and she couldn’t think about Daniel right now. Not with her hands pressed into this boy’s belly, not with him about to die.

At least he hadn’t died
yet
.

He only thought he had.

She couldn’t blame him. After he’d been hit, he’d
probably gone into shock. And then maybe he’d seen her come through the Announcer, a black tunnel appearing out of thin air. He must have been terrified.

“You’re going to be fine,” she said, using the perfect Italian she’d always wanted to learn. It felt astonishingly natural on her tongue. Her voice, too, came out softer and smoother than she expected; it made her wonder what she’d been like in this lifetime.

A barrage of deafening shots made her jump. Gunfire. Endless, in quick succession, bright zipping tracers arcing through the sky, burning lines of white into her vision, followed by a lot of shouting in Italian. Then the thump of footsteps in the dirt. Coming closer.

“We’re retreating,” the boy mumbled. “That’s not good.”

Luce looked toward the sound of soldiers running in their direction and noticed for the first time that she and the injured soldier were not alone. At least ten other men lay wounded around them, moaning and trembling and bleeding into the black earth. Their clothes were singed and shredded from the land mine that must have taken them by surprise. The rich stink of rot and sweat and blood sat heavy in the air, coating everything. It was so horrific—Luce had to bite down on her lip to keep from screaming.

A man in an officer’s uniform ran past her, then stopped. “What’s
she
doing here? This is a war zone, not
a place for nurses. You’ll be no help to us dead, girl. At least make yourself useful. We need the casualties loaded up.”

He stormed off before Luce could respond. Below her, the boy’s eyes were beginning to droop and his whole body was shaking. She looked around desperately for help.

About a half mile away was a narrow dirt road with two ancient-looking trucks and two small, squat ambulances parked at its side.

“I’ll be right back,” Luce told the boy, pressing his hands more firmly against his stomach to control the bleeding. He whimpered when she pulled away.

She ran toward the trucks, stumbling over her feet when another shell came down behind her, making the earth buck.

A cluster of women in white uniforms stood gathered around the back of one of the trucks. Nurses. They would know what to do, how to help. But when Luce got close enough to see their faces, her heart sank. They were girls. Some of them couldn’t have been older than fourteen. Their uniforms looked like costumes.

She scanned their faces, looking for herself in one of them. There must have been a reason why she’d stepped into this Hell. But no one looked familiar. It was hard to fathom the girls’ calm, clear expressions. Not one of them showed the terror that Luce knew was clear on her
own face. Maybe they had already seen enough of the war to grow used to what it did.

“Water.” An older woman’s voice came from inside the truck. “Bandages. Gauze.”

She was distributing supplies to the girls, who loaded up, then set to work putting together a makeshift clinic on the side of the road. A row of injured men had already been moved behind the truck for treatment. More were on the way. Luce joined the line for supplies. It was dark and no one said a word to her. She could feel it now—the stress of the young nurses. They must have been trained to keep a poised, calm façade for the soldiers, but when the girl in front of Luce reached up to take her ration of supplies, her hands were shaking.

Around them, soldiers moved quickly in pairs, carrying the wounded under the arms and by the feet. Some of the men being carried mumbled questions about the battle, asking how badly they’d been hit. Then there were the ones more seriously injured, whose lips could form no questions because they were too busy biting off screams, who had to be hoisted by the waist because one or both of their legs had been blown off by a land mine.

“Water.” A jug landed in Luce’s arms. “Bandages. Gauze.” The head nurse dumped the ration of supplies mechanically, ready to move on to the next girl, but then she didn’t. She fixed her gaze on Luce. Her eyes traveled downward, and Luce realized she was still wearing the
heavy wool coat from Luschka’s grandmother in Moscow. Which was a good thing, because underneath the coat were her jeans and button-down shirt from her current life.

“Uniform,” the woman finally said in the same monotone, tossing down a white dress and a nurse’s cap like the other girls were wearing.

Luce nodded gratefully, then ducked behind a truck to change. It was a billowing white gown that reached her ankles and smelled strongly of bleach. She tried to wipe the soldier’s blood off her hands, using the wool coat, then tossed it behind a tree. But by the time she’d buttoned the nurse’s uniform, rolled up the sleeves, and tied the belt around her waist, it was completely covered with rusty red streaks.

She grabbed the supplies and ran back across the road. The scene before her was gruesome. The officer hadn’t been lying. There were at least a hundred men who needed help. She looked at the bandages in her arms and wondered what it was she should be doing.

“Nurse!” a man called out. He was sliding a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. “Nurse! This one needs a nurse.”

Luce realized that he was talking to her. “Oh,” she said faintly. “Me?” She peered into the ambulance. It was cramped and dark inside. A space that looked like it had been made for two people now held six. The
wounded soldiers were laid out on stretchers slid into three-tiered slings on either side. There was no place for Luce except on the floor.

Someone was shoving her to the side: a man, sliding another stretcher onto the small empty space on the floor. The soldier laid out on it was unconscious, his black hair plastered across his face.

“Go on,” the soldier said to Luce. “It’s leaving now.”

When she didn’t move, he pointed to a wooden stool affixed to the inside of the ambulance’s back door with a crisscrossed rope. He bent down and made a stirrup with his hands to help Luce up onto the stool. Another shell shook the ground, and Luce couldn’t hold back the scream that escaped her lips.

She glanced apologetically at the soldier, took a deep breath, and hopped up.

When she was seated on the tiny stool, he handed up the jug of water and the box of gauze and bandages. He started to shut the door.

“Wait,” Luce whispered. “What do I do?”

The man paused. “You know how long the ride to Milan is. Dress their wounds and keep them comfortable. Do the best you can.”

The door slammed with Luce on it. She had to grip the stool to keep from falling off and landing on the soldier at her feet. The ambulance was stifling hot. It smelled terrible. The only light came from a small lantern hanging
from a nail in the corner. The only window was directly behind her head on the inside of the door. She didn’t know what had happened to Giovanni, the boy with the bullet in his stomach. Whether she’d ever see him again. Whether he’d live through the night.

The engine started up. The ambulance shifted into gear and lurched forward. The soldier on one of the top slings began to moan.

After they’d reached a steady speed, Luce heard the pattering sound of a leak. Something was dripping. She leaned forward on the stool, squinting in the dim lantern light.

It was the blood of the soldier on the top bunk dripping through the woven sling onto the soldier in the middle bunk. The middle soldier’s eyes were open. He was watching the blood fall on his chest, but he was injured so badly that he couldn’t move away. He didn’t make a sound. Not until the trickle of blood turned into a stream.

Luce whimpered along with the soldier. She started to rise from her stool, but there was no place for her to stand unless she straddled the soldier on the floor. Carefully, she wedged her feet around his chest. As the ambulance shuddered along the bumpy dirt road, she gripped the taut canvas of the top sling and held a fistful of gauze against its bottom. The blood soaked through onto her fingers within seconds.

“Help!” she called to the ambulance driver. She didn’t know if he’d even be able to hear her.

“What is it?” The driver had a thick regional accent.

“This man back here—he’s hemorrhaging. I think he’s dying.”

“We’re all dying, gorgeous,” the driver said. Really, he was flirting with her
now
? A second later, he turned around, glancing at her through the opening behind the driver’s seat. “Look, I’m sorry. But there’s nothing to do. I’ve gotta get the rest of these guys to the hospital.”

He was right. It was already too late. When Luce took her hand away from under the stretcher, the blood began to gush again. So heavily it didn’t seem possible.

Luce had no words of comfort for the boy in the middle sling, whose eyes were wide and petrified and whose lips whispered a furious Ave Maria. The stream of the other boy’s blood dripped down his sides, pooling in the space where his hips met the sling.

Luce wanted to close her eyes and disappear. She wanted to sift through the shadows cast by the lantern, to find an Announcer that would take her somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Like the beach on the rocks below Shoreline’s campus. Where Daniel had taken her dancing on the ocean, under the stars. Or the pristine swimming hole she’d glimpsed the two of them diving into, when she’d worn the yellow bathing suit. She would have taken Sword &
Cross over this ambulance, even the roughest moments, like the night she’d gone to meet Cam at that bar. Like when she’d kissed him. She would even have taken Moscow. This was worse. She’d never faced anything like this before.

Except—

Of course she had. She must already have lived through something almost exactly like this. It was why she’d ended up here. Somewhere in this war-torn world was the girl who died and came back to life and went on to become her. She was certain of it. She must have dressed wounds and carried water and suppressed the urge to vomit. It gave Luce strength to think about the girl who’d lived through this before.

The stream of blood began to trickle, then became a very slow drip. The boy beneath had fainted, so Luce watched silently by herself for a long time. Until the dripping stopped completely.

Then she reached for a towel and the water and began to wash the soldier in the middle bunk. It had been a while since he’d had a bath. Luce washed him gently and changed the bandage around his head. When he came to, she gave him sips of water. His breathing evened, and he stopped staring up at the sling above him in terror. He seemed to grow more comfortable.

All of the soldiers seemed to find some comfort as she tended to them, even the one in the middle of the
floor, who never opened his eyes. She cleaned the face of the boy in the top bunk who had died. She couldn’t explain why. She wanted him to be more at peace, too.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. All Luce knew was that it was dark and rank and her back ached and her throat was parched and she was exhausted—and she was better off than any of the men surrounding her.

She’d left the soldier on the bottom left-hand stretcher until last. He’d been hit badly in the neck, and Luce was worried that he would lose even more blood if she tried to re-dress the wound. She did the best she could, sitting on the side of his sling and sponging down his grimy face, washing some of the blood out of his blond hair. He was handsome under all the mud. Very handsome. But she was distracted by his neck, which was still bleeding through the gauze. Every time she even got near it, he cried out in pain.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “You’re going to make it.”

“I know.” His whisper came so quietly, and sounded so impossibly sad, that Luce wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. Until then, she’d thought he was unconscious, but something in her voice seemed to reach him.

His eyelids fluttered. Then, slowly, they opened.

They were violet.

The jug of water fell from her hands.

Daniel
.

Her instinct was to crawl in next to him and cover his lips with kisses, to pretend he wasn’t as badly wounded as he was.

At the sight of her, Daniel’s eyes widened and he started to sit up. But then the blood began to flow from his neck again and his face drained of all its color. Luce had no choice but to restrain him.

“Shhh.”
She pressed his shoulders back against the stretcher, trying to get him to relax.

He squirmed under her grip. Every time he did, bright new blood bloomed through the bandage.

“Daniel, you have to stop fighting,” she begged. “Please stop fighting. For me.”

They locked eyes for a long, intense moment—and then the ambulance came to an abrupt stop. The back door swung open. A shocking breath of fresh air flowed in. The streets outside were quiet, but the place had the feel of a big city, even in the middle of the night.

Milan. That was where the soldier had said they were going when he assigned her to this ambulance. They must be at a hospital in Milan.

Two men in army uniforms appeared at the doors and began sliding the stretchers out with quick precision. Within minutes, the wounded were placed on rolling carts and wheeled off. The men pushed Luce out of the way so they could ease out Daniel’s stretcher. His
eyelids were fluttering again, and she thought he reached out his hand for her. She watched from the back of the ambulance until he disappeared from sight. Then she began to tremble.