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Edward put me on the nearest empty gurney, and the movement didn’t so much hurt as let me know that it was going to hurt. It was as if things shifted around that I shouldn’t have been able to feel. I had a moment of nausea and knew that that was just me thinking too hard, or hoped it was. Edward moved me so Peter could see me without moving. It meant that I could see Peter. His jacket and shirt were gone, but bulky bandages were taped across his stomach; more of them were on his left shoulder and upper arm. His weapons and jacket and the remains of his bloody shirt were on the floor under his gurney. It’d be my turn next.

“What happened to Cisco?” I asked.

Peter said, “You’re both hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Edward said, “it’s not my blood.”

Peter looked at me, his eyes too wide, face sickly pale. “He got his throat torn out.”

“I remember, but he should be able to heal that,” I said.

“Not all of us are that good at healing, Anita,” Nathaniel said.

I looked at him now. The fact that I hadn’t truly looked at him said clearly how much I was hurt. He was wearing one of his pairs of jogging shorts that left very little to the imagination. His hair was back in a tight braid. I met his eyes, and I still loved him, but for once my body didn’t react to the sight of him.

Edward came to stand by Peter, and Nathaniel came to me, an exchange of emotional prisoners. Nathaniel took my hand and gave me as chaste a kiss as we’d ever exchanged. His lavender eyes held the worry that he’d been hiding from Peter, or trying to hide from him. He leaned over my body, and I heard him draw in a big breath of air. “Nothing’s perforated,” he whispered.

Until he said it, I hadn’t thought about it. My intestines could have been perforated, or hell, my stomach. If I’d had to get clawed up, it wasn’t a bad place for it. It wasn’t a fatal hit, not right away, not if things weren’t spilling out of me. They were bulging out, not spilling. There was a difference.

“Is Peter…”

“Not perforated either, you were both lucky.”

I knew he was right, but…The voices had risen in pitch across the room. When the doctors start sounding that panicked, things are very bad. Cisco, shit.

It was Cherry who peeled away from the crowd around him and came to me. She had thrown a white coat over the usual black Goth outfit. Her heavy eyeliner had run down her face like black tears. She touched Peter’s shoulder as she went past, and said, “Let the drugs work, Peter. You can’t help him by fighting to stay awake.”

“She was trying for me,” he said. “She was reaching for me. He put himself in her way. He saved me.”

She patted his shoulder and checked the IV almost automatically, but she also adjusted the little knobby thing on it. The liquid began to drip a little faster. She patted him again and came to the other side of the gurney so that she could look at Nathaniel across me, or maybe so she could keep an eye on what was happening to Cisco. There were so many people around him that it looked like they were getting in each other’s way.

She said, “Nothing I can do over there.” She said it almost to herself, as if she were trying to convince herself.

She put on a fresh pair of gloves before she looked at my stomach. There was blood on the sleeve of the white coat she was wearing. She seemed to see it at about the same time I did. She just stripped off the coat, tossed it in the little hamper they had for washables. Threw the clean gloves away, got another pair of clean gloves, and came back to me. Her eyes stared at the wound, not at me. Her face had gone to concentrating on her job. If she just concentrated on her job then she wouldn’t fall apart. I knew the look, I had one like it.

I tried to do something else while she looked at the wounds. Somehow I didn’t want to see my insides on the outside again. But it was like a train wreck; you couldn’t quite look away. “What is that?” I asked.

“Intestine,” she said, in a voice that held no emotion.

I heard someone shout, “Clear!”

The crowd around Cisco cleared, and I saw Lillian using the crash cart on his chest.