CHAPTER SIX: Death and Resurrection
718 Words
Soon the night was silent again. Blood spread around Lila, her breath fading. But somewhere, out there in the dark, truth was already rising. Adrian Voss had no idea what was coming. Not yet.
The place they dumped her wasn’t for living. It hovered out past the city’s glow, past where anyone bothered to look. That old road, cracked, pitted, barely even a road now, cut straight through it. People didn’t linger out here. Most just ignored it.
Lila Kane barely moved. Blood crept under her, dark and slow, as if even it didn’t want to raise a fuss out in this emptiness. Her breath came in short, rough bursts. Ragged. Almost not there at all. Time just dragged, loose and shapeless, minutes or maybe longer, nobody measuring. The night kept stretching on, cold and indifferent.
Elias Vass had no business being out there. Nothing to do, no one to see, no emergency dragging him down that road. But loss, that rearranges everything. The quake tore up his habits, destroyed his clinic, smashed his home, and left him with nothing but ashes and a memory or two. The life he’d worked years to build? Gone in a handful of seconds.
So now he kept something smaller going, calling it a clinic, but really it was a patched-together space full of scavenged gear and old hopes. Not official, not perfect. Still enough to matter. Enough to keep him moving. At night, sometimes, he drove just to give his mind something else to do. It beat sitting still and remembering everything he’d lost.
That’s why he saw her. At first, she was just a shape in the headlights. Nothing more. He slowed. Stared. Something about the way she lay there felt all wrong. People don’t end up like that for nothing.
His first instinct told him to stay cautious, but the second, stronger, dragged him out of the car. The air was cold, and the silence had weight. He moved closer, slow and tense, but when he got a good look at her, caution dropped away. She was alive, just barely. Instinct took over. He dropped to her side, hands searching for a pulse. Weak, shaky, but still there. He breathed out, steadying himself.
“Stay with me,” he said, soft but sharp.
The wound looked bad. A gunshot. Clean entry, not a killing shot by itself, but close to fatal if ignored. He didn’t look around. Whoever did this was gone. Or if not, hanging around now was a bad idea. He gathered her up, too light, worryingly light, and settled her in the back of his car. Then he got them out of there fast.
He brought her to his so-called clinic, a patched-up little place on a crumbling block. Half the area around it was still ruined from the quake, a kind of death zone. Inside, though, order fought back the chaos: equipment scavenged from old hospitals, supplies begged and borrowed, everything put together by calloused hands that needed to keep doing something.
He got her on the table. The lights flickered once, then held. Good enough. He worked fast. Tore away fabric, cleaned the wound, and stopped the bleeding as best he could. His training still lived in his hands, steady, sure. But worry kept scraping at him. He didn’t have the right tools, the right people. It didn't matter. He did what he could with what he had.
“Stay with me,” he muttered, firmer this time. She barely shifted, but even a twitch meant he was getting somewhere. Time warped minutes, dragging, tools clattering, silence broken only by his breath, the fight to keep someone alive. Eventually, the bleeding eased.
A few hours later, the room had gone almost quiet. Lila lay still, wrapped up, her breath thin but holding steady. Elias folded onto a chair nearby, hands stained, body buzzing with fatigue. He should’ve called this in. That was the rule: a gunshot wound, dumped outside city lines, looked all kinds of bad. But the logic only went so far. Because something about this felt twisted, and he knew reporting it might make things worse, not better.
So he chose to keep her hidden for now. Wait until she can talk. Figure out what kind of trouble he’d just walked into.
- Writer
