Beau had already started cutting away Carter’s jeans. He went up and over, exposing the man’s naked lower half.

Carter sneered at Sara. He didn’t speak, but she knew what he was thinking.

She ignored him.

Will made him look like a Ken doll.

Beau asked, “What’s the plan?”

Sara said, “You’re going to have to knock him out if you want me to do this.”

“I can take the edge off.” Beau drew Versed into a fresh syringe. He hadn’t bothered to run a saline line. He jabbed the needle into Carter’s arm so hard the plastic tube popped against the skin.

So, Beau wasn’t a Carter fan, either.

He started lining up supplies on the top of the mini-fridge by the bed. Clamps, scalpels, gauze, forceps.

“Get thish . . . bith . . .” The drug hit Carter in slow motion. His chin dropped to his chest. His mouth gaped open. His eyes were slitted as he tried to follow what they were doing.

Sara changed out her gloves. Mentally, she worked to separate Carter the abhorrent human being from the patient with a knife in his leg. She studied the insertion point of the blade. Summoned her anatomy mnemonic for the femoral triangle. NAVEL. Starting laterally: nerve, artery, vein, empty space—the femoral canal—and lymphatic.

Beau cut the shoelace lanyard away from the knife. His fingertip held it in place.

They could both see the handle pulsing.

The blade had shifted, or maybe Carter had been lucky this whole time, because there was clearly a hole in his femoral artery. The pulse was from his heart pushing out oxygenated blood. The effect was like a high-pressure hose. The only thing keeping Carter from bleeding out was the side of the blade plugging the hole.

She told Beau, “I’m not a vascular surgeon.”

“Understood.”

“I can cut down while you hold the knife steady. I’ll try to clamp the bleed. We don’t have any suction. I’ll be feeling around blind.”

“Understood,” he handed her the scalpel.

They were doing this.

Sara felt unusually shaken by the prospect of cutting into this man. Surgery was not a time for introspection; it was a moment for pure arrogance. If she couldn’t move quickly enough, if there was too much blood to isolate the bleed, then Carter would be dead in less than a minute. Vale was already as good as dead. With both men gone, they wouldn’t need her—or worse, they would find another use.

Beau said, “Doctor?”

She held breath in her lungs, then slowly pushed it out. “This has to be fast. I need you to pack the wound with gauze as I go. Can you hold open the forceps?”

Beau nodded, but said, “We need a third set of hands.”

Sara could feel the heat of Michelle staring at her back. She probably hadn’t operated on a person in years, if ever, but she could hold a knife steady.

Dash indicated his sling. “I’m down half a set.”

“Fuhch—” The word jumbled out of Carter’s mouth. “She ain’t touching—”

He meant Michelle.

Dash said, “It appears that you don’t have a choice.”

Sara wasn’t sure whether he was talking to Carter or Michelle, but it didn’t matter in the end. Slowly, Michelle stood. Her head was still down. Her eyes stayed on the floor.

It wasn’t until the last second that Sara saw her hands clench.

What happened next was clearly planned—maybe Michelle had been thinking about it at the car accident or when she’d walked into this dingy motel room or maybe her actions were something she’d practiced in her mind for the last four weeks. The when didn’t matter. The what was spectacular.

Michelle waited until she was close to the bed, then pushed off from the balls of her feet. She launched herself into the air. She straddled Carter. She ripped the knife out of his leg and started stabbing him.

Slap-slap-slap.

The blade made the same sound over and over again as it punctured the skin.

There were no wasted movements. The attack was the visual realization of a deep understanding of human anatomy.

The jugular. The windpipe. The axillary arteries. The heart. The lungs. Michelle gave out a primal scream and drove the final blow into the man’s liver.

Then she collapsed.

Beau had injected her with the rest of the Versed.

The vestiges of Michelle’s primal screams echoed around the room. No one could move. Vale’s staggered breathing served as an audible pulse to the blood squirting from Carter’s carotid.

Slowly, Sara took off her streaked safety glasses. Ropes of blood had slashed across her face and hair.

At some point, the door had flung open. The two sentries stood motionless, weapons drawn.

Dash’s arm was out. He said, “Let’s keep it calm, boys. We need her alive.”

The men stayed where they were. They didn’t seem to know what to do.

Sara wiped her face. She wiped blood from her forehead. Every item in the room shadowed the slashing of the knife, from the beds to the TV to the ceiling.

Even in death, Carter was a nuisance. He hung on for twenty seconds or more. Gurgles came from the back of his throat. Red bubbles popped on his blue lips. He stared blindly down at the knife sticking out of his belly. Urine soaked his pants. His hands and fingers twitched. A line of blood dripped from his open mouth. The spray of blood coming from his carotid dwindled into a leak, like a lawn sprinkler that had suddenly lost pressure. His last breath was taken with visible terror.

He had known what was coming every single second that preceded his death.

Sara put her hand to her chest. Her heart was like a trapped bird.

She was elated by his suffering.

“Well.” Dash went into the bathroom. He came out wiping his face with a hand towel. He had a second towel for Sara. She caught it mid-air. He looked down at Michelle. She had collapsed across Carter’s legs.

Sara had expected Dash’s preternatural calm to finally break, but he only said, “I wonder why she did that?”

Sara put her face in the clean towel and shook her head.

“Gentlemen. Let’s clear the room.”

She could hear them lift Michelle from the bed.

Dash said, “Put her next door. Make sure she’s handcuffed. We don’t want any more sudden acts of mayhem.”

Mayhem?

Sara wiped her face. Michelle’s arms flopped to the side as she was carried out. Her eyes were closed. There was something like peace in her expression.

“Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash asked. “Can you enlighten me?”

Sara studied his face for guile. Did he really not know that Carter had raped Michelle?

She said, “He—”

She felt Vale’s hand on her shoulder. The sudden violence had pierced the fog of the muscle relaxer. His eyes were opened, filled with fear.

Dash waited another moment, then asked, “Dr. Earnshaw?”

Sara shook off Vale’s hand. “He raped her. Repeatedly. He threatened to rape me.”

Dash’s jaw tightened. His expression began to change. Sara watched the slow transformation from amicable to enraged.

He looked at Vale, not Sara, and asked, “Is this true?”

Vale shook his head wildly.

“Soldier, is this true?”

Vale kept shaking his head.

Dash turned away from him. He rubbed his jaw with his fingers.

Then he turned around and shot Vale twice in the chest.

Sara jumped. She had been close enough to feel the heat of the bullets whizzing past her face.

Dash returned the gun to his holster. He told Sara, “I hope, Doctor, you don’t think that we are the sort of animals who use rape as a weapon of war.”

Sara said nothing. They had bombed a hospital and kidnapped two women. Pretending to hold themselves above the pettiness of rape was laughable.

Beau grabbed the handle of Will’s folding knife and pulled it out of Carter’s belly. He wiped the blade with cotton gauze. He folded the knife and stuck it into his own pocket. Then he started to pack up the medical kit. He put the used items in a pile on the table. He took out a card to start an inventory.

Or to make sure Sara hadn’t taken anything.

Dash patted Vale’s pockets. He found some cash, but nothing else. He did the same pat-down on Carter. This time, he found a cell phone. Not a flip phone, but an iPhone.

The screen was cracked.

“Unfortunate.” Dash went to the door. He asked the sentry, “Do you have a cell phone?”

“No, sir. None of us do. Your orders were to leave anything identifiable at the Camp.”

The Camp?

“Thank you.” Dash closed the door. He sat on the bed beside Carter. He tried one-handed to press Carter’s finger to the home button on the phone.

Beau said, “Won’t work when they’re dead. You need a capacitance signal in your skin to activate the ring. Gotta have a heartbeat to make that happen.”

“Is that so?” Dash held up the phone. He stared at it as if he could divine a way into the contents. “We don’t want to be using any of your devices, do we?”

“No, sir, we don’t.” Beau’s tone implied he was taking a position.

So maybe he wasn’t as aligned with the group as the others. A former recruit? A hired gun? A medic who charged by the injury?