“Sarge, come back. Come back to me.”

“No.” The word came out of him cracked and low. His eyes snapped, all at once, back into focus — back into the room, back into the present, back to the small pale creature in front of him. “No. I’ve got her. I’ve got her.”

And then, fighting the tremor in his own arms so hard I could see the effort of it standing out in the cords of his neck, he slid one massive hand beneath her head — her whole head fit in the cup of his palm — and the other beneath her hips, and he lifted her.

She was impossibly small against him. A sparrow in the hands of a stone wall. He drew her out through the portholes with a slowness that must have cost him everything, and he backed up, one deliberate step at a time, until the backs of his knees found the vinyl rocking chair beside the machines, and he lowered himself into it as carefully as a man defusing something.

She screamed harder. Her spine arched into a rigid, painful bow against his forearm.

And Sarge closed his eyes, and locked his jaw, and began to breathe.