Sarge Ransom had passed every check.

He had cleared the psychiatric evaluations.

He had finished the orientation, all of it, and someone with more authority than a night charge nurse had looked at his file and signed their name. On paper he was qualified.

In person, standing under the fluorescent lights with his scarred, shaking hands, he looked less like a volunteer than like a man who had wandered off a battlefield and was waiting, patiently, for someone to come and carry him out.

And then the alarm on bed seven began to scream.

Chapter 3 — Bed Seven

Her chart said, simply, Baby Girl Reed.
She had been born at twenty-six weeks, which is to say two and a half months before she was meant to exist outside anyone, and she weighed two pounds, and she had come into the world already fighting a war she had not started and did not deserve.