The scalpel slipped.
Not from clumsiness. Not from shock.
But because her hand had started shaking again.
The Surgeon wiped the blade clean on her apron and bent lower. The boy on the table—twelve, maybe—hadn't screamed once. His teeth were clenched so hard his gums bled.
They were in what had once been a monastery — stone floors now stained black, pews repurposed as operating tables. No prayers here. Only groans and dripping water and the soft thump of falling limbs.
"You're going to live," she whispered. "That's the problem."
She finished the amputation, wrapped the stump, and nodded to the assistant, who carried the boy away like luggage.
In the silence that followed, she washed her hands in a bowl of melted snow and vinegar. The water turned red, then pink, then clear again.
She stared at her fingers. Pale, wrinkled, alien.
There were voices now. Not outside. Not from the patients. Inside her head.
Not shouting. Not cruel. Just… present.
She knew them.
The girl from last week who bled out under a collapsed altar. The man with the missing jaw who blinked twice before going still. The nurse she'd buried in the garden when the fever took hold.
They whispered between her thoughts, unfinished sentences and fragments of songs. One had asked for a cigarette. Another had simply said, "Please."
She hadn't smoked in years.
Outside, the wind howled against the shutters. It had started snowing again.
She opened the cabinet. There was half a bottle of morphine left. Four scalpels. Two clean bandages. And her old medical license, now smeared with dried blood and ash.
It still bore her name.
Though she couldn't remember the last time someone had said it out loud.