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Phoenix travelled with him in the ambulance. She sat on the bench opposite, leaning right and left as the paramedic moved around her. He fixed a bag of fluid onto a peg and pumped it through a vein in the crook of Wiri’s elbow. “Nice job with the tourniquet,” he told Phoenix as he released the belt and handed it back to her. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
Phoenix reached for Wiri, pressing her fingers over his hand and slipping her thumb into the warm cave beneath his palm. He groaned as the paramedic parted the fabric of his jeans with curved scissors. “My father has haemophilia,” she said, the statement loaded with meaning. The man nodded, and she relaxed when he made no further comment. As a female child of a haemophiliac, she had a fifty-fifty chance of becoming a carrier. The odds weren’t in her favour. Unlike Edin, who got away Scot free. Life just wasn’t fair sometimes. Wiri folded his fingers around her hand. The pain medication pumping through his veins made everything blurry, but he found her face and offered her a smile of solidarity.
Wiri closed his eyes, and the paramedic nudged his shoulder with sharp fingers. “Keep talking,” he insisted. “No sleeping. We’re almost at the hospital.”
He turned his head to observe Phoenix as she wiped a stray tear from her cheek. The way she struggled to swallow told him more than words, and he tapped the top of her hand with his thumb. She pursed her lips, a flare of alarm in her slate grey irises as he lifted it and held out his arm to her instead.
Phoenix unclipped her seat belt and dropped to her knees on the hard corrugated floor of the ambulance. She wrapped her arms around his chest and buried her face against his neck. Her genteel sniffs stopped the paramedic’s objections as the vehicle turned right into the main entrance for the hospital. It ran with lights but no sirens and Wiri took that as a good sign.
“Will I need surgery?” he asked as the man swayed with the motion of the vehicle and pushed liquid from a syringe into a port on the drip.
“Yeah.” He wrinkled his nose and gave a definitive nod. “But you’re lucky it ripped right through and did its worst to the furniture behind you. Nobody wants a 44 Magnum exploding in their leg.” The ambulance lurched to the left, and he placed his palm against an overhead cupboard, shifting his weight without concern like a pro surfer. He leaned forward and tapped Phoenix’s shoulder. “We’re here now, miss.”
Wiri stared up at various ceilings as hospital staff wheeled him through vast kilometres of faceless corridors. The strip lights blinded him, but every time he tried to close his eyes, someone shook him awake. The pain in his tail bone paled into significance against the fire in his left thigh. They let Phoenix stay with him, and he sensed her quiet presence. A nurse pushed a pen into his hand and helped him make a slanted signature. Her lips moved, and he smiled and nodded, concerned only with making her go away and leave him alone.
Sleep came fast and hard. A man leaned over him, a disembodied head wearing a surgical mask. “Count backwards from ten,” he ordered.
Wiri blinked up at him, confusion swirling around his brain and mixing with the powerful burn which snaked up his leg and into his stomach. “Uncle Mark,” he managed. Hana’s brother tugged the mask from his face, hiding his concern with his usual good humour.
“The very same.” He gave him a wink before speaking to someone on the other side of the gurney. “Let’s get this open and take a look,” he said with the authority of a surgeon speaking to a junior. Wiri tilted his head, finding another man to his right. The eyes watching him from above the mask looked only a little older than his own. Gloved hands wielded a needle, and he sighed with resignation.
“Ten,” he began, hearing his voice as though it began to someone else. “Nine.” He stumbled over eight and seven before forgetting all about six. As his lips struggled to form a coherent five, he heard Mark say something about saline. Then a giant vacuum cleaner snatched at his frozen limbs and sucked him into a brightly lit tunnel of peace.
