Triage Politics

He woke up on a wooden slab, mistaking a medic for an interrogator and lashing out against a kindness he couldn't recognize.

The first thing to return was the pain. Not as a memory, but as a present, occupying force. It was a grid of agony laid over his body. A hot, grinding sensation where his right shoulder met his chest, a deep, resonant throb at the base of his skull, and a series of sharp, stabbing jolts in his ribs that flared with every ghost of a breath. He was lying on something hard. Wood. The grain pressed into his cheek, unforgiving and real.

Sound came next, a high-pitched whine that drilled into his ears, the ghost of the impact that had sent him into darkness. Beneath it, a low, wet, rhythmic coughing. Someone else’s misery. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were heavy, caked with something dry and sticky. He managed a slit. Light, harsh and white, speared into his brain. It wasn't sunlight. It was electric, sterile. Fluorescent. The kind they used in basements. The kind they used in cells.

A shape resolved itself out of the blinding glare. A silhouette, tall and undefined, standing over him. The light was directly behind it, turning its edges into a blazing corona and plunging its features into absolute shadow. It was a classic interrogation technique. Backlight the subject, obscure the questioner. Create an imbalance of power. He knew their tricks. He’d written about them. He’d interviewed men who had survived them, men who came back with hollowed-out eyes and a permanent tremor in their hands. They always started with the light.

His body tried to react before his mind could form a coherent strategy. Adrenaline, cold and sharp, flooded his veins, a biological imperative to fight or flee. Fleeing wasn't an option. His limbs felt disconnected, heavy as lead. That left fight. He tried to push himself up with his left arm, the only one that seemed to respond. The world tilted violently. The wooden surface he was on was narrow. A table. Not a cot. Not a bed. A table.

The silhouette moved. An arm extended toward his face. He saw the glint of metal in its hand. A tool. A needle. Pliers. Something to pry and probe. The primal terror that had been simmering under the pain boiled over. He wasn't Theo Garrick, journalist. He was Subject 734, a designation on a file in a BHI sub-level facility. They’d caught him. The whole Zone was a trap, and he’d walked right into it.

"No," he rasped, the sound a dry crackle in his throat. His voice was a stranger's.

He swatted at the approaching hand, a clumsy, sweeping motion born of pure panic. His knuckles connected with something cold and metallic. There was a clatter, a loud, cascading crash as a metal tray hit the floor. The sound was obscene in the tense quiet. It was a sound of waste. Of failure. Instruments, sterilized and precious, scattered across the filthy laminate floor, rendered useless.

The silhouette flinched back. A voice cut through the ringing in his ears. "Hold him!"

It wasn't the voice he expected. It was female, strained, but sharp with authority. Not the calm, menacing baritone of a BHI officer. The confusion was a split-second flicker, not enough to stop the momentum of his fear. Other shapes converged. Hands, strong and insistent, grabbed his flailing left arm, his legs. They pinned him to the table. He bucked, a useless, pathetic thrashing that sent lightning bolts of agony through his shattered clavicle. He screamed, a raw, ragged sound of an animal caught in a snare.

Something was wrapped around his wrist, tight. A strap. Then another around his ankle. They were restraining him. Just like they did in the white rooms. He was a piece of meat on a slab, and they were strapping him down for processing. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a cold, leaden despair. He’d lost. He’d come all this way, sacrificed everything, just to end up here.

He squeezed his eyes shut, the harsh light burning even through his eyelids. The hands retreated. The world settled back into its rhythm of pain and the distant, wet coughing. He lay there, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps, waiting for the questioning to begin. He prepared himself. Name, rank, serial number. Except he had no rank, no serial number. He had a name, and a press badge that was probably ground into the frozen mud somewhere. It meant nothing. He meant nothing.

He risked opening his eyes again. The world was coming into sharper focus. The haze was receding, though his vision still felt… wrong. Distorted at the edges. The ceiling wasn't sterile white tile. It was high and ornate, covered in grime, with peeling plasterwork. He could smell dust. Old paper. A damp, musty scent that reminded him of forgotten books. And beneath that, the coppery tang of blood and the sharp, clean scent of antiseptic. It was a disorienting cocktail of decay and clinical procedure.

His eyes tracked down. He was in a large, open space. The source of the light was a single emergency floodlight on a tripod, aimed at the ceiling to diffuse its glare. The table he was on was dark, polished wood, its surface scarred with decades of use. It looked like… a circulation desk. The main circulation desk of a library. The realization didn't comfort him. It only deepened the sense of surreal dislocation. A BHI black site in a public library? It was exactly the kind of psychological warfare they'd employ.

The silhouette that had terrified him was now just a person. A woman, her face obscured by a cheap paper mask, her hair pulled back under a stained beanie. She was picking up the fallen instruments with a pair of tongs, her movements economical and laced with frustration. Not an interrogator. A nurse. A medic. He had attacked a medic.

The shame was a hot flush that momentarily eclipsed the pain. His paranoia, honed by years of covering the slow, grinding encroachment of the security state, had betrayed him. He saw threats everywhere because the world had taught him that threats were, in fact, everywhere. But here, he had been the threat. He had wasted supplies that were likely irreplaceable. He had made an enemy of someone who was trying to help him.

Another figure entered his field of vision, moving with a purpose that made the first woman seem hesitant. This one was all sharp angles and controlled energy. She wore a heavy winter coat over scrubs, the collar turned up against a chill that seemed to emanate from the very walls. She didn’t even glance at him. Her focus was absolute, directed at a gurney being wheeled alongside his table.

On the gurney was a man. Or what was left of one. He was young, maybe twenty, with a face pale and slick with sweat. His eyes were wide with shock, his breathing a rapid, shallow panting. A thick, filthy blanket was pulled up to his chest, but it couldn't hide the dark, spreading stain that was soaking through it. The medic—Mina Kovic, he remembered her name from Owen's frantic briefing, a name spoken with a kind of desperate reverence—pulled the blanket back without ceremony.

Theo’s stomach lurched. The fighter’s abdomen was a mess of shredded flesh and fabric. Shrapnel. A claymore, or maybe a drone-dropped munition. It wasn't a clean wound. It was a violent tearing, a brutal geography of exposed tissue and muscle. Mina’s hands, covered in thin nitrile gloves, went to work immediately. She wasn’t healing. She was assessing. Her fingers probed the edges of the wound with a detached, clinical precision, her face a mask of concentration. Theo couldn't tear his eyes away. This was the reality of the Zone, the butcher's bill for every defiant broadcast, for every inch of contested ground.

"Pressure is bottoming out," the first medic said, her voice tight. "Lost too much."

"Saline?" Mina’s voice was clipped, devoid of emotion. It was a command, not a question.

"Last bag," the medic replied, holding up a clear plastic pouch of fluid. The last bag. In a city of millions, this was the last bag of sterile salt water.

Mina glanced at the IV stand next to the gurney. Then her eyes moved, for the first time, past the wounded fighter. Her gaze swept over Theo, dismissive and quick, before landing on something else. A small cot, pushed against a bookshelf filled with overturned volumes. On the cot lay a child, a girl no older than eight, her skin dry and papery, her lips cracked. She was shivering under a thin blanket, her eyes half-open and glazed. Dehydration. A slower, quieter death than the one on the gurney, but just as certain.

Mina made a decision. It wasn't spoken. It was communicated in a single, fluid motion. She took a marker from her pocket, a thick black one, and drew a large, crude 'X' on the fighter's forehead. A tag. It was a classification. Theo had seen the triage systems in field manuals. Green for walking wounded. Yellow for urgent. Red for critical. And Black. Black for the unsalvageable. The ones you make comfortable, if you can, while they die. The ones you don't waste resources on.

She’d just condemned him. With a single mark, she had declared his life over. The fighter saw it. His eyes, wide with shock, filled with a sudden, terrible understanding. A choked sound escaped his lips, a plea cut short by a spasm of pain. Mina didn't look at him. She took the last bag of saline from the other medic.

"Her," she said, nodding toward the child. "Full drip. We need to get her core temperature up."

The medic hesitated, her eyes flickering from the dying fighter to the dehydrated child. It was a calculus of life and death, and she was being asked to solve the equation. But Mina’s authority was absolute. The medic moved to the child’s cot, her shoulders slumped.

Theo watched, his mind reeling. He couldn't process the coldness of it. This wasn't medicine. This was… politics. The fighter was militia. Expendable. A soldier who had accepted the risks. The child was a civilian. A symbol. The future. Was that it? Was she making a political statement? Or was it simpler? Crueler? Was she deciding who was worthy of life based on some private, unknowable criteria?

Righteous indignation surged through him, a fire that burned away the shame and the fear. This was wrong. This was an injustice. He was a witness. He was a journalist. His entire purpose for being here was to observe, to document, to hold power accountable. And this woman, in her small, frozen kingdom, wielded the ultimate power. The power to decide who lives and who dies.

He had to do something. He had to intervene. His badge, his credentials—they weren't just plastic. They were a symbol of an ideal, of a belief in objective truth and moral accountability. They had to mean something here. They had to.

"You can't…" he started, his voice a strangled whisper. He tried to push himself up. The leather strap on his left wrist held him fast. But his legs were free. He swung them over the side of the desk, his bare feet hitting the cold, gritty floor. The shock of it jolted him.

He put his weight on his legs. They trembled, then gave way. His muscles, starved and battered, refused to obey. The world spun, a nauseating lurch of floor and ceiling. He wasn't standing; he was falling. He pitched forward, his good arm flailing for purchase, and crashed into the small, sterile space between the dying fighter and the child.

His hand landed in a tray of fresh bandages, a carefully laid out field of white gauze and medical tape intended for the child. He contaminated it. His dirty, bloody hand, a smear of grime on the pristine white. He’d done it again. In his desperate attempt to enforce his own morality, he had once again become a source of chaos, a vector of contamination.

He was on his knees, the laminate floor slick and cold beneath him. He looked up at Mina. Her back was to him. She was checking the saline drip into the child's arm, her movements completely unaffected by his collapse. She hadn’t even flinched.

"My badge," he croaked, fumbling at his collar with his left hand. The lanyard was still there, tucked inside his shirt. He pulled it out. The plastic card swung free. "I'm press. International Press Corps. You have to… you have to save him. It's the law. Geneva…"

He was babbling. He knew it. The words were meaningless here. But they were all he had. The whole architecture of his life, his identity, was built on the power of those words, on the idea that they represented something sacred and inviolable.

Mina finished adjusting the drip. She turned, slowly. Her eyes, dark and exhausted, finally met his. There was no anger in them. No irritation. There was nothing. It was the detached gaze of an engineer examining a broken component. She looked down at the press badge dangling from his fingers, then back up at his face.

Her movement was so fast he didn't see it coming. She stepped forward, grabbed his left wrist, the one holding the badge. Her grip was like steel. With a single, efficient twist, she bent his wrist back on itself, forcing his hand open. The pain was sharp and immediate, a clean, technical application of leverage. He cried out, and the badge fell from his numb fingers, clattering onto the floor.

"Here, this is just plastic," she said, her voice low and steady, each word a perfectly polished stone of contempt. "It doesn't clot blood. It doesn't fight infection. It doesn't lower a fever. It is a useless object. And you," she continued, her fingers tightening on his wrist, forcing him to meet her gaze, "are a contamination vector. You are a drain on resources. You are a problem of biological order."

She wasn't angry. She was stating facts as she saw them. He wasn't a person to her. He was a disruption in her carefully managed system. His ideals, his mission, his very identity—they were less than nothing. They were a liability.

From the gurney beside them, there was a sound. A long, shuddering sigh. A wet rattle, and then… silence. The shallow, rapid breathing had stopped. The fighter's eyes, which had been wide with terror and understanding, were now fixed and vacant, staring at the grime-covered ceiling. He was gone.

The finality of it was absolute. It had happened while Mina was focused on him, on neutralizing the threat he posed. He had distracted her. In those last crucial moments, when there might have been some small comfort to offer, a hand to hold, a word of reassurance, he had demanded her attention with his pointless, arrogant posturing. He hadn't just witnessed the fighter's death. He felt complicit in the messiness of its final moments.

"Get him out of my triage," Mina said, her voice flat. She released his wrist and turned away, already picking up a fresh pair of gloves, her attention shifting back to the living. To the child.

Hands seized him under the armpits. He was hauled to his feet, his legs dragging uselessly behind him. The pain in his shoulder screamed as his full weight settled onto the shattered bone. A gray fog descended over his vision. He was being dragged across the laminate floor, his bare feet scuffing through dust and grime. He was a sack of meat being moved from one place to another.

They dragged him past the main atrium, a cavernous space where dozens of other bodies lay on cots and makeshift beds made from piles of books. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, sickness, and burning paper from a fire pit in a large metal drum. The heart of the library, the place of learning and quiet contemplation, was now a charnel house, a refugee camp. Every face he saw was gaunt, etched with fear or pain. This was Mina Kovic's sanctuary. A place of managed decay.

His handlers grunted with effort, pulling him toward a darker, narrower section of the library. The aisles were tight, lined with tall metal shelves that stretched up into the gloom. The fiction section. They were taking him to the stacks. They rounded a corner, into an aisle marked 'Romance.' A single, bare emergency bulb at the far end cast long, distorted shadows, making the rows of books look like crooked teeth in a monstrous jaw.

They dumped him unceremoniously on the floor. His head hit the cold concrete with a dull thud. His escorts left without a word, their heavy boot steps receding back toward the relative light of the main hall. He was alone.

He lay there for a long time, listening to the frantic drumming of his own heart. The silence of the stacks was different from the tense quiet of the triage area. It was a heavy, oppressive silence, weighted down by the millions of forgotten words mouldering on the shelves around him. The air was cold and damp. He could feel the chill seeping into his bones through his thin shirt. Condensation dripped from the ceiling, a slow, maddening rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap.

He had to get off the floor. Hypothermia would kill him as surely as a BHI bullet. He pushed himself up with his left arm, gritting his teeth against the chorus of pain from his body. He was leaning against the base of a bookshelf. He needed insulation. Something to put between his body and the freezing concrete.

The books. Of course. The library was full of them. He reached out and pulled a handful of paperbacks from the bottom shelf. Their covers were garish, featuring ridiculously handsome men and swooning women in period dress. The paper was swollen and soft with moisture, the pages warped. The smell of mold and mildew was overwhelming. He pulled out more, piling them on the floor, trying to construct a mattress.

It was a pathetic effort. The books were uneven, digging into his already bruised ribs and back. Many of them were so damp they felt colder than the floor itself. But it was something. It was an act of self-preservation, a small defiance against the overwhelming despair that threatened to swallow him whole. He lay down on his makeshift bed of ruined love stories, pulling more books on top of himself like a blanket. The damp paper clung to his skin, but it blocked the drafts that snaked along the floor.

He closed his eyes. Exhaustion was a physical weight, pulling him down, down into a darkness that promised a temporary escape from the pain. He let himself drift, his consciousness fraying at the edges. For a moment, there was just the rhythmic drip of water and the shallow whisper of his own breathing.

Then it started.

A crackle of static. A loud, jarring pop from somewhere above him. He flinched, his eyes snapping open. He looked up into the darkness between the shelves. He could just make out a small, circular grate in the ceiling tiles. A speaker. Part of the library's old PA system.

Another crackle, and then music blasted out, shockingly loud in the enclosed space. It wasn’t an emergency broadcast. It wasn't a pirate radio signal. It was cheerful. Manically, aggressively cheerful. A synthesized beat, a high-pitched, auto-tuned female voice singing in a language he didn't understand. Korean. It was K-Pop. The same slick, manufactured, relentlessly upbeat music the BHI used in their propaganda videos, the soundtrack to their carefully edited footage of compliant citizens in the secure sectors.

The sound was distorted, tinny, and pushed far beyond the speaker's tolerance. The treble was a physical assault, a high-frequency screech that vibrated in his teeth. The bass was a muddy, repetitive thud that he could feel in the floor, in the books pressed against his body. It was psychological warfare. A sonic siege. They couldn’t shell the library—too many of their own 'loyalist' assets were likely hidden among the refugees—so they were breaking them down with sound. Preventing sleep. Fraying nerves. A constant, maddening reminder of the happy, orderly world they were excluded from.

The cheerful melody was a grotesque counterpoint to the suffering in the library. It was the sound of a world that didn't care. A world that was singing and dancing while they froze and bled and died in the dark.

Theo rolled onto his good side, pulling his knees to his chest. He pressed his hands over his ears, but it was useless. The music was too loud, too pervasive. It wasn't just in the air; it was in the bones of the building. It was inescapable. He had fled the war on the streets only to find it here, in a more insidious form. The war followed you. It got inside your head. It played on a loop, a maddening, cheerful, synthesized beat that promised no rest, no peace, no escape.

He curled up tighter, the damp, swollen spines of forgotten romance novels digging into his ribs, and realized with a sickening certainty that there was no such thing as a sanctuary. There was only the front line, and he was on it, whether he was standing or lying broken in the dark.