John always envisioned hospitals and medical environments as sterile and ordered, if stressful. The situation in the makeshift medical area was anything but sterile. It fell short of the abattoir he’d dreaded, but not by much. Unable to transport patients to the hospital, the motley crew of healthcare workers did their best.

  The people inside recognized Katherine and made way. John did his best to analyze each patient, but their conditions were all different stages of “critical.” In his magical senses, the patients felt faded and weak, like coals under a blanket of snow. John’s perception could not make out, so he looked for his mom’s instruction.

  “John, how much mana do you have left?”

  “Just under two-thirds of my total, I think.”

  “How much of that will you need to heal someone?”

  “Truth be told, I have no idea.” John slumped.

  “Come on, no time to mope,” his mom grabbed his wrist and dragged him to the side of a cot.

  The man in the cot had a massive bandage over his abdomen. Blood and worse had soaked his linens. John’s mom read off a chart while John examined him, “Took fire from an engagement with looters, bullets ripped through his abdomen as he turned to run. To summarize, his abdominal muscles and guts are mulched, and we don’t have the stuff to do proper surgery here. He’ll die of sepsis and/or internal injuries if you can’t stabilize or save him.”

  John swallowed hard. “Got it.” No pressure.

  John raised his hands and began to pull mana out of the simmering pool in his midsection. Crimson spirals traveled out through his arms. His hands started to glow as the first drops of mana dripped through his palms. Several people nearby yelped before his mom calmed them down and shouted orders. As the trickle of mana increased from drips to a continuous flow, people cut the bandages off the man’s midsection.

  When John was learning first aid in the Boy Scouts, he’d seen photos of some gnarly injuries. When they went on campouts, he’d helped treat what seemed like bad gashes caused by accidents with knives or falling on rocks. His mom had raised him and Cameron with videos of rare surgical procedures alongside The Backyardigans. When he was confronted with the twisted ruin of this poor bastard’s midsection, he nearly puked. The smell of pierced intestines was just as assaulting as wound’s grisly appearance, with puckered lines of skin where intestines had been stitched back inside the abdominal cavity.

  John wobbled on his feet even as his mana made contact. Someone steadied him and murmured encouraging words. He appreciated it most when the mana seeped into the patient and suffused damaged and inflamed tissue. Intestines writhed and muscles knit themselves back together. Several people had fished their phones out to make videos and document the process. Dr. Brisal was captivated by the process. John was struggling not to vomit.

  In the past, John had been unconscious or totally juiced on adrenaline while he repaired major trauma. When he’d restored Lt. Long’s sight, he’d been focused on the crowd around him. For the first time, he was watching it happen right in front of him. The seasoned professionals around John all had years if not decades more experience than he did.

  John took deep breaths and focused on keeping the flow of mana steady. Once the man’s injuries were sealed, he would have to move on to the other patients. Abdominal muscle fibers wove back together while fatty tissue and skin welded together. Sickening black rivulets flowed away from the angry red inflammation when the mana soothed it. John assumed his mana was sweeping nascent infections out of his patient’s system, but he was hardly an authority. John’s magical senses dimly registered that the man’s situation was improving, but he had no idea if he was stable.

  “How’s he doing? I can’t keep this up forever,” John grit out.

  An EMT with her fingers on the patient’s carotid replied, “His pulse is evening out, he’s in a lot less pain.”

  “Great. We need a benchmark for when I can stop and move to the next person,” John was starting to sweat from the effort of maintaining a regular mana flow for this long.

  His mom proposed a solution, “Once the skin is sealed up we’ll assume he’s stable and John can move on. We’ll continue to monitor for internal bleeding or sepsis.”

  John grunted, “Deal. Someone run triage and get ready to steer me to the next person. I have something like five-eighths left in the tank. Anyone free, brainstorm how I can make this more efficient. Mom, you call time on this guy.”

  It took about twenty seconds longer for the last skin to grow into place. John had to leave it pink and raw when his mom called time. He had a brief respite, just enough for several heaving breaths, as people scrambled to clear the area around his next subject.

  He marched over and repeated the process. A woman this time, her hand crushed and body lacerated when two fighting mages had caused a car pileup. The lacerations were all stitched and bandaged, but her right forearm and hand were a mess. She was clearly in agony but too exhausted to scream. According to her previous care team, she was dangerously low on blood and the wounds in her arm had not clotted well. When John stepped up with his hands raised, a doctor stepped in front of him before he drew on his mana.

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  “What is it?” John asked tersely while he watched the woman writhe in pain.

  “Do we know if you can fix bone? The first guy was all soft tissue damage.” The doctor wrung his hands nervously.

  “Yes. Move.” John shouldered him out of the way.

  Mana spilled forth freely, but the injuries healed slowly. Much too slowly. John hauled on his reserves, but increasing the reasonable stream to a torrent barely helped her recovery while exhausting him further.

  John was panicking, “What should I do?!”

  The medics had a huddle while his mom and her aides helped hold the patient down. Her nerve endings were regenerating just fine, without any of the endorphins or trauma to take the edge off. Someone pushed morphine into her IV, but it failed to register. John noticed more mana flowed in the rough direction of her liver when it did.

  “Cut that out. Look at the mana. John’s magic is juicing up her liver and wasting energy to metabolize the morphine,” Dr. Brisal shook her head.

  “She gonna be ok?” John grunted.

  “She’ll have to be. Stay focused.”

  John nodded. The huddle behind them was stalling out. He had to ratchet back the outpouring of mana, the firehose method was just too much to sustain. Nobody knew enough about how magic worked to produce useful advice. Wait a minute…

  “Go get Case and Jen, they might have some ideas.”

  An orderly dashed off. In a minute of healing, John had burned close to an eighth of his total mana capacity and accomplished essentially nothing. The smaller cuts were healed over and the big ones started to close, but the patient’s hand was still tangled wreckage. The tourniquet over her elbow was doing a much better job keeping her alive than John. John shot a glance at his mom. She had hoped he would be the magic bullet for the catastrophe, but it seemed like he might not be cut out for the task. He despaired at the possibility that the earlier doctor had been right. Maybe I can’t heal someone else’s bones!

  Just in time, Jen and Case arrived. They both grimaced but got to work. Magical vines took over for the medics, strapping the patient down better than any team of men could. Case stood behind John and held him up. Jen and Case saw John’s harried visage and frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” Case asked.

  “Look at her hand. It isn’t healing at all!” Jen pointed.

  “Good shout, Jen. Y’all have any ideas?” John wiped his forehead on a sleeve before his sweat reached his eyes.

  “Maybe the healing is spread out too much?” Case proposed.

  “Seems like it, her minor cuts and the lacerations are making progress,” Dr. Brisal agreed.

  Jen nodded, “So you need some way to direct the mana, like my vines.” A creeper waved to support her point.

  John shook his head “Yeah, but I can’t make it move the way you can. Not once it’s out of me.”

  Case’s brow furrowed, “What about that whip move you did earlier? That was pretty well aimed.”

  John tried to effect that change and frowned, “Doesn’t work. I think I was able to steer it earlier because the mana had a track to follow. A loop that would return. It’s just getting used up here.”

  Dr. Brisal stepped up, “Well, it must be possible. We just saw it prioritize metabolizing the morphine.”

  “I don’t know how to replicate that.”

  Jen huffed, “Alright, then stop spreading the wealth. Force the issue and concentrate the mana on her arm.”

  Two vines snapped up from the table, grabbed John’s wrists, and forced them down to meet the ragged surface of the woman’s arm. The feeling of rent flesh and jagged bone fragments made John pull back on instinct. Jen’s eyes filled up with a deep viridian green and power pulsed out of her into the vines. They held fast.

  John grimaced, but it was working. The point-blank wash of mana worked wonders. Bones made sickening crunches as they slid back into place and tendons whipped into position. Tissues churned as they turned over, pushing out damaged cells and growing new. The sensation of flesh roiling beneath his fingers made John’s gorge rise. Gasps filled the tent at the sight. John’s mom practically dove to administer more morphine now that the mana had been forcibly focused.

  It took another full minute of healing before the arm was back in shape. The woman on the gurney looked gaunt. John supposed the accelerated healing forced her body to get nutrients from somewhere. John gasped and slumped into Case when his mom gave the thumbs up. His best friend caught him under the armpits.

  Case praised his friend, “Good job man. Breathe for a second.”

  John sucked down air as though he’d been drowning. He wondered why using his mana for sustained periods was goddamn exhausting while Jen was just fine. The reserve in his abdomen had shrunk to just over a quarter of his total capacity.

  Dr. Brisal put a hand on her son’s shoulder, “John, how are you doing?”

  “I’ve got maybe a quarter tank left.”

  “Ok, take a little breather. You freed people up so the last four patients are in a little better shape. How fast does your mana come back?”

  “Honestly, I have no clue. I’ve been unconscious so long recently I haven’t really been tracking it. Case, Jen?”

  Jen waggled her hand, “We’ve been experimenting a little bit. Case and I recover something like one percent every minute and a half to two minutes. There’s no way to know if we all have the same capacity, because there’s no common energy measure.”

  “We could get the Groupmind guy in here? Surely they’ve figured out some sort of estimation.”

  Case shrugged, “Probably not worth his time to tell us personally.”

  Jen frowned, “Case, people are dying.”

  “Sure, but John’s mana is going to come back however fast it comes back. Nothing we can do about that.”

  John felt horrible. His gaze flicked over to the four remaining patients and grimaced. He could hardly bear someone dying on account of his deficiency. John’s expression revealed his deeper feelings to his friends.

  Behind them, the assembled medical professionals reviewed the footage and talked in hushed tones. The huddle sent an EMT to retrieve Dr. Brisal while the three youths argued. She listened to them and nodded.

  Dr. Brisal called out to interrupt the trio, “John! We have a plan that we think will stabilize the last four patients. You have five minutes, then we’re moving, ok?”

  John took a shuddering breath. You can do this, it’s just like playing a third half after a full 80 minutes in rugby. He’d pushed through exhaustion before, now people’s lives were on the line.

  “Sounds like a plan, Mom!” John tried to inject some cheer into his tone, but it fell flat.