Star of Life and heartbeat on upper back

Gethin drove with the blue lights turning the hedges the colour of deep water. The boy in the yard was sixteen and pale as a sheet of paper, one hand clamped on the rail of a feed trough. He had come off a quad bike. His breathing was quick and shallow, and when Nell clipped the leads to his chest the monitor drew a green line that jumped and stalled, jumped and stalled, like a bird that could not decide whether to land.

"Talk to him," she told Gethin, and he did, about football, about the bike, about nothing at all, while she worked the cannula into a hand that would not stop shaking. Somewhere between the second bag and the cattle grid, the line steadied. By the time the doors opened at Penmorva General, the boy was swearing at the porters, which Nell took as a good sign.

Dawn came up grey over the car park. Nell sat in the cab with the engine ticking and wrote the handover sheet the way she always did, plain and short, because the people who read it at the end of a shift needed facts more than feelings. Stable on arrival. Asked for his dog. Asked whether he could still make Saturday's match. She signed her name, then added one more line in the margin, small and careful: Ring the farm, nobody has told the brothers yet.