“Hey, hey. Shh.” Jem squeezed her hand. “HART and Fire and your lot are all on their way. Just hold on a little while longer for me, okay?” Refusing to panic, Jem focused on the basics, shining the torch around Rosie to establish her position and general condition. Trapped at a slight angle, her head twelve inches below the ledge, Rosie had jammed her right hand into a gap between two bricks to keep herself steady. The water had covered her chest, but she wasn’t shivering, and her skin was mottled and clammy. Jem hit priority on her radio, her fingers pressed to the rapid pulse at Rosie’s wrist. “ETA, Ryan. I need water rescue and enclosed space capability and someone with bolt cutters ASAP.”

“Twenty to twenty-five,” he said. “Half the available resources are en route to you.”

“Thank fuck for that. Keep me updated.” She pulled out her IV pouch. “Score the pain out of ten for me,” she told Rosie, sticking the pulse oximeter on her finger and then attaching the defib’s blood pressure cuff and setting it to calculate. “Let’s say one is a paper cut, ten is stepping barefoot onto Lego.”

“Four?” Rosie hedged, busy staring at the cuff.

“Four, eh?” Jem made no attempt to disguise her scepticism. Tight lines were etched across Rosie’s forehead, and her jaw was clenched. At some point she had bitten her lip so hard it was still bleeding. “Try again without fibbing.”

Rosie sighed, obviously embarrassed. “It keeps making me throw up.”

“Don’t worry, I can fix that.” Jem fastened her tourniquet around Rosie’s wrist and slapped the back of her hand. “Are you allergic to anything?”

“Ferrets.”

“Drugs, Rosie. I’m not going to launch a bloody ferret at you.”

“Oh. No, no drugs.”

“Good. Bear with me, your veins have gone to shit.” Despite her misgivings, Jem managed to slide the cannula into place at the second attempt and secured it with a bandage. Rosie’s blood pressure was low, her pulse was racing, and her temperature wouldn’t even register, so Jem hung a bag of warm saline from a section of pipework and set the infusion running. “I can’t give you too much of this,” she said, injecting a cautious dose of morphine. “I don’t want you falling off your perch. It should help, though.”

“Mm.” Rosie took a deep, relieved breath as Jem continued to work. “That’s better than a pint with a whiskey chaser.”

Jem smiled and snapped the tops off her last couple of vials. “Smashing. I’m nearly finished. The nausea should ease, and this is to stop you from bleeding too much. Then all we have to do is sit tight and wait for the cavalry, okay?”