The bolt had entered the girl’s left shoulder just below the spoon-shaped curve of her clavicle. Alicia wedged her hands under the girl’s shoulders while Caleb took her feet, and together they eased the girl onto her side. Sara retrieved a pair of scissors and sat behind her to cut the blood-soaked knapsack away, then the girl’s flimsy T-shirt, snipping it at the neck and tearing the rest of it free, revealing the slender frame of an early adolescent—the small, curving buds of her breasts and her pale skin. The bolt’s barbed tip was poking through a star-shaped wound just above the line of her scapula.

“I have to clip this off. I’ll need something bigger than these shears.”

Caleb nodded and ran from the room. As he passed through the curtain, Soo Ramirez rushed in. Her long hair had come undone; her face was streaked with dirt. She stopped abruptly at the foot of the cot.

“I’ll be goddamned. She’s just a kid.”

“Where the hell is Other Sandy?” Sara demanded.

The woman appeared dazed. “Where on earth did she come from?”

“Soo, I’m all alone in here. Where’s Sandy?”

Soo lifted her face, focusing on Sara. “She’s … in the Sanctuary, I think.”

Footsteps and voices, a buzz of commotion from without: the outer room was filling with onlookers now.

“Soo, get these people out of here.” Sara lifted her voice to the curtain. “Everybody, out! I want this building cleared now!”

Soo nodded and darted outside. Sara checked the girl’s pulse again. Her skin appeared to have taken on a faintly mottled appearance, like a winter sky on the edge of snow. How old was she? Fourteen? What was a fourteen-year-old girl doing out in the dark?

She turned to Alicia. “You brought her in?”

Alicia nodded.

“Did she say anything to you? Was she alone?”

“God, Sara.” Her eyes seemed to float. “I don’t know. Yes, I think she was alone.”

“Is that blood yours or hers?”

Alicia dropped her eyes to the front of her jersey, seeming to notice the blood for the first time. “Hers, I think.”

More commotion from without the room, and Caleb’s voice yelling, “Coming through!” He burst through the curtain, waving a heavy cutter, and thrust it into Sara’s hands.

A greasy old thing, but it would do. Sara poured spirits over the blades of the cutter and then her hands, wiping them dry on a rag. With the girl still lying on her side, she used the cutters to clip the arrowhead free, and poured more alcohol over everything. Then she directed Caleb to wash his hands as she had done while she took a skein of wool from the shelf and snipped off a long piece, rolling it into a compress.