As prayers go, it’s been heard before, and many times at that, but she means every word with all of her heart and soul.

Stepping over fallen beams and shattered glass, she enters the clinic, wrinkling her nose at the stench of melted plastic and cordite that still permeates the air despite the obvious signs that the damage was done several months ago, at the very least. A fitful sun shines through what remains of the roof, turning the ugly scene oddly beautiful as the shards of glass sparkle like diamonds in the snow. At the rear of the reception area is a door that has somehow escaped the brunt of the blast. She walks to it and, with a hard yank, pulls it open. Beyond is more destruction. To the left, the walls and ceiling have collapsed, leaving whatever is beyond inaccessible to her. Straight ahead, a long corridor has, for the most part, been left to stand on its own. Taking out a small, but powerful, flashlight from her pocket, she switches it on and shines it down the undisturbed hallway. The walls are a soothing blue, and the doors, six to a side, are painted in cheerful primary colors. She walks slowly, cautiously, down this hallway, opening each door in its turn. All reveal neatly kept examination rooms with real beds instead of sterile tables, and all the high-tech medical equipment a prospective mother could want to be assured of the continuing health of her developing fetus.

The corridor ends with a stark white door, larger than the others, and bearing the legend: “Authorized Personnel Only”.

This door opens easily, and she steps through, into yet another corridor—sterile white, this time. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says, feeling a faint spark of hope bloom. There are several doorways with no doors to bar the view, and she walks to the first one, peering inside. A rather large centrifuge and other identifiable pieces of equipment identify this room as a lab. Her light reflects back at her, sparking off of many rows of glass tubes used for blood collection. The open cabinets reveal nothing of great interest, but she goes through them meticulously anyway on the off-chance that some needed item might be stored within. Coming up empty, she plays her light in a last sweep over the room and steps back into the hallway.

“Paydirt!” Her happy cry echoes through the empty corridor, though the squeaking of disturbed rats tell her the place is not exactly as empty as she might have liked. “Ok, time to find out if my furry, striped hallucination is worth the ulcer he’s giving me.”

Stepping into what obviously is the pharmacy portion of this little operation, she shines her flashlight over row after row of open cabinets, and several which appear to be securely locked. “Oh well, no narcotic bliss for me. Let’s see. Pills, pills, caplets, tablets, pills, pills, more pills, vials! Yes!!” Walking over to the cabinet containing the vials, she squints at the names on the boxes which house the ampoules of liquid medication. “Damn, I should have remembered my damn glasses. Stupid…. Ok, what do we have here. Sodium chloride. Potassium chloride. Gentamycin. Vancomycin. Zythromycin. Erythromycin. I’m not gonna even try to pronounce that one. Ampicillin. Amoxicillin. V-Cillin, Hello Levaquin!” She pulls down a box of twenty five 50cc vials. “Ok, they’re not pre-filled syringes, but the dose is right, and with my crash course in Shot Giving 101 yesterday, I think I can manage. Now all I have to do is find some syringes.”

Acting on a hunch, she pulls open a large drawer beneath the cabinet and finds a plethora of sterile-wrapped syringes of different sizes, from 10cc down to TB. Grabbing handfuls, she begins stuffing her pockets with as many as they can possibly carry. “Thank God there aren’t any cops around anymore. With my luck, I’d get arrested for drug pushing. I know it.” Another drawer reveals hundreds of alcohol prep packets, and she grabs those as well.

Pockets filled to overflowing, she takes a final look around, sees there isn’t anything else she thinks she’ll need, and steps back out into the corridor. “Alright, I think it’s time to blow this one-horse town and get back to where I belong.”

Without thinking, she turns the wrong way and faces a somber brown metal door with a safety bar across it and an “EMERGENCY EXIT” sign just below the wire-crossed window that is too high for her to see through. Seeing no reason to take the long way around, and well aware of the need (and desire) to get back to Dakota as quickly as possible, she ploughs ahead, hitting the safety bar and taking a step outside, before just as quickly reversing and allowing the door to slam closed in front of her. When it does, she sinks to her knees, breathing deeply and trying to convince herself that what she thinks she’s seen out there isn’t what she did, in fact, see. The visual imprint of the scene plays itself out behind her closed eyes, cutting her futile hopes in that direction to shards.

The first thing that comes to mind is a newsreel, seen long ago in some dusty History class in school—High School, she thinks, though it doesn’t really matter. Done in black and white, it showed, in incredibly vivid and heart-wrenching detail, scenes captured just after the liberation of the concentration camps of post World War II Poland. She remembers giant bulldozers pushing before them the emaciated bodies of dead Jews, Gypsies, and gays into gigantic earthen trenches.

The trenches are here, as they were there. She’s seen them, no matter what her mind tries to tell her. Instead of musselmen, however, these slashes in a weeping earth bear the bodies of infants. Not fetal abortions—even assuming an abortion clinic would toss their remains in some stinking, rat infested pit—but infants, and even, she would swear before court, toddlers.

“Jesus Christ,” she moans, her body rocking in a completely unconscious self comforting gesture. “Oh sweet Jesus Christ. What the hell is happening here?”

Her plaintive wail goes unnoticed and unremarked in the cavernous emptiness of the bombed out clinic. Even the rats, it seems, have no answers for her.

Ok, Kirsten, she thinks, putting her hands over her ears like a child not wanting to hear a fight between her parents, you’ve got to let this go for now. There’s nothing you can do here. There’s nothing anyone can do here. They’re dead, and dead they’ll stay. You’ve got someone out there who loves you and depends on you, and damnit, you’re not going to fuck this up. Get a hold of yourself and get the job done. Mourn later.

Thus bolstered, she rises to her feet. A spasm hits her belly, and everything she’s eaten for the day comes up in a large glut, pooling on the ground between her feet. Black speckles dart before her eyes and she stumbles blindly until her back is against the wall, her flashlight falling to the ground and breaking, plunging her into total darkness. She can feel panic begin to draw its icy talons down her spine. She fights it down as she fights the waves of nausea and the threat of fainting, digging down deep to a reserve of strength she senses is Dakota’s as much as her own—the bond they share. That same sense of her lover tells her that she’s running out of time, and that scares her far more than what she’s dealing with here. Her stomach settles and the dizziness and cold sweat of panic recede, enabling her to move away from the wall, hands in front of her like a blind woman. One booted foot slips in the mess she’s left, but she continues on, one hand skimming along the corridor wall until she’s able to find the door. She opens it quickly, and steps into the second hallway, this one just as night-black as the first. Hurrying now, a map of this corridor firmly in her head, she runs down the hall and grabs the doorknob, yanking it open and breathing a sigh of relief when the charred rubble of the waiting area appears before her.

It’s snowing again. Hard. The flakes fall in straight, heavy lines through the roof’s many holes, adding to the accumulation already on the floor from the earlier blizzard. Kirsten barely notices as she stumbles through the partly covered wreckage and into what remains of the day. Frosty breath jutting in twin streams through her nose, she secures her hard-won and newly gotten gain and begins to run.

*

The door to the shack opens reluctantly on its one squealing hinge. A gust of bitter wind enters and flows over Dakota’s uncovered, sweat-shiny body. She shivers, then stirs. Sunken eyes, ringed with deep, dark circles, flutter open, dazed. A huge wolf, gray-pelted and sleek, steps through the open door and looks down at Dakota, dark eyes wise, calm, and affectionate.

Dakota struggles to sit, but it too weak to do more than lift her head the merest inch from its makeshift pillow. “Wa Uspewicakiyapi? Am I dreaming?”

“No.” His voice is deep and comforting in her mind. “Nor do you walk the Blue Road, Mato Sica Kte.” (ed. Note: Killer of the Wolverine—loose translation.)

From the depths of her illness, Koda musters up a smile. “You saw that, huh?”

“Indeed. It was most…impressive.”

She looks away, hopeful that the slowly guttering fire hides the blush that creeps onto her cheeks, but knowing that her old teacher’s eyes are keen indeed.

“The reason I have come,” he continues, “is because your mate is in danger.”

Koda’s eyes snap back to him, wide and fearful. “My m….Kirsten?” She cranes her neck, looking frantically about the tiny shack. Asi lies, oblivious, next to her, deeply asleep. “Kirsten?!?”

As she struggles to rise, all thoughts of illness, and its attendant weakness, forgotten, Wa Uspewicakiyapi steps forward and places a forepaw on her shoulder, easily holding her to the floor. “As you are now, there is nothing you can do, young one. Your mate has gone to The Far Away Place to gather healing for your wound. Your body is too weak to follow.”

“You don’t understand! I have to—.”

“I understand well, my friend,” he replies, putting more of his weight down on her shoulder, sharp claws not quite digging into the tender flesh beneath them. “As you are now,” he repeats, words measured and deliberate, black eyes staring deeply into hers, willing her fevered, panicked mind to understand, “you cannot help her. Remember.”

“Remember what? I can’t —.”

Again she struggles and again he presses more of his weight into her. He can feel his time growing short. The solidness of his body begins to shift and grow insubstantial. “Remember my lessons. Remember where your true strength lies. Goodbye for now, my friend. I will be watching.”

“Wa Uspewicakiyapi! No!! Wait!!! Please!!”

“Remember….”

Her frail strength depleted, Dakota slumps back on the ersatz bed, shivering in pain and distress. “Remember. I need to remember….” Her gaze darts about the empty cabin, searching…searching. “Kirsten!! Kirsten, where are you?!? I have to find you! I have to….” She struggles, but it’s one that’s over before it has truly begun. Her body is weak, wrung out, her mind delirious with fever. Delirium tells her she is simply dreaming, but the more rational part of her mind, buried deep and struggling to maintain its hold, tells her the truth of the matter. She is not dreaming, and Kirsten is in danger.

“Remember,” she mutters to herself, dragging her good hand through her sweat-tangled hair. “Remember….”

Her eyes drift closed and a vision, not of Wa Usepwicakiyapi, but of her grandfather, appears in the darkness. His face is exactly as she remembers it; lines as deep as river-cut canyons running down from the corners of his somber mouth, braids iron gray and tightly wrapped, eyes stern, but always with a tiny twinkle of amusement sparking their pale depths. He holds in one gnarled hand a teaching stick. A feather, tied off with rawhide, dangles from its end.

In this vision, fever induced or otherwise, she sees herself as she was many years ago, a weaning-child, all pudgy arms and legs, a mop of coal-black hair, and pale blue eyes. Giggling with joy, this younger version of herself reaches for the pretty feather and topples forward, into the feather’s bright colors and the paleness of her grandfather’s eyes. Dakota finds herself merging with this younger version, and together they fall into the swirling void.

“Remember….”

*

The blizzard has grown greatly in intensity, but Kirsten, at the bottom of a deep ravine, barely notices. Both sides of the ravine bear signs of her struggle. The back side, scuff and tumble marks from where she had, in her haste, blundered off the path and down the steep embankment, end over end, and the front side is covered in the broken branches and muddied snow that marks her scrambling, frantic attempts to get back out.

For the moment, she lies at the very bottom, bruised, aching, sore, and above all, tired. It does not seem like she is lying on snow at all, but rather a soft, warm bed that appears to promise her a restful sleep if only she’d close her eyes and sink into the gift it offers. The scientist in her knows the dangers of such seduction—hypothermia will kill her far more quickly than any animals who might slither down this cut in the earth looking for an easy meal. The medicine she has somehow managed to keep safe, though the thought of Dakota seems far away—hazy almost, as if she’s dreamed that part of her life. “Sleep,” she murmurs, laying her cheek into the soft, so very soft snow. “Just a little rest. I can try again when I’m stronger. She’ll understand.”