Part 7 — The Edge of Courage
Your voices make a fence. I lie inside it and count the shapes your footsteps make. When you say my name like a promise, I believe the ground will hold.
The barn breathes like an old animal—wood swelling, wind testing the seams, dust turning in the light like patient snow. Outside, engines idle, cut, idle again, a low hive of opinion. Inside our square of cattle panels and baling twine, Buddy rests with his chin on Noah’s sock. The baby monitor translates his chest into small, green mountains.
2 hours, 58 minutes.
Agent Ramirez stands at the door, back to the parking lot, eyes on us. Her stance says plainly: If the world comes through that door wrong, it touches me first.
Mom crouches, gloved and masked, counting breaths aloud under hers. Dad walks a trench into the dirt floor. Dr. Lin sets his bag on a hay bale and lays out sterile packets with the reverence of a man arranging photographs of people he loves.
My phone buzzes. Mr. Whitaker stable—overnight observation. Another buzz. Hannah still holding—fever down one degree. Relief knocks, peeks in, refuses to stay.
“Walk with me,” Ramirez says, signaling Mom and Dad behind a feed bin. I drift close enough to pretend I’m not listening and listen anyway.
“There’s a compassionate-use protocol.” Ramirez’s voice is steady, but I notice her hands—how she keeps them open. “Antiviral candidate, fluids, supportive meds. If we can source canine convalescent plasma, we add it later. It’s not approved. It’s drafted. It carries real risk.”
Dad’s jaw tightens. “So the choices are a needle that ends him, or a needle that might end him slower.”
“You have a third word,” Mom says, soft but iron. “Try.”
Dr. Lin nods once. “I won’t lie to you. Risk of hemorrhage. Possible seizure. Organ stress. Might buy time. Might do nothing. Might make it worse.”
“How long to get plasma?” Mom asks.
“Two hours if roads hold,” Dr. Lin says. “A rescue in Sandusky—dog recovered last week. We’ve called.”
The taller Guardian Rider appears, wind on his coat. “Parking lot’s twitchy,” he reports. “Two different groups chanting the same word and meaning different worlds.”
“Keep them off the line,” Ramirez says.
“Boring heroics only,” he says, and disappears.
Mom asks for the forms. Dad glares at the signature line like it owes us money. I go to Buddy and sit outside the pen.
“Hey,” I tell him, “if we do this, it’s going to feel weird, and you are still very good. Remember the storm last summer? How you kept checking each of us with your nose every time the thunder hit, as if fear needed roll call?” His tail ticks: once, twice.
2 hours, 41 minutes.
An officer sets a thermos near Mom. “Coffee,” he says. “Hot-ish.”
“Bless you,” Mom says, as if caffeine counts as sacrament.
The chanting outside braids tighter: “Let–Buddy–LIVE” meets “Keep–Kids–SAFE.” If you stand in exactly the wrong spot, it sounds like a song. If you stand anywhere else, it’s just noise shaped like love and fear.
Mom finishes page three and stares at page four like it might bleed. “If this were your dog?” she asks Dr. Lin.
“I would try,” he says, looking at Buddy instead of at us. “And I would forgive myself either way.”
Dad exhales through his teeth. “What if trying takes him sooner?”
“What if not trying does?” Mom answers, and there it is: the math of love.
We sign. Mom first—Maya Alvarez, pen squeaking. Dad second—block letters that have co-signed mortgages, permission slips, and promises. He hands me the tablet. “You don’t have to.”
“I do,” I say, and I do. My name looks too hopeful next to the waiver, like it hasn’t learned yet.
Dr. Lin and Mom stage the attempt with the quiet choreography of people who have practiced hope inside disasters. A line. A pump. Vials with labels that seem embarrassed to exist. “Slow sedation,” Dr. Lin narrates. “Antiviral. Fluids. If he seizes, we manage.” He does not say how in a barn with a teenager listening. I love him for the omission.
The shorter Guardian Rider hustles back in, cheeks winter-pink. “Plasma courier en route,” he says. “Ninety minutes if we don’t meet a parade.”
“Ninety is a luxury we don’t have,” Ramirez says, checking the clock that owns us. “We begin.”
Mom kneels at the crate door, and Buddy lifts his head. “Hi, love,” she murmurs, the same voice she uses for babies waking into bad dreams. “We’re going to help you rest while your body fights.”
He watches her hands like he’s memorizing a lullaby.
“Jade,” Dad says, “front of the pen. Talk to him. Make the world small.”
I slide to the panel nearest Buddy’s nose and fall into the only language I trust. “Remember the time you ate a sock and we called you Sock-Factory for a week? You were so proud. Remember the green beans? How you’d chew them like cigars?” His eyes soften at the word beans. The green line stays a hill. Up. Down. Up.
Dr. Lin slides the needle. Mom holds the line like a violin bow.
The barn listens.
A shout from the lot detonates against the door. “MURDERERS!” someone screams. Another voice jackknifes in: “SAINTS!” Words collide, drop to the gravel with a sound I feel in my teeth.
Ramirez doesn’t turn. “Hold your positions,” she says into her mic. “We do not escalate the stupid.”
Then Buddy sneezes. Not a cute sneeze. Wet, sharp, red threading from his nostril to the pad. The metallic smell steps into the aisle like an uninvited guest.
“Gauze,” Mom says.
“Here.” Dr. Lin is hands already where they should be.
Buddy’s eyes cloud slightly, like the light in the room thickens. He swallows and settles his chin back on Noah’s sock. The green mountain hesitates, jaggeds, tries to remember the path.
2 hours, 19 minutes.
Outside, a pickup noses beyond the sawhorses. The taller Rider plants his bike like a doorstop and smiles the kind of smile that says I have time to be patient, but not forever. The truck backs up a foot. Another car tries to pull alongside. An officer puts out one palm. The gesture is a small, unglamorous miracle: it works.
Inside, Dr. Lin murmurs to Mom, “Rate up a hair.” She adjusts. Her eyes meet mine just once. It is not permission or apology. It’s an I see you across a canyon.
Buddy’s tail thumps. Twice. The green line smooths. The room exhales in a single, ragged chorus.
I tell Buddy about the tomato massacre again—how he “helped” garden redesign—and he huffs at the funny part like he remembers. “You carried the ripe ones inside like trophies,” I say. “You do not understand tomatoes.”
He blinks slow, a dog’s version of I’m listening.
From the doorway, the feed-store man removes his hat and twists it like wringing out a cloud. “Family with the dog from this morning—Scout—called me,” he says to no one and us all. “They’re on their way to leave flowers at the boarding gate. I told them this barn is closed. They said grief doesn’t read signs.”
Dad’s throat works. He nods once. “We’ll make space,” he says, and I love him so much for the sentence my bones ache.
1 hour, 52 minutes.
The heaters tick; the barn’s winter breath chills my ankles. Ramirez steps out, returns, her badge now tucked inside her coat like even authorities get cold. “Crowd is mixed, but holding,” she reports. “Kira posted from intake. She told her followers to go donate blankets to the shelter and leave this address alone.” She allows herself half a smile. “I may send her a fruit basket.”
Mom’s gloved hand gives the line the smallest correction. Dr. Lin watches the green hill. “Good,” he whispers, to the line, to the dog, to the universe.
Then the green hill becomes teeth. Sharp, fast, too tall.
“Arrhythmia,” Dr. Lin says, the word bruising the air.
“Buddy,” I say, the name shaped like a rope. “Stay.”
He tries. I can see it—how an animal can try. Nose flares. Chest lifts. There’s a private fight happening inside him that none of us can enter.
“Seizure kit,” Mom says, and the way she says it tears the edges off the room.
Dr. Lin’s hands become metronomes. Mom’s voice turns into numbers. Dad stands very still, a man pretending to be a wall so the house doesn’t fall.
“Jade, back,” Mom says, gentler than the order requires. I’m already backing, fingers tight on the panel, prayer dissolving into air. I don’t know who I’m talking to anyway. Buddy. Gravity. Every dog who has ever loved a girl.
The monitor chirps an alarm that belongs in bright rooms, not barns. Outside, the crowd reacts as if they can hear what we’re hearing, though they can’t. The chant collapses. A woman sobs. Somewhere, a horn blares once and gives up.
“Hold him,” Dr. Lin breathes, and Mom does, not with hands—rules—but with presence, which is its own medicine. “Steady… steady…”
Buddy’s legs tremble, splay, still. His eyes find mine again—God, they find me—and I swear I see apology there for making me worry, which is the cruelest kindness: that even now, he thinks of us.
The green teeth smooth. For three heartbeats, the mountain returns. The world returns.
Then it doesn’t.
The line knives down, flat enough to make time stop.
“No,” Dad says to the universe.
“Lin,” Mom says, already doing what the next page of the manual demands.
The alarm goes full-throat, that long, punishing note that summons people from sleep. Dr. Lin moves—adjusts meds, checks, recalibrates—hands learning this particular dog’s body on the fly. The shorter Rider steps closer to the pen and looks away, which is respect disguised as grief. The feed-store man crosses himself with fingers that shake. Agent Ramirez stands exactly where she was, eyes wet, jaw set, a person refusing to let this become theater.
“Do we have him?” Ramirez asks, so softly it almost isn’t sound.
“We—” Dr. Lin begins, and mercy interrupts him.
A sound splits the space—boot scuff on concrete, breath, door—then a woman’s voice from the threshold, raw as a wound: “Is—this—where—”
She stops when she sees the crate. Her hand flies to her mouth. The quilted jacket behind her belongs to the man from the video—the one who filmed a calendar because truth needed a date. Between them, dangling from a leash like a guilty charm, is a yellow lab wearing a stiff Elizabethan collar and a leather strap stamped SCOUT.
Not a ghost. A second dog from the family who lost the first: Scout’s bonded housemate, alive, wary, eyes blown wide by a world that rearranged itself overnight. A thermal bag swings from the man’s other hand, a courier label peeling in the cold.
“We brought plasma,” he says, voice shattered and clear. “For yours. For Buddy.”
The alarm keeps singing. The clock keeps not caring.
And the syringe in Mom’s fingers, hanging halfway down the line, catches the light—mid-story—waiting for someone to decide what the next sentence is going to be.
Part 8 — The Covenant
Your hands are shaking, but the way you say my name is steady. I don’t know the words on your papers. I know the warmth through the metal when you lean close, and how your voice makes a room out of air.
For a beat, the alarm owned the barn. Then the couple in the doorway stepped into the sound—eyes raw, breath fogging—and the man lifted a soft cooler like an offering.
“We brought plasma,” he said, voice scraped thin. “From our other dog. He recovered last week. We… we wanted Scout’s name to mean something besides a video.” The yellow lab between them wore a cone and a borrowed leather strap stamped SCOUT that slid against a tag reading MILO—a makeshift tribute and a mistake you make on purpose when grief needs an anchor.
Agent Ramirez moved first, all training and mercy. “I need to see the label,” she said, already signaling an officer to hold the outer door. The woman pressed a gloved hand to the cooler before letting go, like releasing a kite string. “We had a tech pull it at our clinic,” she said. “Chain of… I don’t know. We did our best.”
Dr. Lin checked what could be checked without turning the moment into a courtroom. He met Mom’s eyes over the cooler lid. They had one of those silent conversations adults learn the hard way: the kind where you stack every fact you have and still step into the fog.
“We can try,” he said.
Dad exhaled through his nose like a man trying not to fog up glass. “We’re already trying.”
Ramirez tucked her badge inside her coat and spoke into her shoulder mic without leaving us. “We’re initiating compassionate use,” she said, simple and untheatrical. “We’ll document inside the ring. Keep the perimeter boring and tight.”
The woman from the video took one step toward me and stopped on the edge of the taped square. “I’m sorry,” she said, and her face broke in a way that made me want to hold her coat forever. “I filmed because I didn’t want it to be invisible.”
“I know,” I said, surprising myself by meaning it. “I’m sorry your video had to exist.”
She swallowed. “Make a different ending,” she whispered.
Mom and Dr. Lin staged the new hope like a ritual: nothing dramatic, everything careful. No one said the names of medicines. No one said the numbers that belonged in someone else’s textbook. The Guardian Riders drifted back to the door. The feed-store man put his hat to his chest. The heaters clicked, catching, and washed the air with the smell of clean metal and old hay.
“Jade,” Dad said, “front of the pen. Make the world small.”
I slid to the panel by Buddy’s nose and let my voice do the job my hands weren’t allowed to. “Hey, love,” I murmured, “remember how you hate the vacuum more than thunder? And how you pretend the vacuum is a snake and have to protect us from it? Today it’s just humming in a corner. It’s got nothing.”
Buddy’s eyes found mine, brown and steady, even as the sedative pulled him toward a softer floor. The green line stepped back from its teeth and tried to remember it was a hill.
“Clock,” Dad said, out of habit, out of fear.
“1 hour, 46 minutes,” Ramirez answered, not looking at her watch anymore. “We’re not letting the number do all the talking.”
The crowd outside reshaped itself around the sheriff’s tape: fewer chants now, more breath hanging in the cold, the strange hush that arrives when a group of people realize they might be near a sacred thing and don’t know how to behave. Every so often the parking lot spit out a heckle like a burp, but the Riders’ bored stares ate most of them before they grew teeth.
Mom’s voice slid into the low register she keeps for cliff edges. “Starting,” she said to Buddy more than to us, the way you tell a child what’s coming so their body doesn’t learn to be scared of hands.
A minute became milk pouring slow. Dr. Lin checked a connection and nodded once. Buddy’s chest climbed, fell. The line remembered how to be a landscape. The nosebleed, which had painted a comma on the pad, dried to punctuation.
“Good,” Dr. Lin whispered, not to tempt the universe. “That’s good.”
The woman with Milo pressed her knuckles to her teeth and watched like a person at a window when weather changes. “Scout would’ve liked him,” she said softly, eyes on Buddy. “He liked the ones who told jokes.”
“Buddy tells jokes,” I said. “He thinks green beans are comedy.”
From outside: a voice asking for updates in the tone of a neighbor, not a mob. Another voice telling someone to put their sign down or put it to work holding a door for an old man. A siren in the distance going somewhere else for once.
The heaters hummed. The barn held.
And then Buddy’s body remembered it was a battlefield.
It wasn’t big. No violent arc. Just a ripple under his skin, a tremor that ran the length of him like a rumor and made the green hill stutter. Mom’s gloved hand steadied the line without touching his fur. Dr. Lin said “ease” in a voice I had never heard before, a word that made a request more than an order.
Buddy blinked, slow. He breathed. The tremor gave up like a bad idea.
“Come on, bud,” Dad said, because some prayers are just names.
1 hour, 28 minutes.
Ramirez’s radio crackled. “Heads up: county health director is on site,” dispatch said. Two beats later a woman in a wool coat and sensible boots stood in the barn doorway, badge on a lanyard, frost in her hair, a folder in her hand. Her face was the face of someone who has slept badly and argued well for a long time.
“I’m not here to stop you,” she said before anyone could plant their feet. “I’m here because we need to change the way we talk to each other. The twelve-hour window was a blunt instrument. We’re replacing it with documented criteria.” She lifted the folder an inch. “If vitals stabilize for four consecutive intervals and there’s supervised containment, we’re not sending anyone to kick down a door.”
Dad looked like he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “So we get to be human again?”
“You were always human,” the director said. “We’re going to act like it.”
Ramirez’s shoulders dropped a centimeter, an earthquake on her body. “Put it in writing,” she said, and the director did, initialing the page the way you sign a peace treaty no one will ever read aloud in school.
Mom didn’t look up from the line, but the tendons in her neck loosened. I realized my jaw had unclenched only because my teeth hurt less.
The woman with Milo wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Thank you,” she whispered to nobody and everybody.
For ten minutes, the barn did the impossible thing: it felt like a safe room. Dr. Lin adjusted something microscopic. Mom watched numbers the way a sailor watches sky. Dad stood with his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t break the rule he believed in. The Riders took turns pretending to be bored so the crowd would catch it like a yawn.
I told Buddy a story about the time he stole a peach from the counter and walked backward to the couch so no one would notice the peach bulging in his mouth. He thumped his tail once—just once—but in a way that made a future out of the word.
Milo rested his head on the woman’s knee and watched me like he was memorizing my face, maybe so he could worry about me later.
1 hour, 07 minutes.
The first sign that the world wasn’t going to let us have anything for free was tiny: the overhead lights flickered, the way tired lights do in old buildings when wind leans on the wires. The heaters coughed and recovered. The monitor didn’t blink.
A second flicker. Longer. The barn breathed in, embarrassed. Somewhere outside, a transformer answered with a pop that sounded like a balloon taught to swear.
“Backup?” Ramirez asked, already moving.
“We’re on battery,” Dr. Lin said, calm. “We’re okay.”
The lights steadied. A kid in the parking lot whooped because someone had tossed him a spare handwarmer. It was the kind of sound that doesn’t belong in a movie about emergencies and ends up saving the scene anyway.
“Vitals?” Mom asked Dr. Lin without taking her eyes off the monitor.
“Better than my blood pressure,” he said.
The health director stood with her hands wrapped in her own scarf like gloves and watched the green hill as if staring could keep its promise.
I leaned closer, careful of the panel. “Hey,” I whispered to Buddy. “If you wake up enough to want to complain about this barn, you can. We’ll call it character-building and pretend you like the smell of cows.”
He did not wake up more. He did not wake up less.
Outside, the chanting didn’t come back, but something else did: the long, soft murmur that neighborhoods make when they remember they’re made of people. Someone passed out cups from a thermos. Someone walked a stroller in slow circles and sang the alphabet under their breath. Someone set a bouquet against the livestock gate: sunflowers in winter, wrong and perfect.
Time, that rude accountant, cleared its throat.
48 minutes.
The power hiccuped again—one of those blinks that are long enough to make you hate the word “blink.” The heaters died, caught, died, caught. This time the monitor beeped a warning that wasn’t about a heartbeat, but I still felt it in my ribs.
“Generator?” Dad asked the air.
“Fairgrounds office is rolling one,” the taller Rider called from the door. “Two minutes out.”
“Let’s not make two minutes longer than it is,” Mom said to the universe.
The woman with Milo squeezed the cooler’s handle like a hand and closed her eyes. The county director pulled a pen from behind her ear and wrote down something that didn’t have a place on a form yet. Ramirez stood with her feet set exactly the width of her shoulders and looked at each of us in turn, like a teacher taking attendance during a fire drill.
And then—and this is how days like this go—the thing we’d been keeping still for shifted anyway.
Not in the crate. In the aisle.
Noah coughed. It was nothing at first, the kind of thin winter cough kids collect like trading cards. Then it wasn’t nothing. It built a ladder out of his throat and climbed. He pressed the heel of his hand to his chest, eyes going wide at the architecture of it. Mom’s head snapped in his direction like a bird.
“Noah?” she asked, already halfway to him without letting go of the line. “Buddy’s okay, baby. I need to hear your breath.”
He nodded, then shook his head, then couldn’t decide, then coughed again—a high, tightening sound that made the cold in the barn feel personal.
Dad moved—fast, controlled, all the training he never talks about unfolding back into his body. He scooped Noah under the arms and set him on a hay bale like it knew first aid. The inhaler that lives in Mom’s bag because of last winter’s RSV landed in her palm like a coin you don’t remember putting there.
“Slow,” she said, which is the most unreasonable word in an emergency and also the only one that works. “Sip the air.” She glanced at me without looking away from my brother. “Jade, with me.”
I was already there.
Behind us, the green line kept time. In front of us, Noah’s chest learned a shape it didn’t like. The heater hiccuped. The lights flickered. The crowd outside hushed itself with the kind of silence that belongs to churches and moments when a family is making a bargain with the world.
“Stay with me,” Mom said to Noah, to Buddy, to the hour that was shrinking like wool in hot water. “Stay.”
The generator truck rounded the corner, engine loud, a promise with wheels.
And for the second time in one day, I understood how a life can tilt on the hinge of a breath—one dog’s, one boy’s—while the whole town holds still, waiting to find out what kind of story we’re telling.