Chapter 2

I knew what came next.

The mass casualty incident would overwhelm us. In the chaos, an ambulance, Unit 7, would be dispatched for a secondary emergency. Emily would have a "vision" that it was going to crash. Dr. Peterson, rattled by her first "correct" prediction, would hesitate, rerouting resources and delaying care.

Later, they would discover that Unit 7 had a catastrophic brake failure. It would have crashed. Emily would become a hero, a prophet. Her power would solidify.

Not this time.

"I' ll take the secondary dispatch," I announced, my voice cutting through the planning huddle.

Everyone stared at me.

Dr. Peterson looked up from the dispatch board. "Sarah, that' s a field call. I need my charge nurse here, coordinating."

"David can handle triage coordination," I said, nodding to my colleague. "He knows the protocol as well as I do. The call is for a cardiac arrest at a construction site near the plant explosion. It' s high-risk. I' m the most experienced paramedic-certified nurse on staff. I should go."

My fiancé, Dr. Ryan Chen, a surgeon who had come down to the ER to help, stepped toward me. He put a hand on my arm, his face a mask of concern.

"Sarah, no. It' s too dangerous. The area is unstable. Let the dedicated paramedic team handle it."

His touch felt cold. In the last timeline, his concern had felt genuine, loving. Now, it felt like a performance. A painful echo of a man I thought I knew.

"Ryan, I' m not just a nurse, I' m a first responder," I said, pulling my arm away gently. "My skills are needed out there more than they' re needed here right now. I can handle it."

I looked directly at Dr. Peterson, my expression unwavering. "I' m the best choice for this call, and you know it."

He studied me for a long moment, weighing his options. The ER was a storm of activity around us. He needed to make a decision.

"Alright, Miller. You' re right. Go. Take Unit 7."

A flicker of something-annoyance? panic?-crossed Emily' s face before she smoothed it into a look of grave concern. She stepped forward.

"Dr. Peterson, wait."

All eyes turned to her.

"Don' t send out Unit 7," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "It' s... it' s not safe. I see it crashing. A horrible accident. Fire, twisted metal... please, you have to believe me."

Dr. Peterson stared at her, his face a mixture of frustration and a new, creeping flicker of doubt. The memory of the patient who died just an hour ago was still fresh.

I seized the moment.

"With all due respect, Doctor," I said, my voice sharp and clear, "we don' t make life-and-death decisions based on feelings. We make them based on facts and training. A man is dying, and Unit 7 is our fastest ambulance. I' m going."

I turned and walked toward the ambulance bay without waiting for a reply.

Emily' s voice followed me, laced with a smug, pitying tone. "I'm just trying to prevent another tragedy. But some people just won' t listen."

I didn' t look back.

The ride in Unit 7 was tense. The paramedic driving, a guy named Mike, kept glancing at me. The story of Emily' s "prediction" had already spread like wildfire.

"You sure about this, Sarah?" he asked.

"Just drive, Mike," I said.

We arrived at the construction site. The scene was chaotic. We found the patient, a man in his fifties, down on the ground, his coworkers performing frantic, ineffective CPR.

We took over. I worked on instinct and memory. In the last timeline, the paramedic team had struggled with the intubation, costing them precious minutes. I knew exactly what to anticipate.

"His airway is compromised by swelling," I said, working quickly. "We need to do a cricothyrotomy. Now."

It was an aggressive, risky procedure, but I knew it was the only chance. We performed it right there on the dusty ground. We got him stabilized, loaded him into the ambulance, and raced back to the hospital. We had saved him. I had changed one small detail.

As we pulled into the hospital' s ambulance bay, I saw the rest of the team gathered outside, their faces a mix of relief and astonishment.

We wheeled the patient into the trauma bay, and the team swarmed him. He was alive. His vitals were stable.

We had won.

David Lee clapped me on the shoulder, a huge grin on his face. "See! I told you she was the best. Eat your heart out, spooky psychic." He shot a look at Emily, who was standing in the corner, looking pale and confused.

A few others chuckled, the tension from before finally breaking.

"My... my vision must have been wrong," Emily stammered, trying to regain her composure. "I' m so glad you' re all okay."

Dr. Peterson just nodded at me, a look of respect in his eyes. "Good work, Miller. Damn good work."

The team was buzzing, a sense of victory in the air. We had faced down a mass casualty event and a supposed prophecy of doom, and we had come out on top.

But as I watched the celebration, I noticed something that made my blood run cold.

Ryan wasn' t celebrating. He was standing near Emily, his back to me. He leaned in and said something to her, his voice too low for me to hear. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

It wasn't the gesture of a colleague reassuring a shaken rookie. It was protective. Intimate.

He was defending her. He was on her side.

My heart, which had been soaring with victory, sank like a stone. The betrayal was sharper this time, because now I was watching for it.

Just then, Dr. Peterson' s phone rang. He answered it, his expression shifting from relief to confusion, then to horror.

He hung up the phone, his face ashen.

"That was the vehicle maintenance department," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "They were doing a routine check on the reserve ambulance, Unit 4. The one we would have sent if we had listened to Dr. Hayes."

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

"They found a cut in the brake line. A clean cut. If it had gone out on a call, the brakes would have failed completely on the first major downhill slope."

A dead silence fell over the ER. Everyone stared, not at me, the person who had just saved a man' s life, but at Emily Hayes, the person who had predicted a crash.

The patient we had just saved chose that exact moment to go into sudden cardiac arrest. The monitor screamed its flatline tone.

We rushed to his side, but it was too late. An autopsy would later reveal a massive, unpredictable brain aneurysm that had ruptured. Something no one could have foreseen or prevented.

He was dead.

Emily' s prediction, in its own twisted way, had come true again. The man was dead, and an ambulance had narrowly avoided a fatal crash.

The celebration curdled into stunned, fearful silence.

And in that silence, I saw the look on Emily' s face. It was a look of pure, triumphant power.