“He’s going to rip someone open,” a nurse said, voice shaking, heart rate pushing 180. “We need a dart in him now.”
Dr. Morland loaded a heavier sedative into a larger syringe. “Three more minutes of this and he bleeds out anyway. We sedate or we lose him.”
“No,” Maggie said from the far wall.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but something in the tone made people pause.
Dr. Morland looked up. “Excuse me?”
“You put that in him and you stop his heart,” Maggie said quietly. “Look at his blood loss. That dosage might be standard for a healthy animal, but he’s borderline hypovolemic. You hit him with that cocktail and his cardiac system shuts down.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I’m a SEAL corpsman,” Maggie said. “I’ve treated hemorrhagic shock in the field more times than I can count. You overcompensate with sedation on a hypovolemic patient, you crash their blood pressure and stop their heart.”
“Bob,” Master Chief Brennan Cole, the K9 program director, stepped forward. Fifty-two, gray-haired, weathered. “Ashford’s got a point, Doctor. This animal’s lost at least fifteen percent blood volume. We need to think this through.”
But no one was really listening. The room had committed to sedation. Too much chaos. Too much fear.
Titan was panting now, blood still leaking from torn muscle around his hind flank. His legs trembled slightly—not from fear, from blood loss, from exhaustion. But he wouldn’t let anyone near. Every time someone shifted, he tracked it, calculated, prepared to strike.
Every hand except one.
His eyes kept drifting back to the young woman in dusty fatigues against the far wall. The one who hadn’t tried to grab him, hadn’t approached with false sweetness. Just watched him the way he was watching everyone else.
Maggie stepped forward. Just one step, slow and deliberate.
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