The silence inside my head was louder than the chaos of the sirens fading into the distance.
My palms still burned from the phantom kickback of the gun I had fired in the mud. Every time I closed my eyes, I could still feel the heavy metal shaking in my grip, the deafening roar of the blast, and the sight of that man collapsing into the wet gravel. I had spent my entire adult life learning how to preserve the fragile boundary between life and death. I knew the exact thickness of an arterial wall; I knew how many seconds a brain could survive without oxygen. My hands were meant for healing.
Yet, tonight, those same hands had taken a life to save another. The psychological weight of it felt like a physical anchor dragging me down into the freezing Pacific.
