Major Eva Rostova’s world ended in a percussive, deafening roar. One moment, she was mentally triaging the incoming casualties from the IED blast, her mind a cool, efficient engine of medical logic. The next, a rocket-propelled grenade turned the belly of her Black Hawk into a sun-bright, shredding vortex. Her final sensation was not of pain, but of a profound, dispassionate regret for the lives on the ground she would now never save. Then, the thunder of the rotors was replaced by an absolute, crushing silence.
She awoke to a different kind of thunder. A deep, rolling, earth-shaking concussion that was not the rhythmic beat of a helicopter but the chaotic, brutal roar of artillery. The air smelled not of jet fuel and desert dust, but of churned earth, sulfur, and the cloying, metallic scent of fresh blood. She was lying on her side in a field of tall grass, her body a foreign country. It was the body of a young man, thin and trembling, clad in a scratchy, ill-fitting blue wool uniform.
Her head throbbed with a headache that was a universe of memories not her own. Elias Kane. A volunteer from Pennsylvania, a bookish, gentle boy who had joined the Union Army as a hospital steward because he wanted to help, but couldn’t stomach the thought of killing. He was idealistic, terrified, and utterly unprepared for the reality of war. And his most recent memory? Marching for days, arriving at this small, sleepy town whose name echoed in his mind with a terrible, dawning significance: Gettysburg. The date was July 1st, 1863.
Eva—Elias—pushed himself up. The intellectual part of her, the surgeon’s mind, tried to process the situation as a hallucination, a complex, trauma-induced dream. But the visceral reality was undeniable. The distant rattle of musket fire was real. The sight of a line of blue-clad soldiers marching past him, their boyish faces grim with a fear he could taste, was real. The cannonball that screamed overhead and exploded in a geyser of earth a hundred yards away was terrifyingly real.
“Steward! On your feet!” a voice bellowed. A burly, bearded man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve hauled him up. “The wounded are coming in. The surgeons need you at the seminary. Move!”
He was half-dragged, half-pushed toward a large brick building on a nearby ridge—the Lutheran Theological Seminary, a place Eva knew from history books would soon become one of the battle’s most infamous field hospitals. The scene that greeted him at the entrance was a Dantean vision of hell. The wounded were already pouring in, a tide of bleeding, broken men. They lay on the grass, on the steps, in the hallways, their groans and screams a constant, ghastly chorus.
Orderlies, their arms stained red to the elbows, carried men inside to rooms that were already becoming charnel houses. The air was thick with the smell of blood, sweat, and fear. In the center of what had been a library, a surgeon, his sleeves rolled up, was working over a man on a makeshift operating table—a door laid across two barrels. He moved with a swift, brutal efficiency. He was not healing. He was butchering.
Eva, a surgeon who lived by the creed of “preserve, repair, restore,” watched in abject horror. She saw the surgeon pick up an amputation saw. She saw him place it on the soldier’s shattered leg, above the knee. She saw the other orderlies hold the screaming man down. She did not see a single one of them wash their hands. The saw was wiped on an already-bloody rag before being applied to the next patient. The floor was a slick of blood, pus, and discarded human tissue.
“You! Boy! Fetch water!” the surgeon, a major with a face of grim exhaustion, barked at Elias.
He stumbled away, his mind reeling. He knew about Civil War medicine, of course. He’d read about it. But to see it, to be in the middle of it, was something else entirely. This wasn’t just a lack of knowledge; it was a complete absence of the most fundamental principles of his profession. They knew nothing of shock, nothing of dehydration, nothing of germs. They were killing these men as surely as the enemy cannons were.
He found a bucket by a rain barrel, the water cloudy with debris. An orderly splashed some on a wound, rinsing dirt directly into the exposed muscle. Eva’s mind screamed in protest. She saw not a man being cleaned, but a man being sentenced to death by gangrene.
He, Elias Kane, the timid hospital steward, was a helpless cog in this machine of death. But inside him, the ghost of Major Eva Rostova, a combat surgeon from a future of sterile fields and plasma drips, was wide awake. And she was not going to stand by and watch men die. She didn’t know how he had come to be here, in this nightmare. She only knew that her war had not ended. A new one had just begun.
