Her father taught her to stitch wounds before he taught her long division. This was not negligence. In the world he was preparing her for, the wounds would come first, and you needed to be calm with a needle before you could afford to be calm with numbers. He had a theory, which he explained to her once when she was nine and had just passed out at the sight of her own blood from a cut on her palm: the body is information. If you can read it without flinching, you can help it. If you flinch, you hesitate, and hesitation is the thing that makes the difference.

Jerry Anderson had been a surgeon before the outbreak and a surgeon after it. The after version had fewer instruments and more improvisation and a success rate that he tracked in a notebook with the same methodical care he had applied to hospital records in the before. He kept the notebook not for pride — he had failed too many times for pride to survive intact — but for honesty. The notebook said: this is what I was able to do. This is what I was not. This is where the line ran between them.

Abby had grown up in the margins of that notebook without knowing it. She had absorbed his precision the way children absorb the habits of the people who raised them — not through instruction but through proximity, through watching hands that never trembled even when the patient was already going somewhere past saving. She had thought this was normal. She had thought every father moved this way through the world.

He told her once, in the year before Salt Lake City, that he had found something. He did not tell her what. He was careful with her in that way, the way he was careful with dangerous things in general: he handled them himself and kept her at a distance and loved her enough not to explain the distance. She was sixteen and she understood only that he was excited and frightened in equal measure, and she had never seen him frightened before, and the fear in him looked exactly like the thing her own fear would have looked like if she had ever let it show.