Click.
The sharp bite of steel hitting a stainless-steel tray pierced the thick, suffocating air of the operating room, heavy with the reek of antiseptic and blood plasma.
"Heart rate dropping to fifty! Blood pressure fifty over thirty! Patient is going into hemorrhagic shock!"
The heart monitor’s alarm blared in sharp, panicked bursts. High-intensity surgical lights beamed down directly onto the opened chest of a twenty-year-old man. Blood. It pooled continuously—a deep, dark crimson—seeping through layers of sterile gauze and staining the surgeon's white latex gloves crimson.
"Sternally retractor. Sponge forceps. Suction, NOW!"
The voice snapped through the room, cold as ice and utterly devoid of tremor. The command belonged to Elena Marsh.
Inside Operating Room 4 of Central Hospital, Elena reigned like a queen holding total domain over life and death. Her ash-blonde hair was tucked neatly beneath a surgical cap, her deep gray eyes unblinking behind her magnification goggles. Her gloved hand reached inside the patient's thoracic cavity; her slender, steel-hard fingers searched frantically for the breach in the aorta.
"Dr. Marsh, blood pressure flatlining! I can't catch a pulse!" the surgical assistant reported, his voice shaking as sweat dripped from his chin.
"Rapid-infuse four units of packed red blood cells! Push adrenaline straight into the heart!" Elena ordered without looking up, her voice hard as flint. "Surgical tweezers. Move!"
The entire operating room ran like a high-octane machine under her command. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. Elena’s hands moved so fast they turned into a blur. She stitched, she clamped, fighting Death for every millimeter of artery. Not a single wasted movement. Not a single superfluous emotion. Her unnerving composure forced every nurse and doctor in the room to hold their breath and follow her lead.
After all, she was Elena Marsh—the youngest thoracic surgery prodigy in the hospital’s history, a woman who had pulled hundreds of lives back from the edge of the abyss. In the eyes of her peers, she wasn't entirely human. She was a flawless stitching machine, possessing hands blessed by God Himself.
"Dr. Marsh... the ECG line..."
The assistant’s voice sounded like a hopeless sigh.
Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiip—
A long, flat, monotonous tone resonated through the room, chilling everyone to the bone.
The green wave on the monitor flattened into a dead line.
Elena’s hands, mid-stitch, froze in the air. The blood on her gloves was still warm. The feverish heat of life had just drained away, replaced by the absolute chill of a corpse.
"Defibrillator! Four hundred Joules! Charge paddles!" Elena barked, her eyes flashing with stubborn defiance.
"Doctor, we’ve already shocked him five times..."
"I said charge the paddles!" she snapped, her commanding aura forcing the assistant to press the iron paddles onto the bloody chest.
Thump! The young man’s body jolted off the table, then fell dead back onto the pad.
The line on the screen remained flat.
"Again! Four hundred Joules!"
Thump! Nothing.
"Again—"
"Dr. Marsh! The patient is gone!" The assistant surgeon stepped forward, bravely grabbing Elena’s lightly trembling wrist. "His aorta was completely transected in the car crash. You held the bleeding and stitched it flawlessly. Human limits only go so far. You are not God."
You are not God.
The words hit Elena like a bucket of ice water.
A suffocating, dead silence fell over the room. Elena stared down at her blood-soaked hands—hands praised by the world as "blessed by God." But what did it matter in the end? Before the brutal laws of mortality, before trauma that exceeded the limits of modern medicine, her intellect, her skill, her pride... were nothing more than a joke.
Elena slowly pulled off her latex gloves and tossed them into the biohazard bin.
"Time of death: 10:40 AM."
Her voice was as flat as a frozen lake, devoid of all feeling. She turned and walked straight out of the operating room, leaving behind the heavy sighs and sorrowful gazes of her team.
They knew this was the third patient to die on her table this month. Every case had been an unrecoverable, catastrophic emergency, but to a perfectionist who lived on pride like Elena Marsh, it was a crushing blow to the core of her existence.
Midnight.
A slate-gray sports car tore down the highway leading toward the city’s outer limits like a streak of lightning.
Elena held the steering wheel with one hand, a cold, unlit cigarette pinched between the fingers of the other. Her ash-blonde hair fell loose around her shoulders, wild in the wind rushing through the cracked window. The digital speedometer read 140 km/h.
She wanted to run. Run from the gut-wrenching sobs of the patient’s mother echoing down the hospital hallway; run from the sharp, chemical stench of Isobetadine clinging to her skin; run from the suffocating powerlessness gnawing at her mind like venom.
Modern medicine could land humans on the Moon, it could decode DNA, yet it couldn't hold onto a single heartbeat when fate called the bill. Human ignorance and human limitations made her sick.
The car hurtled toward the geological preserve in the Western Valley—a site recently buzzing over a new archaeological discovery.
Tonight’s weather was unnaturally grim.
Dark clouds churned like giant monsters swallowing the moon whole. The atmospheric pressure plummeted so sharply Elena felt a dull ache in her chest. Stranger still, over the surrounding limestone peaks, flashes of deep violet lightning—silent and eerily void of thunder—streaked along the fault lines.
"What the hell..." Elena narrowed her eyes, easing her foot off the gas.
The car radio suddenly burst into harsh, deafening static: Zzz... Snap... Zzz...
The speedometer and fuel gauge needles spun wildly out of control. The Ferrari’s entire electrical system died in an instant. The headlights sputtered and went black, plunging Elena into total darkness.
Elena frowned, her survival instincts kicking in as she slammed on the brakes. But the vehicle didn't stop. It coasted on pure momentum, veering straight toward the cordoned-off paleontology excavation site.
BOOM!
A seismic explosion shuddered deep underground.
The earth directly ahead cracked open like a giant maw. From the deep fault trench, a pillar of turquoise light laced with deep violet soared dozens of meters into the night sky, twisting the surrounding air into a high-pressure vortex. Dust, loose boulders, and her car were dragged toward the geological abyss by an invisible, irresistible gravitational force.
"What in the absolute..." Elena cursed under her breath.
She jammed her hand onto the door handle, intending to throw herself out. But the moment her fingers touched the metal latch, a massive electrical charge surged through her body.
ZAP!
The oxygen vanished from the cabin. Elena watched space itself warp around her. The city lights behind her, the paved road, the streetlamps... all shattered into millions of invisible glass shards.
Time seemed to freeze. In that split second, Elena saw a surreal vision: massive herds of bison thundering across an untouched prairie, the mournful blow of a war horn, and feathers-adorned riders charging on horseback through a hail of artillery smoke.
A searing pain, as if her meninges were being ripped apart, struck her brain.
"Argh!"
Elena’s head slammed onto the steering wheel. Her eyes burned, her senses stripped away one by one. The modern surgeon’s consciousness sank into an endless, freezing, bottomless abyss.
Smell.
The first thing that hit Elena’s nostrils wasn't Isobetadine antiseptic, nor was it the expensive leather interior of her car.
It was the scent of sun-baked dry grass, night-dewed earth, pungent animal manure, and wind—a wild, untamed wind never touched by industrial smog.
Elena snapped her eyes open.
A headache like someone driving a claw hammer into her temples forced her to wait a few seconds before her vision focused.
Above her was no white hospital ceiling, nor was it the crushed frame of a car crash.
It was an overwhelming, endless sky. A crystal-clear, deep blue sky stretching infinitely upward, with fluffy white clouds drifting lazily beneath a brilliant sun.
Elena sat up sharply. She realized she was lying in a sea of waist-high grass extending all the way to the horizon, where jagged limestone mountains rose like dragon’s teeth from an ancient world.
"This is..."
Elena looked down at herself. She was still wearing her expensive white Etro silk shirt, tailored trousers, and custom pumps—though one heel had snapped off. The white surgical lab coat she had casually grabbed on her way out of the hospital lay rumpled beside her, along with her personal bag containing a portable tactical surgical kit she carried out of sheer force of habit.
No car. No asphalt. No power lines. Not a single trace of 21st-century civilization.
A surgeon’s discipline kept Elena from screaming like a lunatic. She dropped to her knees, quickly checking her carotid pulse: 82 beats per minute. Pupils reactive to light. No traumatic brain injury.
"Geological displacement? Or a delirium brought on by exhaustion?" She spoke aloud to herself in a cool, detached tone, trying to apply scientific logic to her situation.
She reached down, grabbed her bag, and pulled out her iPhone. She glanced at the screen: No Service. The system clock was frozen at 00:00.
Just then, the ground beneath Elena’s knees began to hum.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The vibration wasn't seismic. It had a heavy, rhythmic cadence that was rapidly closing in.
Elena instantly dropped flat into the high grass. Survival instincts and a surgeon's sharp caution made her hold her breath. She gently parted a few stalks of grass, peering toward the crest of the eastern hill where the noise originated.
Over the ridge, figures on horseback began to appear.
One. Two. Ten. Then dozens of dark silhouettes.
Elena narrowed her eyes. Beneath the blazing midday sun, the riders looked surreal. They were bare-chested, their bronze skin glistening with sweat. Their faces and chests were painted with fierce black and red war paint. Their hair hung in long, braided locks, a few adorned with large eagle feathers tucked behind their heads. In their hands, they brandished long iron-tipped lances and a few old breech-loading rifles.
"A period film crew? Or a state historical reenactment?" Elena whispered through gritted teeth. Her strictly logical mind clung desperately to any rational explanation belonging to her modern world.
Yet the echoing war cries—"Oa---ha---ha---!"—mingled with the pungent stench of horse sweat, raw leather, and an overwhelming aura of bloodlust that hit her senses, was entirely too real to be acting.
"Stop! Is anyone there?"
Elena Marsh made her decision and stood up. Ignoring her soiled, high-end clothes, she stepped out of the brush, raising both hands to show she was unarmed. She needed help. She needed to know where she was and where the nearest town lay.
"I’m a doctor! My car crashed nearby, I need—"
Thwack!
Before she could finish her sentence, an arrow embedded itself deep into the dirt inches from the toe of her pump. The impact was so violent the feathered fletching on the shaft vibrated wildly.
Elena froze dead in her tracks. Her gray eyes contracted.
The mounted warriors erupted into wild, triumphant whoops, tearing down the slope like wind. Within seconds, roughly twenty wild warriors had encircled Elena in a lethal ring. Their massive warhorses stomped the earth, snorting hot streams of breath onto her shoulders.
Sharpened lance tips glistened under the sun, aimed directly at Elena’s throat, chest, and temples.
A man with a long scar stretching across his cheek rode up closest. Leaning down from his saddle, he used the rough tip of his lance to lift Elena’s chin. The brazen violation made a cold shudder run down her spine, but she refused to tremble. She held her head high, her gaze cutting into him like a scalpel.
The scarred man scowled, barking a guttural phrase in a foreign, flowing language that hit her ears like grinding stone:
"Hí-ta-ku? Tȟoká-ya-wá?" (Who are you? Enemy or white?)
Elena frowned. It wasn't English, it wasn't French, nor was it any European language she had ever heard.
"I don't understand what you're saying," Elena forced her voice to remain steady, pronouncing each English word with crisp clarity: "I am a surgeon. I had an accident. Where am I? Is this Wyoming or Montana?"
The scarred man didn't understand a word. His eyes swept over her tailored white silk shirt, her strange high-heeled shoes, and came to a stop at the expensive bag and sterile lab coat on the ground. To his eyes, her attire was utterly alien, reeking of the white invaders who stole their land.
He curled his lip into a cruel sneer, spitting out a brief phrase in broken, fragmented English:
"Wasichu... Woman..."
Wasichu.
A bolt of lightning seemed to strike Elena’s mind.
The keyword awakened historical records buried deep within her brilliant brain. Wasichu—a derogatory term used by the Native American tribes of the Great Plains to describe the white settlers who encroached upon their lands in the 19th century.
She looked again at the 1866 and 1873 Winchester carbines slung across the horses, at the 100% genuine eagle feathers carefully woven into their hair—something strictly illegal to hunt under modern law—and at the raw, wild eyes completely unrefined by urban civilization...
A reality so brutal and absurd it verged on madness began to weigh heavily on Elena Marsh’s chest.
No film crew spent money on purebred warhorses and real antique weaponry to this extent. No reenactment group shot live arrows directly at tourists.
She was no longer in the 21st century. The geological anomaly and that strange pillar of light in the rift had thrown her back into a completely different era—a time of blood, gunpowder, and wild massacres across the 19th-century North American plains.
The scarred man gave her no time to process the truth. Pulling out a rough rawhide rope, he swung his arms and bound Elena’s wrists tight.
"Let go of me!" Elena twisted to fight back, but how could a female surgeon match the brute strength of a weather-beaten plains warrior? Her wrists were pinned behind her back, the coarse rope digging into her fair skin until dark red welts flared up.
He grabbed the nape of her collar, roughly dragging Elena toward his horse.
"Stand still, Wasichu!" he growled in broken English, pressing the tip of a dagger coated in dried blood against her throat.
Just then, the sound of hoofbeats split the air from behind.
The restless warhorses parted automatically to both sides, clearing a narrow path.
A massive, jet-black warhorse, its long mane flying in the wind, stepped out from the shadow of the mountains. Its presence instantly silenced the surrounding warriors, who bowed their heads in absolute respect.
Seated atop the horse was a man.
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