Part 3
Laurel found a heartbeat beneath the cub’s ribs, but it was too slow to move anything except her fingers.
She cleared the airway while Nora rubbed the small chest through a warm towel. The cub’s head rolled to one side. Laurel fitted a tiny mask over its muzzle and gave two careful breaths, watching for the chest to rise.
“Again,” she said.
Nora rubbed harder. “Come on. You’ve done the worst part.”
A rear paw flexed against the towel.
The first breath was little more than a shiver through the ribs. The second came with a faint sound, rough and irritated. By the third, the cub had begun trying to pull away from the mask.
Nora laughed once and then pressed her lips together, as if laughter might spend luck the room still needed.
Sam had already reached for the next cub.
The second was a female who arrived breathing. She opened her mouth in a loud protest before Laurel had finished clearing her nose. The third, another male, needed oxygen but began kicking within a minute.
“Three,” the technician said, positioning them beneath the warming unit.
Sam did not answer.
His left hand remained inside the uterus. His expression changed, not with alarm but with the concentration he usually wore when a scan and a body disagreed.
“There’s another one high in the right horn.”
Laurel looked at the cubs under the warmer. “The ultrasound showed a possible third that far forward.”
“It showed this one behind the third.” Sam shifted his grip. “Small. I can’t tell you more yet.”
Tansy’s pressure fell before he could deliver it. The monitor tone sharpened. Laurel moved back to the lioness’s shoulder, checking the line while the anesthetist adjusted fluids and medication.
“Don’t chase the number too fast,” Sam said. “Give her time to respond.”
Laurel knew that. She also knew how quickly a low number could become no number at all. Her hand tightened around the tubing until Nora touched her wrist.
“The line is running,” Nora said. “You’re bending it.”
Laurel loosened her grip.
The pressure improved by a few points. Sam worked one hand beneath the hidden cub and freed it without extending the incision.
It was less than half the size of the first male.
A narrow line of cream-colored fur ran from the center of its forehead to the bridge of its nose. The marking was not bright white, and it meant nothing medically. It was simply the first detail Laurel noticed before the absence of breath pushed every other thought aside.
Nora received the cub in a towel. “No movement.”
“There’s a pulse,” Laurel said after checking. “Very faint.”
The cub’s airway held more fluid than the others. Laurel cleared it, supplied oxygen, and began stimulation while Nora supported the small body in both hands. They worked without the encouragement people used when there was time for it.
A minute passed.
Then another.
The cream-marked head moved beneath Laurel’s thumb. The cub drew in a thin breath and released a sound like a hinge in need of oil.
“Keep him warm,” Laurel said. “Don’t make him prove anything else yet.”
Behind them, Sam controlled the bleeding and began closing. Tansy’s uterus had not ruptured, but hours of ineffective contractions had left the tissue bruised and poorly responsive. They would watch her for infection, hemorrhage, and every complication that could hide beneath a temporary improvement.
Her blood pressure rose slowly. It never became comfortable, but it stopped falling.
By late morning, Tansy was in the recovery suite on a padded floor warmed from beneath. A sliding inner panel divided her from the cubs while the anesthesia wore off. The four newborns rested in an incubator close enough for her to smell and hear once she began waking, but not close enough to be injured if she came up disoriented.
A neonatal transfer sleeve sat flush with the recovery wall. Its shallow steel cradle had interlocked doors on the keeper and animal sides, allowing staff to move a cub without opening a path for the adult lioness or putting human hands within her reach.
Nora sat outside the suite with a clipboard on one knee. Mud had dried in a pale crust over her boots. She had changed her jacket but not her shirt, and one sleeve still carried a rust-colored smear from the north wash.
“You should eat,” Laurel said.
“So should you.”
“I had coffee.”
“That explains your personality. It doesn’t count as food.”
Laurel found two protein bars in a supply drawer. Nora accepted one without thanking her, which was closer to their normal rhythm than anything since dawn.
A monitor above the desk showed the north habitat. The cameras had come back when Cal restored power to the gate circuit. Rook lay at the exact point where the transport pallet had disappeared from view.
A keeper had placed food in his night den. He had not touched it.
“He can’t know where she went,” Laurel said.
Nora peeled the wrapper from her bar. “No. But he knows where she left.”
The first three cubs maintained their temperature and began searching blindly against the incubator bedding. The fourth curled into the warmest corner. His breathing remained shallow, and his blood glucose sat just above the level that would require more aggressive support.
As Tansy woke, her ears moved first. Then one forepaw dragged across the pad, claws opening and closing. Laurel waited until the lioness could lift her head, track movement, and hold herself upright without swaying.
They transferred the strongest female through the interlocked sleeve first.
Tansy smelled the cub from nose to tail. Her tongue passed over its damp coat with one slow stroke, then another. When the cub rooted against her belly, the lioness shifted enough to make room.
The second and third cubs followed. Tansy gathered them against her with her foreleg, still clumsy from anesthesia but unmistakably attentive.
Laurel brought the smallest last.
Up close, the cream line on his face resembled a narrow candlewick. He fitted into one of her hands, his spine no wider than two fingers beneath the fur.
Tansy inhaled over him for several seconds after the animal-side door opened. Then she lifted him from the cradle, licked the top of his head, and drew him inward with the back of one paw.
The cub found a teat but could not maintain his grip. His jaws worked twice before his head slipped sideways. He tried again with the same result.
After twenty minutes, he had taken almost nothing.
His temperature began to fall. A second glucose check came back lower than the first.
Laurel closed the animal-side door of the transfer sleeve once the cub lay inside it. Only when that lock registered did she open the keeper-side panel and lift him out.
Tansy’s paw followed the small body until the inner grille stopped it…
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