Excerpt from Gemini by Carol Cassella, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Charlotte looked at the monitors, her new patient's heartbeat racing across the screen. "How much fluid did she get on the flight?" .

"Fifteen hundred. Pressure kept falling. Not much urine, though." The fluid in Jane's Foley bag was the color of rancid orange juice.

"Thanks for getting her here"—she nudged his stethoscope aside—"Harold." .

"Harry." .

Charlotte held her hand out, and he shook it. "Right. Harry. Sorry." She flashed her own name tag. "Charlotte Reese. Now, if only Jane had worn hers, we'd know who she is." .

* * * * * For the next two hours Charlotte's only goal was to keep Jane Doe alive. Her blood pressure was so low the monitor's alarm kept chiming, the numbers flashing in red. Jane's hands and feet were dusky blue, and the largest IV line had clotted off. Charlotte tied an elastic tourniquet above Jane's elbow and tapped the skin creases, hoping to feel a vessel.

"You want me to turn up the dopamine?" Anne asked.

Charlotte glanced at the numbers on the pump. "Call the pharmacy and get some Neosynephrine. And some fresh veins along with it. They must have forgotten to stick those in the helicopter." .

Anne hung up the phone. "Ten minutes. They're all out of veins. You want to do a cut down?" .

"Not yet. How'd we get so lucky to be working tonight?" .

"No luck about it for me, baby," Anne answered. "I'm taking every shift they offer. Got no child support check again this month." .

"Can't you get a judge on him?" .

"Judge would have to put money in the man's pockets to do any good. Tryin' to get blood from a turnip." .

Charlotte closed her eyes to focus every sense through her fingertips, pressing and releasing an invisible tension in Jane's swollen tissues. "There it is. Hand me a sixteen-gauge IV." .

"Like I was saying." .

By the time the sky was lightening, Jane Doe was stable enough for Charlotte to dig into the records the medics had left on the desk. If time didn't matter, if this were her only patient, she could spend the whole week sorting through what had been accumulated in four days. How many numbers and images could be spit out of centrifuged blood and spinal fluid and spinning magnets and X-rays? Hundreds. Thousands. She started by skimming the blood work completed just hours before they loaded Jane into the helicopter; her eyes caught the critically abnormal numbers as though they were in neon: Jane's kidneys were shutting down, her liver was stressed, her lungs were stiffening and filling with fluid, her bone marrow wasn't making enough blood, and she was infected with some unidentified bug, verging scarily near septic shock.

Anne looked over Charlotte's shoulder. "Any surprises?" .

Charlotte turned toward the woman lying immobile on the bed. Anne had dutifully pulled the metal side rails up, as if there were any chance this patient would spontaneously move. "What you see there is what I'm seeing here. Not good." She flipped the chart open to the doctors' progress notes and started deciphering the handwritten scripts. Charlotte hated the auto-filled phrases pumped out by her own hospital's medical software, saw it as a shortcut around the methodical, personally described physical exam she had been trained to do. Once she had ripped a printed chart note in half because someone—she assumed a student—had clicked "normal exam" and the computer spit out exactly that for a patient with a subtle heart murmur, which had probably caused his stroke. Later she discovered the error had been made by the chief of surgery. But at least computer-generated notes were legible; her eyes blurred with fatigue reading Jane's chart.

Charlotte translated a summary for Anne. "Hit and run. A truck driver spotted her in a ditch beside the highway and called 911. Femur fracture, shattered lower leg. Broken elbow. It looks like she was conscious when she got to the ER but too disoriented to give a clear story or her name . . . her initial head CT was OK, so maybe just hypothermia. They rushed to the OR to fix her leg. And somewhere in there things really went to hell." .

Excerpted from Gemini by Carol Cassella. Copyright © 2014 by Carol Cassella. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.