The noise was jagged and metallic, the kind of scraping sound that suggested rusty wheels stubbornly dragging across a surface never meant to bear them.
Only when the sound grew louder did the receptionist finally look up.
What she saw made her hands freeze on the keyboard.
A little girl was standing right inside the entrance.
She couldn’t have been more than seven years old.
Her bare feet rested on the cold hospital floor, cracked and stained with dried blood and dust, as if she had walked a great distance over gravel and broken ground. Her thin summer dress hung stiff with dirt, and both hands gripped the wooden handles of a rusty wheelbarrow that looked as if it had been salvaged from an abandoned farmyard.
Her knuckles were blistered and raw.
Her lips had turned pale with exhaustion and dehydration.
And inside the wheelbarrow, wrapped tightly in a faded sheet that may once have been white, lay two tiny babies so still that, for a terrifying moment, they seemed more like delicate wax figures than living children.
