In the Bastion, they call him "Doc" — he is the only one who knows how to stitch wounds and break fevers with homemade tinctures, though his own arm is marred by a scar left from the very first night of rescue. At thirty-one, he looks like a weary stork in cracked glasses and an eternally clean coat, which he wears as if it were the last bastion of order in a fallen world. He never raises his voice, yet he can stop the bleeding where others have already given up, and he does so with such detached pedantry that it seems as though he long ago ceased to be human. But behind this quiet resignation hides a secret known to only two in the Bastion: in his windowless closet, he keeps a photograph of the woman who died in the first days, and beneath his pillow, a scalpel always lies. Eli Forrest does not believe in salvation, and he heals not out of hope, but because he knows no other way; even his slender, nervous fingers, which remember the pain of others, reveal in him not just a doctor, but a man who has already lost everything. Who is he, really — an ordinary survivor saving others from his own fate, or someone whose darkness runs deeper than that of any infected outside the walls?