Stabilized - Amy Wertz

When trauma nurse Alison Bianchi retreats into the wilderness to escape a question she can't answer-what if saving a life isn't always mercy?-she finds something dying: a massive, intelligent Sasquatch, its body failing as two young watch in terror.

With no protocols and no precedent, Alison does the only thing she knows how to do-she stabilizes the patient. But the creatures are not animals; they are a hidden people with their own medicine, their own rules, and a long history of avoiding human contact-until now. As Alison returns to them, learning their knowledge while bringing pieces of it back into her world, the boundary between forest and hospital begins to fracture. Because some lives were never meant to be saved by human hands-and once the line is crossed, there may be no way to contain what follows.

STABILIZED is a literary speculative novel about first contact, hidden knowledge, and the cost of becoming the bridge between two worlds that were never meant to meet.

For readers of Annihilation, Mexican Gothic, and The Overstory.