NOW
It seemed like a lifetime before the sirens finally stopped. As Andao said, it was a false alarm, but everyone crawled out of those tunnels like the risen dead seeing sun for the first time. Andao’s warpath was set back toward Trin’s side, and Nhika followed him.
It was so strange, seeing how everyone resumed their habits as if it were nothing more than a storm warning. As if they weren’t at war. But Nhika supposed a place like the medical center couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow. It could kill heartsooths, condemn doctors, and still chug on as though nothing had changed.
Soon, she was standing before those fateful doors again. Earlier, she’d thought these doors had merely injured her. Now, they were the ones that killed her, and she was staring at the site of her own death.
Andao gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, Nhika. I hate that he’s here, too—but once the war started, the hospital needed more space, and Dr. Santo’s research ward had just been emptied. If you need time, we—”
“No. Let’s go.” She could no longer avoid her own tombstone in this hospital.
When Andao pushed open the doors, Nhika found a completely repurposed hospital ward. It was almost a relief; this hardly looked like the ward that had killed her. Wartime had spat out a veneer over the entire place: the laden stretchers lining the walls, the curtained bays that nurses disappeared into, the surgical tools carted off for sterilization. This hospital ward repurposed, Kochin missing, Trin hospitalized as if she weren’t a heartsooth … Nhika didn’t feel like she’d died. She felt like she’d stepped into a different Theumas altogether, like the events of the past few months had simply been rearranged to write her out of the story. There was no part of this city she recognized anymore, not even the part that had killed her.
At last, they stopped before a postoperative suite, something more than the curtained bays other patients received. Andao stopped before it, straightening his coat like Trin might be awake to notice—or perhaps just to buy time before he had to open the door. But, with a breath, he steeled himself and turned the handle.
Inside, Trin lay soundlessly on the bed, a blanket pulled up to his chest, and his leg, dressed in bandages, elevated by a pulley system from the ceiling. Bandages wrapped his forehead, others his biceps, and a wet towel had been draped over his eyes.
Andao exhaled a long, slow breath, and Nhika couldn’t tell if it was disappointment or relief. “He just came out of surgery the other day. Doctors say he’ll be here until his leg fully heals.”
“I can heal him, if you’d like.”
“But you’ll—”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It won’t hurt me. I know my limits.” And she did. When she’d given her life for Kochin, she’d known exactly what she was giving.
Nhika pulled a chair over to the bedside. Up close, she counted limbs—all four of them, thank the Mother—and snaked her hand under the blanket until she found flushed, sweat-mottled skin.
“Watch the door, would you?” she asked Andao before pouring her influence into Trin’s skin.
Nhika felt the anesthetics and pain medications first, like a haze that made her chest bubble with the same warmth as alcohol. Then she felt the pull of stitches, itchy and rough. The wound hit through a moment later in his leg—something tight, red, throbbing. There were a dozen other injuries, bruised ribs and inflamed abrasions and cracked nails, but the bulk of it—the reason he’d come to this hospital—had been his leg. A surgeon had gotten to it first, a long incision along the side of the leg, one that cut through skin and fascia but spared muscle. It was strange, wading through something that was surgically healed, because her influence told her it was an injury where her mind assured her it wasn’t. Most worrisome of all, they hadn’t stitched up the leg fully, leaving the wound exposed with nothing but a wet dressing around it.
Her first instinct was to close it up, finish their work for them. A moment of further exploration revealed why they had left the wound open: The nerves and vessels of the leg were pinched and choked, and the surgeons had cut open the leg to allow them to breathe. A little crude, and not what she would’ve done, but Nhika supposed that was all they could do.
She would help out the doctors. Moving stores up from her liver, she quelled inflamed nerves and pulled excess fluid back toward Trin’s heart. As she did, she realized she hadn’t been the first one here. There was the metallic aftertaste of a surgeon’s scalpel, the muggy haze of a drug cocktail, but beneath it she felt a strange aura in the anatomy—like an afterimage, only there if she wasn’t paying attention to it. When she walked her influence down the vessels of his leg, it almost felt like there was someone just behind her.
Nhika didn’t heal the wound to completion, not wanting the surgeons to find a miracle in their hospital bay the next morning. But she helped the injury along, knowing Trin could keep the leg, and the Congmi family could be full again.
When she pulled her hand away, she found Andao staring intently at her.
“How is he?” he asked, his voice strained.
“He’ll be fine,” Nhika said. “The surgeons will just have to close him up.”
Andao’s shoulders loosened. “Thank you, Nhika. I’ll be sure to reimburse you once we get back to the—”
“No payment,” Nhika said, dismissing him with a wave. “I just want him to get better.”
Someone rapped at the door. Nhika snapped her hand back, fixing the blankets, but when the door opened, it was only Mimi.
And she looked like she wanted to yell at someone, but she just hadn’t decided who yet. Then her eyes locked with Nhika, and she said, “Heaven and earth, Nhika. Have you any idea how worried I was? You can’t just run away without leaving a note. I thought you were … that we let you…”
Andao touched her arm, mollifying her. “It’s all right, Mimi. She’s okay. Everyone’s okay.”
That eased something in Mimi, but the childish irritability was still plain in her tight expression. It only lessened when she noticed Trin on the bed. “Did you…?”
“I did my best.”
“I’m sorry. We should’ve told you about him. In truth, Nhika, there’s a lot more we—”
“It’s all right. I know.” Nhika ran a tongue across her teeth. “Andao told me everything. Everything other than what happened on the other side of the water.”
Mimi’s eyes fell to Trin. She inched forward until her arm rested on his. “We don’t know, either. See, we never buried your body. Mr. Ven requested it. So, last we knew, you were with him. Until you weren’t. You and Trin only showed up a few days ago, and we’ve been trying to put the pieces together, too.”
Nhika quieted. It sickened her, just a little, knowing her corpse had been places she didn’t recall—that it might’ve even been to Yarong. It had traded hands, traveled countries, knew all the answers Nhika sought, yet it hadn’t been her. For her, death had lapsed like a dream, and she’d awoken into a nightmare.
And that pressing question still remained: Where was Kochin? He was of drafting age; it wasn’t so outrageous to assume he’d been drafted. But in war, there were a great many things that could kill a heartsooth. Nhika would know, wouldn’t she?
“You want to know where Mr. Ven is,” Mimi guessed, reading her plainly.
Nhika nodded wordlessly.
“I want to believe he left you in our care,” she responded. “So, that’s what we’ve been doing. Caring for you.”
How strange; she had always been the one caring for this family. She’d healed their loved ones and found their murderers. So, she didn’t quite know what it meant to be cared for by them. It sounded a lot like trust—just as she’d once asked them to trust her. Now, they asked the same.
“Thank you,” she said, long overdue. “I’ll let you have your time with Trin now.”
Nhika stepped outside, giving them their space. Through the crack in the curtain, she watched Andao step up to the bedside, take Trin’s hand in his own, and lace their fingers. He brought the hand to his lips, kept it there—like a prayer. Like a promise. It was a familiar scene. Nhika knew well how it felt to be at someone’s bedside, ready to give anything just to heal them.
What terrible irony, that she had the gift to cure all wounds and they had the money to buy any favor, yet they could still both know loss. Nhika stepped into the hallway. A nurse passed, and she had the wherewithal to call her.
“Excuse me,” she said, stopping the nurse midstride. “This patient, Dep Trin … The surgeon meant to leave the incision site open, right?”
It took the nurse a moment to catch up. “Ah, yes, it’s standard with a fasciotomy.”
“Fasciotomy?”
“It’s for compartment syndrome—swelling or bleeding in the leg without a break in the skin, like when a bone breaks and nicks the artery.”
“But his bone wasn’t broken—I mean, as far as I could tell.”
The nurse tipped her head back. “Yes, I remember—the surgeon mentioned it was strange, a blood vessel breaking with no sign of trauma at all to the leg. As though it just burst of its own volition from the inside out. I swear, we get something new every day with this war.” The nurse shrugged and continued down the hall as though the thought was completely innocuous.
And maybe to a Theuman nurse, it was. But when Nhika had immersed herself in Trin’s bone, there had been the shadow of another in every bundle of muscle, behind every layer of tissue. She knew Kochin had met Trin on the island; it was the only way she’d come into Trin’s possession. And she knew Kochin’s fingers had traced the vessels of Trin’s leg long before hers had.
Now, Nhika asked a dreadful question: Were Kochin’s fingers the ones to rip them open?