WHEN LIA HAD invited West to view the aurora in her cabin, she hadn’t really intended on him sleeping there. Sleeping beside him made it harder to avoid sex. Although she knew that boundary wouldn’t last long with them, she wanted to lead back into that physical intimacy more naturally, as an emotional progression, not just because it was difficult to keep their hands and mouths from taking over when they were alone. Those kinds of distractions would allow them to duck the other things they needed to do. The important emotional excavating they were doing.
He’d told her one story about his brother, just one, and it had already changed things. When he looked at her now, that confidence she always saw was just a little dimmed. Whatever he was hiding scared the devil out of him, and he hadn’t told her all of it. The only way she knew how to prove to him that she wasn’t going to walk away was to dig down to the bottom of whatever was eating at him, and just accept it. Whatever it was. Whatever he felt such guilt and contrition over that he’d run from her. Because that’s what he’d done. Charlie had died, and West had fled to one of the world’s harshest climates, and away from the bright, sunny future they’d planned.
She’d worked out before his trip to Dallas that Charlie had been the trigger, but at that time, she’d thought his decision had been about wasting time with someone you didn’t really love. A life is short epiphany. But if she accepted that he loved her, and that he’d lied to her as a way of putting distance between them for a reason, his unannounced flight took on more meaning.
He’d thought he was protecting her. He’d still thought that when he left with Jordan and Zeke. Saying sempre to him couldn’t have changed that much, could it? She hadn’t made that connection yet, or figured out whatever he’d decided meant he could come back. And that was okay. Like he said, they had some time. It was enough that they were talking.
But tonight they weren’t going to do any of that. No sex. No emotional excavation, at least not for him. Her own digging was obviously less painful than his, and could be done in some fun ways. She wasn’t racked with guilt, she was just living a life of faux confidence to hide from the world. To protect old hurts, but not the same kind of hurts. Hers came from people telling her she wasn’t good enough, and her believing them.
“Why are we dancing in the lifeboat again?” West asked, closing the secure, water-and weather-tight door behind them as Lia went about setting up speakers and her phone to play the music she’d set to download this morning.
“Because I don’t know if I like to dance,” she answered. “Well, I know I say I don’t like to dance, and I know that I’m a terrible dancer, but I don’t actually know if I like it. It’s possible to like things that you’re just terrible at, right?”
“I suppose.” He shrugged, but he’d taken part in scheduling their deep dives, as well, and he knew this was a no-torture zone. He wouldn’t have to bare any parts of his soul tonight, unless there was some part of the soul that showed whether you could or couldn’t dance.
“Help me move the furniture back.” It mostly consisted of oversize ottomans pushed together in clumps to act like elevated platforms. Easy to move out of the way in all directions to make a dance floor. Even a dance floor for terrible dancers.
“Tomorrow are we going to practice kickboxing to see if you like it? Gates didn’t seem to think much of it.” West made a goofy face at her.
She felt her face wrinkle in dismay, remembering the strange fight between Nigel and a very angry guy called Wilson in the dining hall earlier. “I can already tell you I don’t want to be punched in the face. We should probably have stuck around to ask what was going on with those two.”
“It’s not a medical problem until security refers them for violent behavior,” he said, urging her out of the way and taking over sliding the big weird ottomans.
She wasn’t sure. “I can’t see Nigel being violent. Just mostly inspiring it.”
“There’s that.” West offered her a hand in his most debonair pose once the floor had been cleared.
There were several lifeboats littering Fletcher, which weren’t exactly boats, but were designed to protect those inside in the case of catastrophe. Fire being the big worry, it could grow wildly out of control in moments on the Earth’s driest continent. The lifeboats had separate ventilation systems, separate power, separate heat and water and meager food supplies. Basically, large capsules that could hold and keep alive a few dozen souls until evacuations could ensue.
So maybe they were useless in the winter; Lia wasn’t sure. What she did know was how very unlikely they were to be interrupted by anyone, especially two people squabbling about whatever and throwing punches, or even just throwing shade. Only West would have to suffer through her attempts to dance, and probable further attempts to enjoy the terrible dancing.
Once that was done, he nosed into the bag she’d also brought and pulled out a bottle of vintage Monterrosa Port proudly dated 1985. “Am I holding a small fortune here?”
“Aye, lad.” She tried to Scottish at him, and then amended, “Laddie? What do you call a big handsome fellow?”
“You call him West—or I believe you have other special names for him.” He gestured to ask if he could open it, and she gestured in return to the bag.
“I decided Monterrosa Port had probably never made it to Antarctica before, and if I was going to bring it, then I should bring one of the best vintages. Spirited it from the family cellar while packing.”
“Spirited, eh? Have you already been into your cups or does dancing inspire terrible puns in ya?”
“We haven’t danced yet.” But they were going to. “I brought lots of different styles of music, so we can go about this in a thorough and scientific manner. This is a research station, after all.”
He poured them each a small glass of the fragrant dessert wine and took a sip. “Ye gods, why have we not drunk this before? Did you keep it back in London?”
“Not this particular vintage, but I always had a small amount.”
“I might have to forgive them for making you be Ophelia if they keep making this stuff.” He looked at the screen on her phone where it was mounted with the little speakers, and hit Play.
It was a good thing they’d eaten before coming, as West tackled the exercise with all the glee of a drunken Scotsman. For no less than four hours, well past a sensible hour for sleeping, they danced, or tried to. Pop. Hip-hop, where she almost blacked his eye. Waltz. Salsa. She tried to chula, and it looked like she was stomping on ants.
By the time they caught glimpses of strangely pink aurora through the long bank of windows along one side of the lifeboat, he’d even made a comical forbidden dance come-on, which was all eyebrows and swirling hips that had them both tumbling onto the nearest ottoman laughing.
But as the laughter faded, and they rested from all the graceless flailing about, she still couldn’t catch her breath.
“Is it stuffy in here?” she panted, words she hadn’t uttered since she’d arrived. “I need some air, and I want to see the pink aurora outside without glass in the way.”
“Ophelia’s aurora?” he teased, and they both went giggling like idiots again to the exit.
“I think I got to the bottom of that one question.”
“Do you like pink?”
“I do.”
“Me, too. Especially when it’s got a bit of a warm brown tone to it.”
She almost laughed again; the fool was making nipple jokes. “I heard that about you.”
He grabbed the handle for the door, gave it a twist and a jerk, and nothing happened. He tried again, then bent to examine the handle. Instantly, the laughter stopped.
“It’s locked?”
He felt around with his fingertips, and then gave it another twist, then pulled up on it as hard as he could. “Don’t see a lock on it.”
“Panel,” she said as soon as she noticed the very small electronic screen on the far side of the frame. She tapped it, but it didn’t come on. Then employing West’s method of fixing the broken door, she slapped around at it a few times, then looked for other buttons.
“Not working, either?” he asked, and she realized it wasn’t just her. He was breathing as fast as she was. He stepped up behind her to eye it over her shoulder. “No buttons.”
“Nope. Looks like a dead smartphone, but no side button to reboot.”
“You brought your radio?” he asked, and they both turned to look at the counter where the phone sat with speakers broadcasting country music, because they hadn’t gotten to the line-dancing portion of her experiment. Beside the port and the phone sat her radio.
“I’ll call someone...” She glanced at her watch, frowned and hurried over to make the call. “Maintenance is on call all the time, too, right? Like for emergencies?”
“Far as I know. Someone should have a radio, even if it’s after midnight now.”
About ten minutes later, now fully aware the reason the door didn’t open and the panel was not powered up, they stood on the other side of it, listening to men working on the outside, trying to fix the electronics.
“This is kind of a bad design, if it locks people in and suffocates them. How many ventilation issues could they have?” Air issue. And it was getting colder, probably because they’d stopped their hours-long thrashing about in the most rhythmic manner Lia could muster.
“I don’t know. They said that things got switched around from the original plan when they changed up the parts open and closed for the winter,” Lia said, and he could see that she was back to trying to be stoic, but the only light in the room came through the bank of windows, casting everything pink. “Let’s just go sit and watch the aurora through the window. They’ll get this open, but we’re using more air standing around than if we went to sit.”
With all their things stashed in the bag she’d carried in, and no more country music or death metal, they took a seat on the ottoman that had landed below the windows, and he kept one of her hands in his while she gripped her radio with the other.
Another twenty minutes in, West became fully aware of how little oxygen he was getting when his vision started to darken at the edges. He looked over to see Lia with her chin to her chest, and the radio now only resting in her lax hand.
“No! Lia, open your eyes,” he barked at her, then shook her shoulders until she did as commanded. “We’re going to get out, okay? Right now.”
“The door?”
“No, baby, we’re going out these windows.” It took far too much effort to pick himself up from the ottoman where they’d been lounging, but he managed to move one down so when the window shattered, it wouldn’t get on her. All he needed was a weapon.
He looked around in the low light and saw nothing he could swing. No stools. There was a table. Could he break a leg off?
Keep on going became his mantra in those minutes, especially when he looked at Lia and found her unconscious again.
He flipped the table over, examined the construction, then cursed it. No-breaking molded steel. What else? What else?
The bottle.
He took a big swig for luck, then smashed the bottom against the table, knocking it off and making a nice, jagged weapon out of it.
The crash made her open her eyes again, but they were so bleary he wasn’t even sure she’d really awakened.
“You wanted to know how many times I’ve moved? Right? Wake up. I’ll tell you.” He climbed into the tall windowsill above her and began using the broken end of her port bottle to dig at the seal wrapping around the Plexiglas windowpane. “As a kid I moved three or four times per year between foster homes.”
“Foster homes?” she repeated, her voice small, and she looked really out of it, like her eyes wouldn’t focus and she was trying hard to keep them open.
“Yes. And they sucked.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. I didn’t want Charlie in them, or they didn’t want us.” He looked over, breathing heavily, to see her head drooping forward. “Lia!”
Nothing. He got hold of the long strip of seal and pulled, opening up a tiny gap around the window frame. Cold air pushed right into the space. He got two breaths, then shouted, “Ophelia Monterrosa!”
He jumped down to pick her up and hold her face by the air gap. In about thirty seconds, she’d regained consciousness.
“Stay there,” he said, climbing back into the frame to dig out another strip of the rubbery sealant, and rip that down the seam. It didn’t tear evenly. Sometimes it just started stretching, then tore, but when it did, he’d use his broken bottle to dig out another handhold. “My rubbish childhood is going to get us out of here, though. Using the skills learned there.”
“You learned to break into places?”
“No, though I could’ve done if I felt it necessary.” He got out one entire side, and then jumped down to do the bottom edge. “I discovered that if I broke things, they moved us. We’re getting out because I was a bad kid who could figure out how to break anything. And if I break two seams on this window, to the corner, we’ll be able to pull it out of the frame.”
“Why did you break things?” she asked, still not keeping up, still not functioning on all cylinders.
“Because the next place could be better. For me. For Charlie.”
He’d never admitted that before, denied it through all the times that he was rightly accused of it.
“We’re going to need the men to come around and push it in for us. Call them on the radio.”
She had to move away from the fresh air crack to get to the radio, and with her oxygen levels so depleted, she began to droop and slur her words much quicker than she previously had.
He dragged her back to the corner, which he’d freed, and they both sat, faces to the crack, watching flashlights bobbing their direction through the dark. Soon, four men stood outside the glass, and through a series of gestures and West pulling Lia the hell out of the way, the glass soon bent inward, and the sound of the rest of the remaining rubber sealant ripping almost drowned out the hissing of exceptionally cold wind entering the lifeboat.
“You know that door saying?” she asked, coherency returning. “About God shutting doors?”
“He opens a window?” he asked, and when he looked over, he found her smiling at him and pointing.
“Pretty sure that was me. And those lads with the torches.”
They took a moment and just breathed, leaning into one another, and when she looked steady enough and like she was getting too cold, West grabbed her bag, slung it over his shoulder and helped her climb through the window to their rescuers.
Half walking, half stumbling through the snow, they reached an entry port, and made their way inside to warm air, then the clinic, and finally the hospital, and sat together, each with cannula of oxygen running across their noses.
“I’m feeling a little better,” Lia mumbled when she saw how intently he watched her. “But I know we said no sleeping in the same room...for a while...”
“I’m sleeping in your cabin tonight. Don’t even try to send me to mine.” He meant it to sound kind of like a joke, but it didn’t come out that way, too many what-ifs in his head.
What if she’d died just when he was getting her back?
What if he hadn’t come back when he had?
“We need to tell the captain to have the other lifeboats tested. Pretty sure this one is out of commission until summer when they can replace the window.”
“They can put the glass back in and do another seal if they get on it tomorrow. Otherwise, it might fill with snow.”
“Hey,” she said, sharply enough to draw his immediate attention, and she pointed at his hands, which were still fisted and white across the knuckles in his lap. “What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing good.”
“Tell me.”
“I was thinking that if I had stayed gone, no one would’ve gone to the lifeboat to dance tonight and gotten trapped.”
“Regretting coming back?”
“No. But the problem might not have been discovered until it was critical if you hadn’t wanted to go dance terribly there.” He tried to explain. “If people had gone there in an actual emergency, that boat could’ve become a tomb. People who are in this part of the station, near the clinic. You.”
“It’s good you came back. Why is that making you want to punch something?”
“I don’t. Just...having a hard time shaking it off. I’m tense all over.” He leaned down to the nurse on the stick, grabbed the pulse oximeter and slipped it onto her finger. When they’d arrived, her blood oxygen was very low, but with a few minutes of the good stuff, it was once again in the high nineties. Soon to be better.
“Would a hug help?” she asked, voice sweet and arms open.
He didn’t wait for her to ask again, and didn’t wait for her to come to him. He slid off the trauma table and stepped between her legs to pull her against him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and looped her legs around his thighs, then laid her cheek on his shoulder.
Warm, soft and alive in his arms... He felt the tension begin to ebb away, enough for him to admit, “I’m wondering how many people have been hurt by me leaving to have another fresh start.”
He knew of one, but he wasn’t ready to tell her he’d caused Charlie’s in every way but by his own hands. Not yet, but even he could see that was where this was all leading. Like a bomb that ticked without a countdown clock. He knew it was going to go off, he just didn’t know when.
“He’s not answering,” Lia called from inside her office, listening to the phone at the BAT on at least the twentieth ring.
“I thought you two were travel pals.” He poked his head in, and though the teasing was there, neither of them really had the energy to mirror last night’s playful idiocy before they almost died in the lifeboat. Never mind the day was made longer still by security ordering they give the dining hall brawlers a blood test to make sure tempers hadn’t risen due to hormonal fluctuations.
She’d asked West to go to Nigel, since Angry Guy was probably in his cabin and that didn’t involve going outside to reach him.
They should’ve been off the clock at this hour, settling in to sky-watch from her cabin, where there was plenty of oxygen and the big bubble window.
Her email chirped just as West came into the office, and she shook her head, hanging it up. “Two minutes of ringing...he’s not going to answer. Probably has his nose stuck in some galaxy or other. Told you he was going to be difficult once nighttime rolled around.”
“That you did,” he said. “Give it five and call again, then I just go up.”
She nodded, then looked at her phone, and the speculation about Gates’s problematic behavior immediately turned serious.
“What is it?”
“Email from that hospital my father was admitted to. They released his records. We only had to get an attorney involved and email a ton of documents, but...”
He moved to stand behind her and she felt his hand on her shoulder as she opened the document.
“In Spanish?”
“Well, yes.”
“Can you read it?”
“It’s close enough...”
He couldn’t read it, though he might recognize a few words here and there. She babbled through different vitals and doctor’s notes.
“You’re going to have to translate before my curiosity kills us both.”
“I feel like I’m looking at test results from someone who’s here. Angry Guy, or Nigel,” she said, then pointed to one word. “He’s hypothyroid...” She scrolled back. “Damn it, Pai.”
“More, Lia. What else?”
“Immature red blood cells. White cells skewing low.”
“Platelets?”
“Low.” She sighed again, and West’s question about the fire suddenly came back to her. “How did you know?”
“That he’s alcoholic?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t. But your family owns a vineyard—it’s not much of a stretch. With Charlie...” He stopped, sighing as if it was an act of will to say anything about his brother, or just exhausted him. But he was doing it, either to live up to his end of the bargain, or because he wanted to help. “The more he used, the more trouble he got into. After the fire, even though I know you said it was an accident—”
“It was carelessness,” she cut in, dropping her phone onto the desktop. “He was on the veranda during the dry season, smoking, and tossed a used, still-burning cigarette into the garden behind.”
“I thought it started in the fields?”
“No, it mostly destroyed fields. The people in the village, the firefighters, the farm workers, everyone helped save the manor first. The buildings. The winery. The fire ate the other direction, through the oldest Monterrosa vines. They’re now mostly gone. Some were saved, but I don’t know how long it’ll take for them to propagate back. Even with lots of help. Which is why things are precarious. The Monterrosa grapes make the port. If we don’t have them, we don’t have Monterrosa port. We just have port. Douro River port, and sure that’s great, but all the stores we currently have will probably become immensely valuable if we can never make any the same.”
“That’s the problem with the vineyard? I thought it was just reconstruction and the old guys not wanting to listen to you...”
“The cellars where it’s aging are fine. We didn’t lose any product, so we have several years of sales ahead of us. But then we have a looming dry season that will span however long it takes us to replant.”
“Aw, hell, love.”
“Making more sense why I have to live there and run the vineyard now?”
“If you’ve all those people counting on you,” West said. Normally, he’d have been put out that her personal family calamity might be changing the future from what they’d planned and dreamed up, but at that moment, he didn’t want to consider what would come after they’d left Fletcher. Eight months was a long time.
To smooth that over, he said, “If it makes you feel better, that might not have been a drunken mistake. Judging by the tests, carelessness and inattention are probable symptoms. Mental impairment comes with low thyroid.”
“I guess,” she whispered, slumping a little in her seat. “He was admitted for that. Thrown out of a bar for fighting. Can you imagine? A sixty-three-year-old man, in a bar fight, and belligerent with police? They brought him to the hospital once they found out who he was.”
“Not arrested?” Wealth had privileges.
She shook her head. “This behavior might be a little more exaggerated than usual, but it’s still him. It doesn’t surprise me. But this thyroid business does.”
“You didn’t know about the alcoholism, either,” he reminded her.
“No.” She sighed. “Maybe it’s just shock. I wasn’t expecting this. I was expecting something injury related, not...pathology.”
He made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on her thyroid levels as another thought occurred to him. “You said you might have a grandparent with thyroid issues.”
And now he wasn’t just her jerkish father who messed things up and dropped off the face of the planet. He was her jerkish father who did all those things maybe because he was sick. And she was a doctor, and she hadn’t paid enough attention to him to notice.
“No other word about where he is?”
“No. His mental capacity is strong enough to keep ahead of us, the way he’s making withdrawals just before he leaves somewhere.”
“What have you tried?”
“Investigators, contacting friends, family, acquaintances, staking out favorite places, sending frequent emails, sending regular paper mail to his flat in Lisbon, sending people by, paying off the doorman. You know, the usual. Everything I can legally do.”
She was dancing all around it, and he’d heard twice now that her father withdrew money from the bank before he left somewhere. She might be able to freeze that account, providing it was a family account, but she was smart; she’d have thought of that.
He gestured for her to come to him, and opened his arms. It took one second for her to catch on, and she stood and leaned against him, arms circling his waist as he brought his around her.
Freezing the account would find him, but it came with risk. The same kind of risk he took when he drew the final line in the sand for Charlie. Tough love...
He squeezed her tighter and tilted his head to nose her pink knit cap.
“Anything we’re missing?” she asked, turning her nose to his neck, and anything he might have thought to say would’ve been gone, anyway.
“Sounds like you’re doing what you can.”
“It helps, just talking about it.” She squeezed. “Feels better.”
It didn’t solve anything, talking...but he said what he was supposed to say. “Good.”
“Want to help some more?”
“Sure?”
“Stay with me tonight? I want to talk to you about something else with the vineyard. Something I’ve been mulling over.”
“Yeah...” He let go, kissed her cheek and stepped back. “Then I’d better go drag Gates out of the BAT for blood work.”
“I’ll get Angry Guy.”
“Does Angry Guy have a name?”
“Wilson, I think,” she answered, then picked up the supplies she’d already prepared to go do it. “Call when you get there.”
“Why? It’s not a drive across country.”
“So I don’t worry you’ve been lost in the snow.”
“Take security when you see Angry Guy, so I don’t worry about you being alone with someone prone to violence.”
Lia’s trip to see Wilson was much quicker than West’s haul up the steep snowy hillside, so she got back to the clinic about five minutes before he called, one word: her name through the radio.
“You made it, I see,” she answered. “Are your bits frozen off?”
“I need assistance,” his voice said, all playful teasing vanishing. “Gates has been stabbed. I need a stretcher, saline, emergency triage supplies and security.”
“Who stabbed him?” He’d just gotten into a fight with Angry Guy, how many enemies had he made?
“Don’t know,” came the quick answer, then, “Send security. Don’t you come, it’s not safe.”
Lia snorted, and immediately disregarded that order. She did get the supplies, and two from security to accompany her, but she wasn’t sitting out of this for any reason.
Twenty minutes later, with two helpers loaded with two separate emergency surgery bags, they made the mad scrambling climb to the telescope.
All the while, her mind wouldn’t stop spinning. What if the one who stabbed Nigel was still there? With West? Logically, she knew that Antarctica was a dangerous place, especially in the winter, but she didn’t expect to be worried about their survival on a day-to-day basis.
Her lungs on fire, she let the security go in first, with guns to make sure it was safe, but only seconds before she went running, calling for West with what was left of her lungs.
“Over here!” His answer came immediately, from the other side of the telescope rotunda, and as soon as she got close enough, he said, “I told you—”
“You knew it wouldn’t work,” she said, taking in the setup. Nigel had been helped onto a long table to lie on his back, but it was all but impossible to see any details of his wound until she broke out a flashlight.
“How is he?”
“In pain,” Nigel answered, breathless and struggling to keep from crying out.
“And awake,” she added. “Hi. We’re going to look after you. Just worry about breathing.” She smiled down at him, on the off chance that it might give a tiny bit of comfort, then asked West, “Angry Guy?”
“Yes. Wilson, he said. Because he was snoring every night, keeping him awake.”
Mark another one down for Polar T3. “I was just about to run those labs.”
“So they know where he’s at?”
“In his cabin, last I heard.”
While they worked, cutting away minimal clothing so his wound could be visualized, one security officer relegated to holding the light for them while the other called down to the station and within minutes announced, “Wilson’s in custody.”
She didn’t say anything else, just got Nigel’s arm wrapped in a tourniquet so she could get a line in and hang saline. The blood flow didn’t seem to be too much, but saline would help keep the volume up.
“Did you bring coagulants?”
“Yes.” She shifted the contents of the bag she’d brought to drag out needed supplies, along with additional gauze for packing the wound. “Pack it as hard as you must to slow bleeding so we can get him down the hill.”
“Did you bring a sled?” Nigel asked, making her smile this time. Joking. He never did that before. Maybe something to worry about, considering how uptight he had been about spending time in the telescope for his research.
“I always bring a sled with me, everywhere I go now.”
In about ten minutes, they had him stabilized and strapped to the stretcher, then out of the BAT and on the stairs back down.
Although she was the physician on duty for these situations, Nigel was West’s patient. They got him into Medical and she fell into step behind him, ready to assist as he had assisted her with Eileen’s fan-blade accident.
Unlike that night, they needed blood tonight. “I’ll get the files and get his match in.”
“Sedate first. It’ll slow his heart.”
“Slow my heart?”
“That’s good, Nigel,” Lia explained while digging the appropriate medication out of the cabinet and getting it loaded up to dispense into his IV. “It means you’re not pumping as much blood, and less of it is leaking out. You have any allergies I need to know about?”
“No...”
“Don’t worry, we’re going to take good care of you. Okay?”
He nodded, and she slipped the needle of the syringe into the port on the IV to put him to sleep. “See you in a minute, Space Man.”
Or a few hours, but sedation would make it only seem like a moment once he woke.
West cut off Nigel’s jacket and shirts, but got the rest of it off without destroying anything. Lia checked his file for blood information, the notes she’d made about who he cross-referenced with, and called two of the crew for impromptu donations.
“How bad is it?” she asked, rejoining him after making the calls and getting ready to help.
“Not enough blood on the outside, considering his pressure. It’s going somewhere.”
“We should get a CBC before getting started, if he’s more or less stable, and we’re waiting for his donors,” she suggested. West went with it, getting the blood kit he’d taken with him to the telescope to do a draw as she ducked back out to set up the donors with chairs and needles as soon as they arrived.
They alternated watching over the patient while the intervening tests were done and two donated pints of blood collected.
Once West was certain he wouldn’t immediately bleed out, they prepped him for surgery.
Both of them scrubbed in, and once they were certain his anesthesia had fully taken hold, West opened the wound further to see what damage had been done and repair it.
“Spleen?” she asked, once he’d stopped cutting.
“Nicked it. I need more light.”
She tilted a ring light to the wound, then got a wand to suction out the blood pooling in the abdominal cavity.
“I think it’s stopped bleeding... Very small nick.”
Again he was struck by what could’ve happened with her there alone, without another doctor there. Over snoring.
“We need to do weekly thyroid checks, and maybe start a log where everyone marks down how much they’re sleeping per night. Before any of this gets further out of hand,” she grumbled, handing him whatever he needed before he needed it.
“You know, it’s not endemic. It’s this one fight that’s been repeating.”
“I heard tales of overwinter syndrome when I got here. I just thought it was exaggerated.”
Spacey was what he’d been seeing, but the mood swings? Part of him wanted to grab her and run to the nearest boat home—it was bad enough that the station was trying to kill them, now there were people getting in on the action.
His only comfort was that this time when the urge came to run, at least it was to run with someone, not away from them.