Chapter 47: Apparently Confidence Was Not a Permit

Chapter 47: Chapter 47: Apparently Confidence Was Not a Permit

Dante caught the woman’s upper arm before her face hit the rail, then supported her shoulders beside the gate. Anika rolled the abandoned cart beneath her bent knee while Rhea ordered the attendant away from the controls.

The copper band held her ankle against a bar, preventing them from moving her without pulling on the leg. She asked why Dante’s gate hadn’t let her through, and he had no answer worth hearing.

"I thought you could leave," he admitted. "I’m sorry, and I’m staying until somebody gets this off you."

Rhea opened the small case from her bag and checked the sealed skin dressing before showing it to the woman. She explained what it was for, received a frightened nod and placed it over the reddened skin beside the band without trying to remove the metal.

The attendant claimed the restriction would release when the resident stopped resisting. Honey pushed his own visitor tablet beneath his face and demanded the emergency release instructions, which proved considerably faster than arguing about what counted as resistance.

He drew a hooked line beside the hinge and spoke a short Korean phrase. The bars separated enough for Rhea and Dante to slide the woman’s leg free, leaving the copper band closed around her ankle.

Rhea requested the court healer while Honey blocked the attendant and demanded an explanation she could repeat to her family. The healer arrived with a red bag, assessed the burn and helped them settle the woman in a wheeled chair.

He made the attendant sign an injury record and said the band needed an authorized release. Dante gave his name and repeated what he had said. He could point out that he had promised only if she could apply, but she was the one sitting with a burned ankle. Explaining why he was less wrong wouldn’t cool it.

Rhea drew a small arch above the chair while the healer fetched another dressing. She spoke, "Bicheuro garyeo, chagaun barameul mageora," and a pale shield covered the open window beside them, blocking the cold air blowing across the woman’s legs.

It trembled almost immediately. Rhea ended it herself before the shape broke, then asked the attendant for a blanket instead of trying again.

Dante blocked the draft while Rhea recorded her reading, then watched her trembling fingers close around the water Anika offered. Rhea sat while he finished the task her shield hadn’t managed. He collected the blanket, announcing that no further demonstration was needed to prove the building was an asshole with excellent lighting.

He asked whether her hands felt numb, and Rhea checked each fingertip before admitting they were slower than usual. She recorded that as carefully as she had recorded Posey’s weakness, then told him where to hold the blanket while she rested. Dante followed the instruction without offering to cast a stronger shield. Wanting to help no longer felt like enough reason to try something.

The woman laughed despite herself, then gave him the appeal strip that had been folded inside her sleeve. She had requested departure before, and the refusal described her arrival as voluntary even though she remembered asking to be taken home.

Honey laid the refusal beside Anika’s and Rhea’s strips, showing Dante the same mark on all three despite their different accounts of arriving.

Anika asked the healer whether the woman could travel to the appeal desk. He allowed it with her leg supported and wrote treatment instructions for the next clinician. He also recorded permission to remove the band once a medical departure was approved, warning them not to try another active gate before then.

Dante requested the elevator and learned to guide the chair’s padded handle with his forearms, keeping pressure off his injured fingers. Anika watched the supported leg while Honey held the appeals and Rhea added the healer’s treatment note.

He tucked the blanket clear of the wheel and slowed at a floor joint. The woman loosened her grip on the armrest once they crossed it. Nobody applauded, but she asked him to keep pushing, and he liked being trusted with something he could actually do.

At the elevator, he asked the woman which position hurt least and waited while Anika adjusted the support under her leg. The delay made the attendant complain about the next hearing, so Dante asked him to hold the door instead of supplying commentary. Honey repeated the request with enough confidence to make it sound like an official duty, and Dante nearly smiled at finding someone else willing to abuse the voice for a useful purpose.

Anika held the elevator door while he pushed the chair through, keeping her hand there until its rear wheels cleared the gap.

The lift opened into an orchard beneath glass panels. Apples rolled uphill through wooden gutters toward waiting baskets, while branches lowered themselves for workers to pick the rest. Dante kept the chair away from the fruit. Two adult women waited beside separate paths, bark-colored skin showing beneath sleeves and leaves growing through their braids.

They looked almost identical until one stepped forward with a white blossom tucked beside her ear. The other had a strip of green cloth tied around her wrist and watched Dante’s arrival record as though it smelled unpleasant.

Honey introduced them as the route witnesses, then demanded an explanation of the temporary-host mark. Both claimed the other had recorded it, which made Anika’s expression settle into the patient look she used before becoming deeply unhelpful to someone’s day.

Dante held up the injured woman’s appeal. "We’re not deciding who gets to win the argument. We’re finding the path that takes her outside without hurting her again."

The witness with the blossom pointed toward a bridge behind her, while the one with the green wrist cloth pointed toward a low stone tunnel. Each insisted the other’s route had been closed since a memory exchange that morning. Dante kept the chair still instead of picking the more confident answer, having developed a personal interest in how expensive that mistake could become.

Rhea asked what exchange they meant. Both described a morning when they had surrendered a memory of opening the public route, using the same words until Dante asked what they had been wearing.

Dante asked Honey to keep both answers on the same page of her route book. If the witnesses changed their stories, he wanted to notice before the woman in the chair paid for another mistake, and he stayed beside the brake while they answered.

The first remembered the white blossom. The second remembered a white blossom too, then looked down at the strip of cloth around her wrist as though it belonged to someone else.

Dante remembered Iris showing how a false sleeve slipped over a real wrist in the archive workshop, and asked the second woman to describe what she could actually see in the memory. When she said she had looked down at the blossom, he glanced at the flower tucked beside her sister’s ear and asked whose eyes she had been looking through.