Chapter 90 – Past the Arrows

The first stretcher arrived with a wheel that pulled to the left.

Inez pushed it across the repair bay, watched it drift, and sent it back outside. Kai heard her arguing with someone about the axle. When she returned to the mess, she carried a bag of washers and looked more irritated than worried.

"We've found somewhere to take you," she said. "Now we need the wheels to get there."

Morning light reached through the open door. Kai had spent the night waking to Ruth's questions, the pull at his wrist, and the discomfort of being kept in a position he could not change by himself. Between those interruptions, he had slept.

He could hear an argument in the bay and still follow what Inez was saying.

Nia was propped on folded blankets beside him. Ruth had padded and supported her crushed fingers after Mara's examination. Her other hand still couldn't close properly. She watched Inez without trying to get off the mattress.

"Where?"

"A clinic west of here. In the old school dining hall. One of the water crew used to bring deliveries there. They've got a doctor who worked in emergency care."

"Someone's been inside?" Kai asked.

"Yes. With Ruth's list. She won't move either of you on a rumor."

Ruth came in behind her, followed by a man carrying a medical bag and a folded sheet of paper. He introduced himself as a nurse from the clinic. He had come with the crew to examine them before transport, and he knew why Kai's right wrist was being kept clear of everyone else's skin.

He went through Ruth's record first.

Kai was grateful that they didn't make him tell the whole story again. He answered when they needed him, warned the nurse before the band shifted, and kept his left arm still. The warmth there remained faint. He left Mara's test alone.

The nurse and Ruth spoke for some time beside the cupboard. When they came back, Ruth crouched where both patients could see her.

"It's a risk to move you. It's also a risk to keep you here without what the clinic has. They've seen the list, and they have room. We'll take you lying down, and he'll stay with you on the way."

The nurse nodded. "We may still need to send you farther. I can't promise the doctor can do everything you need."

Nia looked toward the repair bay. "Can you take both of us?"

"Two stretchers," Inez said. "Two people on each when the ground's bad. Beck and me, and the two men you met with Mara. The nurse comes with us."

"What about the messages?"

Beck appeared in the doorway with the papers Nia had spent the previous evening correcting.

"Ruth keeps a copy and the clinic address. The water posts will know where we've gone. We won't make anyone start looking for you from scratch."

Nia asked him to read the address aloud. Then she made him read it again while she repeated it to herself.

Kai waited until the nurse had checked the pad at his side before answering for himself.

"I'll go."

The man set the blanket back over his legs. "We'll stop when I say stop. You won't have to earn a rest."

Outside, Inez rolled the repaired stretcher past the doorway. It went straight this time.

They had found the pair in a patient-transfer van that could no longer run. Both frames were narrower than the maintenance cart, with side rails and wheels large enough to cross the seams in the yard. Inez had measured them against the mess doorway and checked the exit herself.

There was no reason to go back down the freight ramp. The patients were already at yard level. The way out was through the repair bay and under the shutter.

Kai watched the helpers bring his stretcher alongside the mattress and set its brakes. The nurse directed the transfer using the sheet already beneath him. Beck supported the bad ankle while the others took his weight. They paused to settle his left arm before moving him any farther.

His right wrist pulled as soon as his position changed.

"Toward the door," he said.

The nurse adjusted the support beneath the forearm without reaching across the blue mark. They waited until Kai could keep it close again.

It was slower than being hauled out of the inspection opening. Nobody started again until he told them his wrist was settled.

Nia went onto the second stretcher. Ruth tucked a folded coat beside her injured leg, then helped Beck secure the loose edge of her blanket so it couldn't fall into a wheel.

Inez and Beck would take Kai. The two water-crew men took Nia. The nurse walked between them, close enough to reach either patient.

Ruth stood by the mess door as they left.

"I've written down when the dressings were changed," she told the nurse. "And when he last slept. Don't let the paper go missing just because nobody can put him on a screen."

She handed him the treatment record and Mara's notes about Kai's arm. He put both inside his bag, separate from the route sheet.

Kai couldn't offer his hand. He said her name instead, and thanked her before the wheels carried him out of earshot.

The woman with the spear lifted the shutter while another guard watched the yard. The opening rose high enough for the stretchers, then for the people pushing them. Sunlight reached Kai's face.

He blinked until the yard stopped being a white blur.

The yellow forklift stood where he had glimpsed it on arrival. Beyond it were barrels, a burned delivery truck, and the open gate. A blue route line ran through the gate and turned along the street outside. Somebody had swept a narrow path through the broken glass.

Inez held up the paper route before they left.

"Across the yard, right at the gate, then the service street behind the shops. No steps. If anything's changed, we look before we roll into it."

One of the crewmen pointed at the blue line. "Guide takes the square. It's shorter."

"The square has a broken curb at the far end. Did they fix it?"

He shook his head.

"Then we use the street we checked."

He let his head rest against the padding.

Outside the gate, the city was louder than he remembered.

A hammer rang somewhere behind the next block. People waited beside a water tank with bottles and cooking pots, each keeping one eye on the roofs. Smoke climbed from a row of shops farther north. On a blank wall, the System had projected three clean arrows over a painted warning that said the building was unsafe.

Kai turned his head to follow a woman walking with a child under each arm. All three had shoes. He watched them disappear through a gate and found himself thinking about Nia's bare feet beneath the blanket.

At the next crossing, the nurse called a stop to check both stretchers. Beck held Kai's frame steady while Inez moved the support beneath his shoulder a little higher. Nothing had torn open during the first stretch. Kai tried to hold on to that fact instead of the distance still ahead.

The route turned behind the shops into a narrow commercial street. A covered arcade ran along its left side, ending at a corner pharmacy. Above the opposite pavement, the front of an office building had collapsed onto a delivery truck. Brickwork covered its roof. A bent shop awning projected over the open road.

The nurse checked the paper. "Straight through, then left past the pharmacy. The school wall starts there."

Kai could see the end of the street from where he lay. Blue arrows marked the open road, rejoining the route they had chosen around the square. People had used it recently; there were clear wheel tracks through the dust.

Inez slowed before the wrecked truck. The arcade offered a roof, but fallen display racks blocked its nearest entrance.

"Keep to the middle," she told Beck. "Away from that loose brick."

He adjusted the stretcher's course.

Something hard pressed at the inside of Kai's left wrist.

He had felt the low warmth during the night, sometimes while half asleep. This was sharper, a brief pressure that seemed to come from beyond his hand. It recalled the feeling he had once had near the shelter's west wall.

He couldn't place it precisely. The ache in his shoulder made the whole arm difficult to read.

Kai looked at the building instead of closing his eyes to follow it.

A pale strip hung beneath the broken awning. He had taken it for exposed cable. Now its end slid upward through the dust on the truck's roof.

"Stop here," he said.

Inez set her feet and held the stretcher still. Behind them, one of the crewmen asked what was wrong.

"Under the awning. The white cable beside the truck. Watch the end."

Beck leaned just far enough to see past Inez.

For several seconds the strip didn't move. A little mortar fell from somewhere higher up and struck the truck's hood.

Then the pale end bent around a brick and drew it backward.

Beck's hands tightened on the frame.

"That's not a cable."

The crew stopped Nia's stretcher well behind them. Nobody called out to whatever was under the awning.

Kai kept watching. A second length uncurled from the same dark space, thin at its tip and wider where it disappeared into the wreckage. He could not see the body attached to either one.

The first slid down the side of the truck toward the road.

The blue arrows hadn't changed.

Inez began easing the stretcher backward. Beck moved with her. They stopped beside a brick pier where the arcade's roof began, out of the direct line beneath the awning. The other stretcher backed around the corner they had just passed.

"Was that on the route when you checked?" Inez asked the nurse.

"The truck was. I didn't see anything moving."

"How long ago?"

"Before I came for you."

He looked down at the paper, then folded it so the marked street was hidden.

Kai tried to keep the pale lengths in sight, but the pressure in his wrist sharpened when he concentrated. He looked away, took a small breath, and told Beck that he couldn't keep doing it.

"Doing what?"

"Trying to feel where it is. You can see it now. Use that."

Beck glanced at his arm, but Kai didn't explain further. The pressure dulled after he stopped attending to it, though he couldn't tell whether that was because of him or the distance they had put between themselves and the truck.

He had seen the thing move. That was enough to avoid the road.

Inez crouched beside the stretcher rather than leaving him to inspect the blocked arcade.

"We can go back to the yard," she said. "Or see if the covered walk goes through. I'm not rolling you past that."

One of Nia's carriers came forward to look at the entrance. He shifted a fallen rack and found a bent frame wedged behind it. The gap was too narrow for either stretcher.

"We'd have to lift them over."

"No," the nurse said.

Nia called from behind the corner. "There's another entrance. Behind us. We passed it."

Inez looked back.

"Beside the red postbox," Nia said. "You could see right through the shop. There weren't any doors left at the back."

From her lower angle on the second stretcher, she had been looking under a half-fallen sign while the others watched the road.

Inez left Beck at Kai's head and went back with the carrier. The nurse stayed between the two patients. Kai listened to footsteps cross loose glass, stop, and continue on tiles.

The pale length touched the road where their front wheels would have been.

It lay there, almost flat. Dust clung to its upper surface.

Inez returned without raising her voice. "It opens into the arcade. The floor's level. There's a delivery shutter at the far end, but I haven't checked beyond it."

The nurse went with her to look while Beck and the crewmen stayed with the patients. When they came back, he had unfolded the paper again.

"The exit reaches the pharmacy corner. We don't have to use the road beside the truck."

They took the stretchers back to the red postbox, one at a time through the shop. It had sold kitchenware. Empty hooks covered the walls, and a cracked mixing bowl lay in the center of the floor until Inez kicked it beneath a shelf.

They did not try to squeeze past the bent entrance rack. Inside the arcade, they turned away from it and continued toward the pharmacy.

The roof gave Kai a strip of shade. He could see pillars passing above him, one after another. Beck stopped twice to lift the front wheels over broken tiles while Inez held the other end level.

Beyond the pillars, the first pale length swept through the dust. It struck the fallen rack with enough force to spin it into the road.

Nia's carrier flinched. The nurse caught the side of her stretcher before a wheel left the edge of a tile.

"Steady," Inez said. "We can't run with these."

Kai could no longer see under the awning. He did not try to recover the sensation in his arm. Every person around him already knew there was something outside the covered walk.

They reached the delivery shutter, which the nurse had secured above the opening with its existing latch. Beck checked it before taking Kai beneath it. Nia followed, and the crew turned both stretchers left around the solid wall of the pharmacy.

The truck disappeared from view.

Inez let them stop behind the wall. She counted people, then looked at the blankets and the wheels. The nurse checked Kai's side and Nia's injured leg before allowing them to move again.

"You saw the shop," Kai said to Nia.

"I was tired of looking at everybody's backs."

Her voice shook. She had still remembered the entrance.

The school dining hall stood beyond a low brick wall at the end of the next street. Cloth covered its windows from inside. Two people at the gate came out when the nurse called to them, one carrying wooden blocks for the stretcher wheels.

They asked who was injured and whether the route was still open.

Inez answered the second question first.

Inside, the dining tables had been moved to the walls. The room smelled of soap, stale food, and people sleeping too close together. It was warmer than the maintenance mess. Kai saw cabinets, a screened treatment space, and a woman writing on a clipboard while holding a lamp against her shoulder.

She set both down when she saw the stretchers.

The nurse gave her Ruth's record before anyone tried to scan Kai. He pointed out the marked wrist and repeated the uncertainty about contact. She listened, asked Kai whether he understood why they had brought him, and waited for his answer.

"You have things Ruth didn't," he said. "And someone who knows how to use them."

"Some things," she said. "I'm Dr. Sayegh. We'll start by finding out which of them you need."

She directed Nia toward one of the beds and Kai toward the screened space. The beds were close enough that Nia could still see him when the curtain was open.

Kai asked them to keep it that way until the transfer was finished.

Inez helped settle him, then drew the doctor aside to explain the road hazard. Beck stayed long enough to hand over Nia's messages and the return address for the water crews. There was a place to put the papers, and someone whose job was to keep them.

The doctor returned to Kai with Ruth's record open beside Mara's notes.

"Before I touch the left arm," she said, "tell me about the line she says I shouldn't bind."

He looked at the dark path visible above the dressing. It hadn't given him a grip, or carried him across the road. But it had made him look at something everyone else had passed over.

"That started before the injuries in the station," he said. "With a piece of a monster core."

Dr. Sayegh pulled a stool beside the bed.

"Start there."