Chapter 91 – What Still Works

Dr. Sayegh stopped him when he began describing the copy room.

"I need to know what happened to your arm. Where you fought the animal can wait."

Kai lay back against the pillow. He had been trying to work out how much of the station she would believe, and she wanted to know which injury had come first.

He told her about the warmth from the core and how the line had opened through his arm. He described the blood, and the cloth Mara had cut away when pressure built beneath it. His hand had already been unreliable before the station. The shoulder and the torn palm had come later.

She asked him to separate what he had felt from what anyone else had seen.

That took longer.

The doctor wrote while he spoke. She did not ask for his level.

"And there's no piece of that core still in your hand?"

"No."

"Where is it now?"

"We left the last one behind. I don't have any here."

She set the record on a chair beside the bed. "Good. That's one thing I don't have to work around today."

The nurse brought a tray from a cupboard. Up close, Kai could see the patched sleeve of his scrub top and an old name badge turned backward on its clip. Sayegh called him Tomas.

They explained each examination before touching him. When they reached the left arm, Tomas supported it rather than lifting it by the wrist. Sayegh checked the hand, then touched different places with a folded piece of gauze and asked Kai where he felt it.

He could locate some touches immediately. Others reached him late, or seemed farther up his arm than they should have.

The doctor drew small marks on a sketch of a hand.

"Don't guess. If you can't tell, say that."

He stopped trying to give her better answers.

At the shoulder, even the careful examination made him sweat. She did not keep pushing to see what would happen. She lowered his arm into Tomas's support and asked about the last time he had carried his own weight on it.

Kai couldn't give her a clean account. Too much of the escape had involved being pulled, pinned, or trying to stop himself from falling.

"I can't sort out all the damage by looking at it," she said. "We don't have imaging here. Some of the things you can't do may be because of the pain. Some may not. I'm recording what works now so we can tell if it changes."

"You think the line did this?"

"You said the numbness started before the shoulder injury. I need to keep that in mind. It doesn't tell me what the line is."

She asked his permission to uncover his side.

Tomas brought the screen farther around the bed. Nia remained visible through the gap at the foot, lying with her head turned toward them. Beck sat beside her, holding a cup while she drank.

The room had settled into a busy, ordinary noise. Someone was washing bowls. A man behind another curtain kept asking for his glasses. Near the entrance, Inez described the ruined truck to a volunteer drawing a route on the back of a food carton.

Sayegh studied the wounds at Kai's waist, then the note about the wet passage.

"There's material in here that needs to come out. The dressing protected it on the journey. We need to do more now."

He tried to look down. His shoulder moved against the support and he stopped.

"Can you close it?"

"Not just sew over what's there. I'll clean it properly first. It's been exposed to dirty water, and some of the edges need attention. Then a fresh dressing."

She explained what she wanted to do, including pain relief and medicine for the risk of infection. She asked about allergies and medicines he had taken before the sky broke. Tomas checked the supplies against her record, then went to the locked cupboard.

Kai watched him turn a small metal key.

"If the healing won't work on me, will that?"

Sayegh followed his glance. "These are ordinary medicines. No skill involved. We'll check the numbing before I start."

"I need to stay awake."

Her attention moved to his marked right wrist.

"You can stay awake for this. But if you feel it pulling, tell Tomas before you try to move. He needs to keep your arm clear of me."

Kai looked past her toward Nia. She had heard enough to be watching him rather than the cup.

"Go on," she said. "I'm here."

He gave Sayegh his permission.

The waiting was worse than he expected. He could hear Tomas opening packaging, and Sayegh asking another worker to bring the lamp closer. Kai kept waiting for the first painful touch. Sayegh was still checking what she needed before she began.

When she tested the skin again, he felt contact without the sharpness he had been bracing for.

She tried another place.

"There," he said. "I can still feel that."

She attended to it and waited longer.

The blue band drew his right wrist a little outward. He warned Tomas, who moved the support beneath the forearm while Kai used his elbow to keep the hand close. Nobody touched the light. Once the wrist had settled, Sayegh tested again.

This time the sharpness was gone.

Kai had to ask her to repeat the test. She did, without comment.

The numbing had worked.

He could still feel pressure during the cleaning, and his shoulder hurt whenever the position shifted. Tomas watched his face and stopped the doctor twice so they could adjust him. It was not painless. But Kai did not spend it fighting to stay still through every touch.

At one point he heard something land in the tray.

"What was that?"

"A piece of grit. Keep looking this way."

He looked at the cupboard opposite him. Someone had taped children's drawings to its doors before it became a place to store medical supplies. Most had been taken down. A crooked paper sun remained above the lock.

He followed its torn edge with his eyes until the doctor told him she had finished.

She hadn't closed the damaged cuts. They were cleaned, covered, and recorded for another check. Tomas wrote down what she had given him and when. Kai could see the page beside Ruth's notes, filled with things someone had actually done.

Sayegh replaced the blanket.

"That was the part I was most concerned about doing promptly. Now we'll get you supported properly and let you rest."

"What happens when it wears off?"

"It will hurt more than it does now. Tell us before it becomes unbearable. You don't have to wait until a dressing change."

He hadn't realized he had been assuming that was the rule.

They fitted support around his injured ankle and arranged padding beneath his left arm so its weight no longer pulled at his shoulder. Nothing circled the dark line tightly. When Sayegh was satisfied, she had Tomas show the next attendant where the marked wrist needed to stay clear.

Then she went to Nia.

Kai listened until he was sure Nia was answering for herself. He heard questions about her fingers, then the scrape of a stool being pulled nearer.

He fell asleep before the examination was over.

***

Beck was still there when he woke, but the light on the covered windows had moved.

The numbing was wearing off. Kai could distinguish the pain at his side from the larger ache in his shoulder. Neither had vanished. For the moment, with the supports in place, neither demanded all of his attention.

Tomas checked him, helped him drink, and asked whether he wanted the head of the bed raised a little.

They tried it slowly. Kai did not pull himself up. The bed and the nurse did the work while he kept his marked wrist close. When dizziness came, they stopped and waited. It eased enough that he could remain there, looking across the room instead of at its roof.

Nia's hand rested in a new padded splint. Her injured leg had been dressed and supported. She had a blanket over both feet.

"How was it?" he asked.

She looked at the splint. "Awful for a while. Better now that nobody's moving it. She wants to check it again later."

"Did she say how long?"

"Not until she knows more. I asked twice."

He believed that without difficulty.

Beck brought his chair between their beds. There was a bowl on his knee and a spoon resting across its rim.

"Kitchen says you can blame them if you don't like it."

It was thin soup with soft pieces of potato. Beck held the spoon; Kai still couldn't use either hand for it. He ate slowly, stopping when he needed a rest. The food was warm, and there was enough that Beck didn't scrape the bottom after three mouthfuls.

Halfway through, Inez came back with the two water-crew men.

"We've got to return before the next load," she said. "Clinic's keeping the stretchers. They'll bring them back when somebody's going our way."

Beck glanced at the bowl, then at the men waiting by the door.

"Finish that," Inez told him. "We've got a few minutes."

One of the crewmen gave Nia the paper Beck had handed over on arrival. Someone had added a name and an address at the bottom.

"Their message desk made copies," he said. "One's going with us. They want the next replies sent here, not the mess. We'll tell Ruth too."

Nia asked him to put it where she could read it. He held it above her blanket until she had checked the new lines.

Kai tried to thank Inez for the detour, the beds, all the things they had needed from her. He stumbled over the list.

"You told us about the thing on the truck," she said. "I hadn't seen it."

"You still came back for us before that."

She rubbed at a dark stain on her cuff.

"Well. Tell someone here if the wheels start pulling again. I didn't have the right washer."

Beck finished helping Kai eat. He took the bowl to the kitchen and returned long enough to ask Nia whether there was anything else she wanted in the message.

She shook her head, then changed her mind.

"Tell them I can talk. If somebody knows something, don't wait until I'm well enough to go to them."

He wrote it down before leaving.

Kai watched the four of them cross the dining hall. Inez stopped at the door to speak to the watch volunteer about the street again. Then the group went out together.

He had known they would have to go. The room felt different without them.

Nia shifted her head against the pillow, trying to keep the doorway in sight. He asked Tomas to leave the gap in the curtain open.

***

Later, when the pain began to climb, Kai called for help before it drove him flat.

The attendant checked the written times and fetched Tomas. There was no argument about whether he had earned another dose. Afterward, he lay quietly while Sayegh worked her way back along the beds.

She found him studying the dark line above his left wrist.

"Does it feel different?"

"Hard to tell with everything else."

"Then don't test it while you're tired. The medicines may change what you notice too."

He let his head sink back. "I need to get the hand working."

"I know. We'll check it again without forcing it. The wounds don't have to stay untreated while we try to understand the rest."

She checked the new dressing. Nothing had soaked through it. Before leaving, she showed him the marks she had made on the hand sketch and explained what she would compare at the next examination.

He rested his arm and left the warmth alone.

The person at the message desk came over near the end of the afternoon. She was a young woman wearing a school visitor badge on a cord, with three pencils pushed through her tied-back hair.

"Nia? A water runner brought this from the yard. They sent him on here when he asked for you."

She held a folded sheet. Nia tried to lift her head.

"Is he still here?"

"At the gate, having a drink. He said he carried it. He didn't write it."

"Read it to me. All of it."

The woman pulled up Beck's empty chair.

The reply had come from a woman named Helen Voss, working at a temporary kitchen in the Larch Street laundry. She had received a copy of Nia's request through the water crews. She believed she had met Elise.

Kai watched Nia's mouth tighten at *believed*.

Voss wrote that a girl had given her that name at a covered bus stop after the first buildings fell. Twelve, or near enough. She had stayed with a group of children while volunteers argued about where to take them. Voss had given them drinking water and walked with the group as far as the municipal pool.

There had been adults receiving people at the pool doors. She had left the children there and returned to find her own husband.

Helen did not say where the girl had gone afterward.

"There's another paragraph," the reader said.

Nia stared at the sheet.

"Keep going."

"She says the girl wouldn't let her call the older sister a guardian. She said her sister's name was Nia. She was worried Nia would be angry with her for losing the house key. Helen wanted to know if that meant anything to you."

Nia made a sound that Kai had never heard from her before. He thought at first that her hand had moved inside the splint.

"The key?" she asked.

The woman nodded.

"She always kept her key loose in her pocket," Nia said. "I kept telling her she'd lose it."

Her eyes filled. She looked toward Kai, then back at the paper, as though the visitor might fold it up if she stopped watching.

"Was that in what we sent?" Kai asked.

"No," Nia said. "I didn't tell Beck that."

Kai asked the woman to set the reply beside the original request so Nia could check both. They waited while she read the lines herself.

Then she asked where Helen was and whether someone could bring her to the clinic.

There was an address at the bottom, the laundry and its side entrance. The message desk could send an answer with the next water crew. Nobody there could promise the journey on Helen's behalf.

Nia began dictating immediately. She got as far as her sister's name before stopping to swallow.

"Tell her I'd like to hear it from her," she said. "If she can't come, ask when I can send someone. And ask her who was at the pool. Who she actually spoke to."

The woman wrote it all down, then read it back.

After she left, Nia lay staring toward the foot of the bed. Kai could see the effort it took her not to ask to leave at once. Her splinted hand stayed on its pillow.

"I don't know if she's still there," she said.

"Neither do I. We can ask about the pool."

"I want to go myself."

He looked at the supports beneath her leg. She followed his glance, and this time she didn't try to move it.

"Tomorrow," she said, "I'm asking the doctor what I have to be able to do. Not whether I feel better. What I have to do before she'll let me travel."

Kai nodded. He wanted that answer for himself too.

The two papers lay on the chair between their beds. When the attendant came to clear it, Nia asked her to leave them.

She was still reading Helen's paragraph about the key when the lamps came on.