Chapter 63: The Medic
The container door stood propped open with a jerry can, and inside, under a hanging work light, a woman was setting out vials in neat little rows.
The neatness was the first thing that told me she didn't belong down here. Nothing else in this whole rotten place was neat.
She had a fold-out kit laid open on a crate. Gauze in one row, ampoules in another, everything square to everything else. She was working on Deel's arm without being asked and without looking up, and the sharp clean bite of antiseptic cut through the shipyard rot like a window opened in a sick room.
The fillers drifted toward her. The low-rank kids the crew burns through like batteries, scraped and limping, edging into the light the way cold things edge toward the one warm rock in a field.
She let them. She kept working.
"Sit," she told me, before I'd said a word.
"I'm fine."
"You're favoring three ribs and you flinched putting the bag down. Sit, or bleed on your own time." Low and dry, the voice of somebody who ran out of polite years ago and found she worked faster without it. "I'm Rue."
"Taylor."
"No you're not," she said, mild as weather, and pressed something cold to my ribs before I could decide whether to be afraid of that sentence. "Nobody's named what they say they're named down here. Hold still."
So I held still.
Her hands were cold. Not Seraphina cold. Ordinary cold, bad-circulation cold, the cold of someone who works nights in a metal box by the sea.
Up close she was younger than the voice. Late twenties, maybe, with the kind of tired that gets into the bones and sets up house.
She was gentle with the fillers and completely unsentimental with me, which meant she'd already sorted the world into people who needed her and people who could stand it, and she'd dropped me in the second pile without a second thought.
Fair, honestly.
I watched her hands while she wrapped me. I can't not. It runs on the same broken switch as the strategist, because you learn a person's whole shape from their hands long before you learn their name.
Hers didn't waste a motion. Not one.
She moved down the line of fillers like she'd walked that circuit a thousand times. A pulse here. A pair of blown pupils there. A low, even murmur, the kind you'd use on an animal you were trying to keep from bolting.
One of the kids asked her if he was going to be okay.
"You're going to be fine," she said, not looking up, already moving to the next cot. "You're always going to be fine. That's the whole job description down here."
It landed like a joke.
It was not a joke. I clocked that too.
Then she unlocked a steel case and started measuring out doses, and her care looked, at first glance, exactly like diligence.
It was not diligence.
I watch hands for a living. It's the one real skill I've got. And her hands were lying.
She'd draw a full measure, right where the chart said full. Then, in the half-second she thought nobody's eyes were on her, she'd bleed a hair of it back into a second vial. Every dose. Smooth as a card trick.
Skimming.
Shorting the doses. Keeping these kids one careful degree further back from the edge than the schedule wanted them. She was sabotaging the machine from the inside, one tiny cheat at a time, and she'd been doing it so quietly that nobody had caught her yet.
My strategist brain sat up and started taking notes.
Vasco appeared at the container mouth with his clipboard, blocking the light.
"Deel. He work tomorrow or not."
"Ask his arm," Rue said, not looking up.
"I'm asking you."
"Then no. Two days." She snapped a case shut. "Unless you want him dropping your stones in a nest because his grip quit. Your call. It's always your call."
Vasco stood there a second, doing whatever the inside of a parking meter does, and then he left, because arguing with the medic costs energy and she is never, ever worth the line item.
Invisible. A whole year of being exactly that boring, on purpose.
Then she reached up to fix the collar of her scrubs, and the collar slipped, and I saw it.
A fracture. Under her collarbone.
One hairline crack of jagged electric blue. The exact color I'd watched crawl up Francis's arm the night he died. The color of a person turning, slowly, into a door.
Faint. Early.
There.
She caught me seeing it. She didn't flinch. She pulled the collar back up, slow and deliberate, and held my eyes the whole time she did it, daring me to say something, so she'd know what kind of person I was before she had to find out the hard way.
I didn't say anything.
She went back to the fillers. Hands steady, voice low, telling one of the kids his blood pressure was fine and he could sit up now.
I sat there with my wrapped ribs and my quietly humming tattoos and did the arithmetic I can't help doing. The kind that has never once let me down and never once made me happy.
She was patching these people up so they'd live long enough to be used up. She was stealing them weeks out of a machine built to spend them.
And under her own collar, in one thin blue line only the two of us could see, the machine was spending her too.