Chapter 97 – A Second Look

They moved Nia first because her bed was nearest the outside wall.

Tomas folded her letter and put it beneath the blue sweater. Two volunteers rolled the bed toward the middle of the dining hall while he kept her supported leg from striking the frame. Nia held still and watched Kai's stretcher pass.

"Where did it get in?"

"It hasn't," Beck said. "They're keeping it outside."

At the far end of the ward, Sayegh was directing anyone who could walk into the interior corridor. People wanted shoes, bags, someone from another bed. She gave them specific jobs instead of telling them to calm down. One man carried blankets. Another took the water jug and cups. The desk volunteer brought the names list.

Kai heard his own name called and answered.

Beck and Tomas parked him beside Nia, well away from the outside windows. The stretcher brakes clicked on. Kai's usual bed was still near the wall, but transferring him back would have put three people in front of the glass.

"We'll use this for now," Tomas said. "Tell me if the support shifts."

Sana came to the wide opening that led into the service room. Her spear point was wet, though she had not been outside long enough to fight.

"Water bucket," she said when she saw Kai looking. "Caught it turning the corner. Rook wants that door shut."

Beck rolled the solid screen away from the opening. Two broad doors had been folded against the wall behind it. He and Sana pulled them closed, leaving a narrow gap until the last kitchen worker came through.

There were windows high above the outside wall of the ward. Kai had looked at them every morning, watching the light change across the ceiling. None was wide enough for a person. Several were open at the top.

Sana followed his eyes.

"Already closing them."

A volunteer was working along the row with a long wooden pole, pushing each catch into place. Sana waited until he reached the last before returning to Rook.

***

The first bolt struck something hard enough that Kai heard it through the wall.

Then boots scraped outside, and a man shouted for room.

Nobody in the ward could see the courtyard from this angle. Nia stared at the closed service doors. Kai tried to keep listening without filling the gaps with things he remembered from the office.

The pressure near his wrist came and went. At first he thought it followed the shouting. Then a loud crash brought nothing, while a quiet moment left the sensation strong enough to make him notice his fingers.

He stopped trying to match every sound to it.

Tomas had gone to help Sayegh. Beck remained with the patients by the interior corridor, holding the empty water jug someone had pressed on him.

"Beck."

He came over.

"I can still feel it. The thing from the roof, or something like it."

"Do you need to be farther away?"

"Maybe. But I can't tell which direction that is."

Beck set down the jug and checked the route into the corridor. A bed was still being turned through the double doors. Kai would have to wait until it cleared.

Outside, Rook shouted a name. A heavy object struck the paving twice, then dragged.

The next sound was softer and closer, a scrape above the service doors.

Kai looked up.

Nothing moved where he could see it. The doors stood in an internal partition; above them, old ceiling panels covered the space under the roof. One corner had a brown water stain.

"Did you hear that?"

Beck nodded. He lifted a finger to keep Kai quiet and watched the ceiling.

The noise did not repeat.

A voice outside called that it was down. Another asked for a knife.

Some of the people waiting at the corridor began talking at once. A woman laughed too loudly and put a hand over her mouth. The volunteer at the double doors asked Sayegh whether they should stop moving the beds.

"Keep that doorway clear," she said. "We're not moving anyone back yet."

Kai breathed out. The pressure remained.

That did not prove another creature was there. He had felt warmth from a core after the body around it was dead. The one in the courtyard could account for it, or he could be holding onto the sensation because he was frightened.

He told Beck that too.

"But there was a sound over the doors."

Beck went to Sayegh. She listened, looked at the ceiling and sent a volunteer through the interior corridor to reach the watch by the front entrance.

There was no fresh alarm. No one screamed. The last bed cleared the doorway, and Beck began rolling Kai after it.

Halfway there, Kai saw dust fall from the stained panel.

"Stop. Look above the service doors."

Beck stopped the stretcher without leaving it. The volunteers had wheeled Nia into the corridor while Kai waited. She leaned toward the ward doorway and called for the pole they had used on the windows.

"Don't stand underneath it," she told the volunteer bringing it.

The panel shifted down at one corner.

Beck pulled Kai the rest of the way through the double doors. From the corridor, the damaged corner disappeared behind the wall. Kai heard the pole scrape the floor as someone dragged it back.

Rook's voice came from the ward.

"Everyone behind me. Shut the far door. Sana, the serving room."

Something broke overhead.

***

Kai saw the second creature through the corridor doorway when it dropped.

It struck an empty mattress with six legs spread wide. The bed lurched against the wall. Brown plates overlapped along its back, and the narrow front of its body turned from side to side above a pair of folded mouthparts.

It was about the length of a man's thigh. That looked small until it moved.

Rook stood between it and the patients with a round shield raised. The crossbowman was beside the closed service doors, trying to get a clear line past the bed frames.

The creature sprang onto the nearest empty bed.

Rook stepped across its path. A pale surface extended a little beyond the edge of her shield as she braced. The impact drove her back a full pace. Metal feet shrieked on the dining-hall floor.

Kai felt a brief pressure from her direction, different from the uneven sensation he had been trying to follow. He had no time to separate them. Beck was pulling his stretcher farther into the corridor.

"Wait," Kai said, then immediately wished he hadn't.

Beck kept moving.

"You can tell her afterward."

The double doors closed most of the way. Through the remaining gap Kai could see only a strip of floor and Rook's boots.

A bolt hit. The creature made a thin rattling sound.

Sana called for the crossbowman to move left. Kai heard her spear strike the floor, then a hard wet crack from somewhere higher.

The shield scraped against a bed frame. Rook swore, breathlessly and at length.

No one in the corridor spoke.

The struggle ended with a series of blows that sounded too ordinary for what was happening. Kai remembered the paper cutter handle sliding in his hands. He shut his eyes and kept his head against the stretcher instead of trying to see more.

When Sana opened the doors, she looked first at the floor behind them to make sure she would not hit a patient's foot.

"It's dead. Stay here until we've checked the ceiling."

There was black fluid up one side of her spear. Her sleeve had torn at the elbow, but the skin beneath looked whole.

Rook came after her with a dent in her shield and a reddening cheek.

"Who heard it?"

Beck pointed toward Kai, then himself.

"He noticed something after the first one went down. We both heard the scrape. Then dust came off the panel."

"The pressure might have been the dead one," Kai said. "I didn't know there were two."

Rook rested her shield against the wall.

"You asked us to look. We needed to look."

She went back into the dining hall before he could explain the uncertainty again.

Nia was watching him from the next bed.

"She heard you," she said.

Kai lay back. His shoulder ached from the transfers. Beyond the doors, he could hear the staff moving beds again.

***

They spent the afternoon in the corridor while the watch inspected the roof space.

The creatures had got under loose flashing near the kitchen. One had come down outside. The other had crawled along the space above the service-room partition before breaking through into the ward. Beck brought back a piece of the torn mesh so Inez could measure a replacement.

The clinic lost one mattress and several ceiling panels. Nobody had been bitten. Rook needed her cheek cleaned, and the crossbowman had twisted a finger while reloading. Sayegh dealt with those before letting anyone congratulate themselves.

Nia asked for her letter.

The desk volunteer found it beneath the sweater and brought both. The letter was unfinished. Nia had been halfway through telling Elise that there was enough room in the clinic for her next visit.

"We can send it tomorrow," the volunteer said.

"Read me the last line."

She listened, then dictated a different ending. There had been trouble with the roof, the staff were repairing it, and June should wait for a message before arranging another journey. She did not describe the creature on the mattress.

After the volunteer left, Kai asked whether she wanted to add anything for June separately.

"Already did. She gets the part about the ceiling. Elise gets to know I wasn't hurt. Both are true."

Nia watched Beck helping carry a clean mattress through the doors.

"I don't want her looking for somewhere else to go every time something happens here."

"She knows where you are."

"Yes." Nia settled the sweater over her knees. "I want to keep it that way."

The watch kept someone outside the kitchen while Inez and Beck worked. They had missed the yard's planned departure, so another crew took the repaired stretcher to collect the waiting patient. Rook sent a guard with them. Kai heard the arrangements rather than watching the door for a rescuer who might not come.

By late afternoon, the unbroken part of the ward was ready. The beds nearest the damaged ceiling stayed empty. Kai was transferred back to his own bed beside Nia, now farther from the outside wall.

Tomas put the cup within reach. Kai drank and slept until the smell of supper woke him.

***

Rook brought the core after the evening meal.

She did not carry it loose. A shallow steel dish sat inside a larger bowl, covered with a kitchen lid. She set the bowl on a counter before coming to Kai's bed.

"Sana said you've handled these."

Kai looked from the bowl to her.

"Badly, the first time. Don't bring it closer yet."

She stopped where she was.

"There's one in each body. We usually trade them to crews that can use them. This one came from the creature that fell through the ceiling. You got us to check above that door before it dropped."

"Why give it to me?"

"Because Sana asked what I was going to do with it, and I asked what you might do with it. I haven't promised it to anyone."

Tomas came over. Kai described the first contact, including the hand locking around the core and the heat spreading after he had tried to stop. He kept the account short, but not short enough to leave out the blood.

Rook looked back at the covered bowl.

"Then you shouldn't sleep with it beside you."

"I don't want to."

He asked to see it from where it stood. Tomas watched his face while Rook lifted the lid.

The dark piece in the dish was smaller than his first core, perhaps half the size of a pea. A pale thread lay within it. He could not see a blue lattice from the bed, but that was no assurance of what a closer look might reveal.

He felt a faint tug near the old path at his wrist. When he turned his attention away, he could no longer pick it out from the rest of his arm.

"Cover it," he said.

Rook replaced the lid. The metal did not noticeably change anything in him. He asked her to take the bowl to the far counter, and the faint sensation was gone by the time she got there.

"I've learned to start something smaller," he told Tomas. "And stop before it gets up my arm. But that was with Sana's light. I don't know whether it will be enough for this."

"Then Sayegh hears that before it comes back."

"Yes. And Mara, if she can get here."

Rook offered to keep the bowl in a cupboard in the watchroom. No one else would take it out without asking her. The door and lid were for keeping hands away, she said, not containing anything she understood.

Kai agreed.

After she left, Sana came to collect her spear from beside the cupboard. She had washed the shaft, but a dark stain remained beneath the blade.

"Rook's being fair," she said. "We got the credit. You don't need to argue against a share."

"The credit?"

"For both kills. The three of us who fought."

She tapped beside her eye, indicating a window only she could see.

Kai had heard no chime and seen no reward. Sana and the others had been counted; Rook was offering him a share anyway.

He looked toward the watchroom instead.

"Tell Rook I'd like her to keep it for me," he said. "I'm not ready to use it tonight."

Sana took up her spear.

"It'll still be there tomorrow."