MCAH Online

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      “It’s his neck,” Hirianthial said from the door.
      “His what?” Jarysh said as the monitor began to sound.
      “His neck hurts,” Hirianthial said, coming closer to the bed, then added, “And his back.”
      “He’s running a little hotter than normal,” one of the healers-assist said.
      “Angels, spare me another spinal infection,” Jarysh said with a moan.
      “If that’s what it is,” one of the assistants said.
      “We just had a bout of it,” the other said.
      “Too soon to tell,” the first said.
      Hirianthial glanced at the monitors, eyes snagging on temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate. It had been long enough since he’d done a pediatric round that while he could sense the levels were off he couldn’t remember what normal levels were for Pelted children that age. “What kind of spinal infection have you been having lately?”
      “We just had a strain of Ackman’s off Karaka’Ana, one we’ve never seen before” Jarysh said, ears flattened. “The port here brings a lot of offworld mutations, and a lot of them latch onto vectors we haven’t blocked off yet.”
      Hirianthial reached for the child’s foot and hesitated over it, then grasped it firmly, skin to fur. “You took a tap?” he asked past the sudden feeling that his neck was too stiff to move.
      “This morning. Negative for virus or bacteria,” Jarysh said. “But—”
      “It might be too early to tell,” one of the assists said.
      “It’s not too early for him to tell,” Hirianthial said. “Take another one.”
      “But—”
      “Do what he says,” Jarysh said.
      “It won’t be wasted,” Hirianthial said.
      The assist shrugged and left. The baby continued to wail. Jarysh sighed and pulled a stool over, sat. “You might as well get one for yourself,” he said.
      Hirianthial nodded and did so, watching the monitors. “One of your bad luck runs?” he asked.
      “Yeah,” Jarysh said, shoulders slumped. “It’s virulent like Chatcaava have talons. I thought we’d seen the last of it two days ago. Our best antibiotics seem useless against it, and we’ve wasted a lot of drugs on trying to keep these kids alive. It hasn’t been working. The stuff just eats into the pia mater like it’s going through sponge cake. The arachnoid webs swell up with the byproducts and eventually shut down the nerves.”
      Hirianthial glanced at the child. “You have no pharmacologists to run up a new drug strain?”
      “We’ve never had any on staff,” Jarysh said. “We send samples to off-site labs, but none of our regulars have been able to get back to us with a specific.”
      Hirianthial watched the vitals fluctuate. The Harat-Shar followed his gaze and let out a long breath. Then, “This is the earliest we’ve ever caught one. Maybe it’ll be enough. If he’s got it, of course.”
      The assist returned with a pump and needle for the spinal tap. Some tests could be done by sensitive enough halo-arches, but this hospital didn’t appear to have any at all. He didn’t bother to ask why not: it didn’t matter why a facility didn’t have the best equipment. What mattered was the sample the healer-assist drew and the infection Hirianthial knew would be lurking in it.
      During the following twenty minutes, Jarysh fidgeted and Hirianthial waited, eyes half-closed. The assist returned and said, “It’s positive. But it’s not as bad as the last cases. Yet.”
      “Damn thing,” Jarysh said, jumping to his feet. “Get the antibiotics.”
      “Right.”
      The Harat-Shar began to pace. “We caught the vector… can you believe it was a honey shipment that ended up in candy? We stopped the spread and finished all the cases. This was supposed to be over.”
      “I suppose you don’t have a Medimage platform,” Hirianthial said. A platform of sufficient complexity would allow them to pinpoint the infection and treat it cell-by-cell, if necessary.
      “Not anymore,” Jarysh said, tail lashing.
      All the years of his life began to drag on his joints. Hirianthial asked, “Anymore?”
      “Our service contract ran out,” Jarysh said. “And of course, with no surgeons there was no point repairing the thing. Surgery was never our specialty anyhow… that’s what the acute care center in Kherdiwen’s for.” The man stopped pacing to stare as the assist arrived with the AAP and injected the child’s stiff neck with it. “Damn.”
      The pain beating against his shields was already beginning to ebb—not because it had retreated, but because the child was losing the strength to project it.
      Jarysh returned to the stool, drooping. “You don’t have to stay.”
      “I know,” Hirianthial said. “How many more of these do you have?”
      “We’re not sure. It wasn’t something we were equipped to handle. We usually only work with chronic diseases. This was just so unexpected.”
      “Why not move them to the Kherdiwen center, then?” Hirianthial asked.
      Jarysh shrugged. “No beds for it.” He sighed. “It’s complicated.”
      “Explain it to me, then,” Hirianthial said. When the Harat-Shar glanced at the monitors, the Eldritch gentled his voice. “We’ll be here a while.”
      “All right,” Jarysh said, tail twitching. “It’s like this….”

      “A mechanic?” Reese asked, eyeing the contract. “You’re going to be a mechanic?”
      “A very junior one, and only for the time we’re here,” Sascha said. “If I had the time I’d be studying engineering, but since I don’t I’ll settle for the hands-on stuff.”
      “Huh,” Reese said. “That’s practical.” She read the fine print, trying to catch anything that might twist Sascha up into knots. “This is for a lot of hours!”
      Sascha shrugged. “It’ll get me out of the house.”
      Reese glanced at him and decided not to ask. She returned to reading and said, “I didn’t know you were interested in engineering.”
      The Harat-Shar chuckled. “Neither did I until I actually started flying. It’s good to fly. It’s also good to be able to fix something you’re flying when it stops.”
      Reese leaned back in her chair to peer at the Harat-Shar. She’d come home exhausted and tried to slip into her room without anyone noticing only to find Sascha already there. Happily he didn’t harangue her about missing dinner again; instead, he’d presented a stack of paperwork for her to sign along with a small covered plate.
      “Engineering,” she said again. “You know, you could take remote classes.”
      “I guess,” Sascha said. “I hadn’t really thought about it until we touched down here.”
      “Well, think about it,” Reese said.
      “Classes take money, boss.”
      “Yeah, well, we’ll find the money,” Reese said, hiding her frustration. “Looks like Bryer’s got dock-work. That seems harmless enough.” She signed it along with Sascha’s. “Where’s Kis’eh’t?”
      “Kis’eh’t's taking the time off,” Sascha said. “She wants to learn to cook from my mother.”
      Reese laughed. “Well, more than one cook’s always good. That leaves Irine and Hirianthial.”
      “Don’t look at Irine’s,” Sascha said. “Just sign it.”
      “That bad, huh,” Reese said, hand hovering over the data tablet.
      “That good,” Sascha said, but the smile on his face didn’t touch his voice. “She’ll have fun. But you don’t want to know.”
      Of course, now that he put it that way, she did. But she flipped to the bottom of the contract and set her stylus on the line.
      And couldn’t sign.
      “Just do it,” Sascha said. “I read through it. It’s fine.”
      She wanted to, but she couldn’t. What if there was something in the contract that would tie Irine down? Her name would be on it, okaying it. Reese scrolled back up and started to read. Sascha pulled a chair up beside her with a sigh.
      “Well,” Reese said by the time she got to the end of it. “I guess this sort of thing is typical here.”
      “Yes,” Sascha said.
      “You’re right that I didn’t want to know about it,” Reese said, signing the bottom.
      “Yes,” Sascha agreed, this time with a hint of a grin.
      “I had no idea contracts like this could be so… detailed.”
      He shrugged. “It’s one thing to roll in the sheets for love and entertainment,” he said. “When you’re doing it for profit with strangers, you have to be very specific about what you will and won’t do.”
      “I guess so,” Reese said. “You’re sure she’ll have fun?”
      “Yes, captain. Really,” Sascha said. “And she’ll earn more than the rest of us combined, I’ll bet.”
      Reese sighed. “That just leaves—”
      “A moment of your time,” came Hirianthial’s baritone from the threshold.
      Reese stared at him, wondering if the exhaustion she heard in his voice was her imagination or not. “Uh, sure.”
      “I have a contract for you to sign.”
      “I have one here for you already… something with Irine and Sascha’s mother?”
      “This is an additional contract.”
      “Not too much more additional I hope,” Reese said. “This one’s already going to take up three hours of your day. You don’t want to run yourself ragged.”
      “No,” he said. She realized then part of her foreboding: his speech lacked its ‘my lady’ adornments and its indistinct evasions. What had stripped him down to bare words? He even handed her his data tablet without any of his courtly gestures, without bothering to set it down somewhere so they wouldn’t accidentally touch. Reese took it gingerly and started scanning. Her eyes caught first on the “mandatory dormitory stay,” lingered over the multiple shifts and glazed at the parts about acceptable punishments for unacceptable results.
      “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not signing this.”
      Sascha cleared his throat. “What did he do?”
      “I’m not giving you over as a slave to any hospital,” Reese said, ignoring Sascha. “I thought you said you didn’t trust the Harat-Shar with that much of yourself?”
      “I had the alternative explained to me,” Hirianthial said. “They’re having a healthcare crisis, one set off by too many free-man workers.”
      “We’re just visiting, Hirianthial. We’re not here to save the Harat-Shar. Even if we were, you’re one man and one man alone won’t be able to fix whatever social problems they’ve gotten involved in,” Reese said.
      “They’re children.”
      “Yeah, well, so am I from your perspective, but they’re adult enough for the rest of the Alliance—”
      Something about his eyes stopped her mid-sentence. “The patients,” he said, his voice very careful. “They’re children. Infants.”
      Reese blushed, torn between anger and embarrassment. “I don’t care if they’re saints and martyrs,” she said. “If I sign this, I’m giving you away completely.”
      “It’s my choice to make, is it not?” Hirianthial said. “Or have you now decided you really are in charge?”
      That stung. Reese said, “Hirianthial—”
      “I’m not yours to give away,” the Eldritch said. “Or isn’t that what your philosophy? Besides, it will take me out of your sight, which should please you.”
      Reese snatched the tablet and signed it with several angry jerks before tossing it to the end of the table. “There you go. Enjoy. Don’t come crying to me if it’s more than you can handle.”
      He didn’t speak—only faded from her door so quickly she wondered how someone with such pale skin and hair could vanish into the blue-violet dusk of the hallways.
      “You could have handled that better,” Sascha said, picking up the tablet and flipping through the dumped contract copies.
      “Hell with handling it better,” Reese said. “He got what he wanted. Isn’t that the point?”
      “This is… really intense,” Sascha said, skimming the text. “I hope this place isn’t abusive.”
      “It’s a hospital,” Reese said. “If they abuse him, they can just patch him back up afterwards.”
      The Harat-Shar’s ears flipped backward. “Boss, what’s with you? I’d swear you had bed-fleas, but you’re sleeping in a hammock.”
      “There’s nothing with me,” Reese said. Then sighed and added, “Nothing new, curse it all. Now get out of my sight, fluffy.”
      Sascha said, “It’s too late to rip that thing up, but you could at least apologize to him.”
      “I was just thinking he should apologize to me,” Reese said.
      Sascha paused at the door. “Well, check up on him, then. Make sure he’s not taking this whole ‘multiple shift’ thing too seriously.”
      “Why don’t you do that?”
      “Because I’m not the one who signed the papers,” he said. “Like it or not, you’re in charge.”
      “Then I get the right to delegate,” Reese said. “I hereby delegate the duty of making sure Hirianthial doesn’t work his sugar-white skin to rags to you.”
      The Harat-Shar shook his head. At least he left her alone with her bills and her questions: foremost being, what was she going to do for the next month or so? Everyone else had found something to occupy themselves. The only duties she had to occupy herself with were her worries.

All together now: Uh oh…

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