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Her Instruments, Book 1
Episode 12
Hirianthial swept forward but not in time to catch her. The moment her palms hit the floor plates, Reese gagged. He didn’t even pause to steel himself before pulling her up by an arm, and when she didn’t support herself on her wobbling legs he caught those up and heaved her into his arms for the short trip from the corridor to the bench in Kis’eh’t's lab. He didn’t have time to organize the impressions he got through their brief contact but all of them hurt. The moment he laid her down, she groaned and said, “I’m going to throw up.”
“I know,” he said, and found a waste container in time. He held her steady as she retched.
“Oogh,” she said, hanging onto the edge of the pail.
“Done?” Hirianthial asked, but gentler. He hadn’t expected to be able to see such a radical change in her skin, but the brown had lost most of its warmth in the short minutes between the collapse in the corridor and her transport to the bench. Seeing her so wrung out made him realize just how small she was. It wasn’t a thing one noticed while she was biting someone’s nose off with her words.
“I… I don’t know,” Reese said.
“That usually means ‘no,’” Hirianthial said, keeping his grip.
She rolled a dull blue eye back at his hand. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Not as much as—” he stopped as she dropped her head back into the container and paid attention to her aura this time, feeling his way over the spikes and static hiss. When she lifted her head, he said, “Now you’re done,” and helped her lie back on the bench.
The ship shook under them again and Reese tried to rise. He pressed her down with fingertips on her collarbone. “No.”
“Got to drive,” she said.
“No,” Hirianthial said again. “Where’s your first aid kit?”
“Don’t need—”
“Captain Eddings,” he said, using his sternest tone. “Every ship is supposed to have one. Where’s yours?”
She sighed. “Above the blue thing.”
The “blue thing” must refer to the chemical analysis machine, though the only blue on it was a stripe down the side. Hirianthial looked in the cabinet above it and found the kit along with a couple of blankets. He took them both down, covering her with one and folding the other into a makeshift pillow. “Now, how about the nearest source of water?”
“Water?” Reese asked weakly.
“Water,” Hirianthial agreed.
“Bathroom. Further down the hall. Turn left.”
“Right,” Hirianthial said. He lifted Allacazam from the floor and tucked him in next to Reese’s arm. “Neither of you move.”
In the cramped bathroom, Hirianthial washed his hands and avoided looking at himself in the tiny mirror. He hadn’t questioned his desire to become a doctor on fleeing his homeworld; whatever his original motive one could hardly find fault with the healing professions, and once he’d begun he’d found he loved the work. But moments like this, where he realized that taking care of someone provided a useful distraction from the wider view, he wondered just how noble it was to be a doctor. So much easier to think of the patient than wonder whether they’d be slaves in a few hours. So much more satisfying to treat someone’s sickness than to serve as their executioner. So much better to run to a good cause than to admit why one started running.
He chanced a look at himself and saw only a bland mask learned among the Eldritch and refined by the school of medicine. He could hide in it for the rest of his life and no one would ever guess. Not even irascible young human women with riding crop tongues.
Hirianthial returned to the clinic to find both patient and palliative alien where he’d left them. He sat next to Reese and slid his hand through her braids. He knew from sight they would be wiry and light, but somehow he still expected them to slide as smoothly as satin and as heavily as rope. The memories were still raw.
“I can lift my head without your help,” she said, dispelling the ghost.
“Hush and drink.”
She slurped at the cup, swished out her mouth and spat into the waste container three times before actually swallowing.
“That’s enough. You’re not ready for much more.”
She eyed him rebelliously, but he pressed her back onto the bench.
“Are you going to force me to keep pushing you down or will I have to tie you there?” he asked.
“If you keep touching me, will you eventually faint?” Reese asked.
“That would make me fairly useless as a doctor, don’t you think?” Hirianthial asked. Some of the notions Alliance citizens had cobbled together about his people would have been amusing had he not had to work past them so often in the past. He knew the reasons for the Veil of Secrecy decreed by Jerisa, the first Eldritch queen, but even he chafed at them sometimes and he considered himself a private man.
Hirianthial turned his back on Reese and opened the kit. Standard kits were packed with supplies sufficient to solve typical problems—bone breaks, bites, cuts, scrapes, basic infections—but didn’t contain any of the things he’d need for a solution to her problem. With his own kit in a Sendaine storage locker, he’d have to pray the quick fixes he had access to would tide her over until they reached Starbase Kappa. If they reached Starbase Kappa. Hirianthial prepared an ampoule of mellifleurin and said, “This will see you to the starbase if you follow my instructions about what you eat and when. Will you do that?”
“What’s the alternative?” Reese asked, watching him with a gloss of gray skepticism as he pressed the AAP to her side. She eyed the paper tab he offered her, but let him swab her tongue with it anyway.
“You vomit more and more often until I have to operate on you with—” He checked the kit. “—medical tape, paper cut-grade antiseptic and my boot knife.”
Her eyes lost their anger, though her gaze remained as intent. “You’re kidding, right?”
He ran a hand over her aura, feeling the tight wad of wrongness around the middle of her esophagus. “No.” He left his hand there, feeling the extent of the pressure on her chest as he slid the tab into the analysis unit. He was not surprised to find a large concentration of keliobacteria. Humanity’s determined march into space had inspired several thousand new variations on old microbiological foes, most of them more virulent than their Terran ancestors. He’d sewn up a few esophaguses as an intern, but never without surgeon’s tools… and while he couldn’t tell exactly when Reese’s esophagus would rupture the pressure under his hand suggested it would be soon.
If it did before they reached the starbase, she would die.
“Don’t make me do this with a knife,” he said. “I’d rather knock you unconscious and keep you that way until we get to Starbase Kappa than have to cut you open with something I use to trim my meat at supper.”
Reese blanched. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
The ship shivered beneath them again. Reese rolled her full lower lip between her teeth, then said, “At least find out what’s going on. I promise not to go anywhere, but if I don’t know what’s happening I’ll gnaw a hole through my arm.”
“That I can do, as long as you promise not to get up,” Hirianthial said. He leaned over and rested a hand on the comm but didn’t activate it. Her belligerence returned, flaring orange.
“You’re actually going to make me promise?”
“I have the feeling you keep your promises,” Hirianthial said.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you actually believe in personal honor and all that.”
Hirianthial said nothing. Personal honor had driven him to unpleasant ends, and discussing it wasn’t one of his favorite pass-times.
“Fine, fine, I promise. Now call!”
He depressed the button. “Clinic to the bridge.”
Ruptured esophagus? SRS BSNS. Do not read about it if you squick easily.
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