Asha Gould's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Her patient slept. Asha stood in the triage shelter doorway and counted the hours she had left. The heir was three kilometers east, burning. The courier would come at dusk expecting supplies she no longer had. She could not walk off the rotation — her uncle had made that plain — and she could not send nothing. She needed a body at the heir's bedside who could hold a fever without her bag. She found the carpenter behind the shelter, planing a warped panel across two sawhorses. Lira Gosse had built this place alone and reminded everyone of it once a week. She did not look up when Asha's shadow fell across the wood. "I need the east wall opened," Asha said. "Tonight. A gap wide enough for a stretcher, sealed again by dawn." Lira set the plane down. "You want me to cut my own shelter." "I want a door my uncle didn't put a guard on." Lira looked at her for a long moment. Sawdust stuck to her wrist. "Who's going through it?" "Not me. A patient coming in. And an inspector going out with a message." "I work alone." "Then work alone on my wall. I'll owe you the debt, not share it." Lira picked the plane up again. "Dusk. One cut. I reseal it before the watch changes." Asha found the inspector at the low, plated house the family used for records — Dex Farrow, broad and blond, measuring a door frame that did not need measuring. He had come up from the rear camps that morning to sign off on the plating. He owed her nothing. He also owed her uncle nothing, which was the part that mattered. "I need a letter carried east," she said. "To a fever patient. Not our side." He clipped the tool to his belt. "You're asking the wrong man." "I'm asking the only man leaving before dark who isn't one of ours." He studied her wrist, the tattoo there, and did not ask. "What's in the letter?" "Instructions. Cold cloths at the groin and neck. Quarter rations of water every ten minutes. Strip him. No blankets, whatever he says. It will hold him two days. Maybe three." "No medicine?" "No medicine. Just hands that know what to do." Dex thought about it. "I deliver it. I don't wait for a reply." "That's all I need." She wrote it fast at the record table. She sealed it with wax and no name. Dex tucked it inside his vest and left through the front gate as an inspector should, waved through by the same guard who would have stopped her. At dusk Lira cut the wall. Asha stayed on rotation. The heir would live two more days on cloth and water and a stranger's steady hands. Two days was not three. She had bought time she did not know how to spend.