Harlen's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The street stayed quiet. Inside the ruin, the woman's breathing had turned wet. Harlen crouched beside her and lifted her jacket. The break in her arm had pushed bone against skin. Blood soaked the brick under her hip from a wound he had not seen before. "She's bleeding out," he said. Elina dropped down beside them. Her wings folded tight against her back, colored light shrinking on the wall. She pressed two fingers to the woman's neck. "Fast and thin," she said. "Find cloth. Something straight for the arm." Harlen went. He tore through the ruin room by room. A collapsed kitchen. A back office with a rotted desk. He kicked the desk apart and pulled a drawer slat free. Straight enough. In a closet he found a stiff curtain and ripped it into strips with his teeth and hands. Elina worked the other side of the building. She came back with a plastic jug half full of stale water and a length of copper pipe. They knelt together over the woman. "Hold her shoulder," Elina said. Harlen braced her. Elina set the arm. The woman screamed once and then went quiet in a way he did not like. They splinted with the slat and the pipe. They packed the hip wound with curtain cloth and tied it tight. The bleeding slowed. Then it kept going. Harlen watched her face gray out. He had killed things all morning. He could not stop this. "Use the panel," he said. "The one that fixed you." "I don't have it." Elina's voice stayed flat. "It's at the camp." "Then we carry her." "She won't make the walk." The woman's hand found Harlen's wrist again. Weaker this time. Her mouth moved. No sound. Her fingers loosened and slid off. Elina held two fingers to her neck for a long moment and took them away. Harlen sat back against the brick. His collarbone throbbed where the rig had burned him. He looked at his hands. Dust in every crease. Blood not his own. "How many people at your camp," he said. "Twenty four. Children. Old ones. Fourteen who can fight." "And how many Vael in this town alone." "More than we killed." He had counted eighteen kills as his own goal. He had thought that number meant something. He looked at the dead woman and understood it did not. There were holes under every street. There would be another town, and another after that. "I can't do this one at a time forever," he said. Elina waited. "Take me to your camp," Harlen said. "I'm in." Elina nodded once. She stood and offered her hand. He took it. Behind her, the stained glass wings caught the light through the broken roof and threw red across the woman's face. They left her covered under the curtain, and walked out into the street together.