Asha Gould was sorting gauze in the aid tent when her uncle's shadow fell across the flap. He was the hardliner in her family, the one who counted names in and out of the front like coins. He held a slip of paper between two fingers. On it was the name of the wounded boy she had treated last week — the boy from the other side, the one with the gut wound who looked like her cousin. "You logged him as ours," her uncle said. "He isn't ours." Asha kept folding. Her medical bag sat open on the cot, its silver clasps catching the lamp. The tattoo on her wrist showed above the cuff — the rival family's emblem, dark as a bruise. She did not cover it. Covering it now would be an answer. "He was bleeding out," she said. "I sorted him after." "You sorted him wrong on purpose." He stepped inside. "Two more days of this and I pull you off the line. You'll sit in the compound until the war ends. No satchel. No radio. No cease-fire channel." She understood what he was really saying. If he pulled her back, she would never reach the heir. The heir of the rival family lay wounded three kilometers east, and she had spent six months building the quiet road to his bedside. Marriage into that bloodline was the only ending she wanted. Her uncle could close that road in an afternoon. She set down the gauze. "Then let me prove I'm ours. Give me a job only ours would take." He watched her. "Triage rotation at the family camp," she said. "Two weeks. I'll leave the front. You'll see who I treat and who I don't." It was the offer of a leash, and he took it. He liked leashes. "Two weeks," he said. "You keep the bag. You lose the channel." He went out. Asha sat down on the cot. Her hands started shaking, which annoyed her, so she pressed them flat against her yoga mat where it lay rolled at her feet. She unrolled it on the tent floor and knelt on it and breathed until the shaking stopped. She had bought two weeks. She had lost the cease-fire channel. The heir would go untreated by her hands, and someone else's hands were not steady enough. The tent flap moved. A courier stood there — wiry, shaved head, bright orange satchel across his chest. She knew him by reputation, and by rule she was supposed to know him as an enemy. He held out a letter with the wrong name on it. "Delivered to you by mistake," he said, and did not blink. She took it. The seal was the rival family's. Her uncle was already fifty steps away. She broke the seal.

Asha read the letter twice, then burned it in the lamp. The heir was worse. His fever had climbed. The rival family's second wanted her at his bedside within three days, and had listed what he needed from her bag: two ampoules of the broad antifever, the clotting foam, the last patch of skin-graft mesh. She had exactly that much. She had been saving it for him. She closed the medsatchel and set it under the cot. The purple leather caught the lamp, its silver clasps warm to the touch. Two weeks at the family camp. Three days to slip east. She could do it. She did not get a full hour. A shout came from the shelter across the yard — the flat-topped one built of funguswood, where triage waited. Boots pounded the packed dirt. Asha grabbed the bag and ran. Inside, two of her cousins were laying a fighter on the table. He was one of theirs. Shrapnel had opened his thigh from knee to hip. The femoral was nicked, not cut. He was pale and going gray. On the floor beside him someone had dropped a child's plush deer, lavender fur soaked dark at one hoof — his daughter's, she guessed. He had been carrying it. Her cousin looked up. "Do what you can." Asha opened the satchel. She saw the ampoules. She saw the foam. She saw the mesh. She saw the heir dying three kilometers east on a fever she had promised to break. She knew the arithmetic before she finished the thought. The man on the table would bleed out in twelve minutes. The heir would last three days on someone else's worse hands. One patient was in front of her. One was not. She used the foam on the femoral. She used both ampoules to hold the fever the wound would bring. She laid the mesh over the open thigh and sealed it. Her hands did not shake this time. She watched the color come back into his mouth. When he was breathing even, she stepped outside. The yard smelled of woodsmoke and iron. She set the empty satchel on a crate and pressed her palms flat against the funguswood wall until her arms stopped wanting to swing. A potted plant sat by the shelter door, indigo, four small open mouths among its leaves. Someone's idea of decoration. It looked like it was screaming. She understood. She had nothing left to bring the heir. Not the antifever. Not the foam. Not the mesh. The letter had named exactly what she'd just spent. She picked up the plush deer from where it had fallen and set it on the crate beside the empty bag. Then she went back inside to watch her patient breathe, and to decide what she would say when the courier came again.

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.