Georgianna grasped the side of the open door and hauled herself up into the car at the end of Medic’s Way. Inside, patients who needed more permanent care could get more peace than the comings and goings of the other cars. The lamps were turned low, and it took her a moment to locate the slim girl kneeling on the floor at the end of the car. She was bent over an unconscious man on a bed.
Georgianna held the papers under a nearby lamp and flipped through to the man’s notes, reading them quickly. Out of all the protocols required on Medics’ Way, the notes were the one Georgianna found hardest to complete. She was great at working in an emergency and even figuring out what to do if they didn’t have the correct supplies, but by the time she remembered to make her notes for the next medic on shift, she’d usually forgotten what she’d done throughout the day. Luckily, where she failed, Lacie was brilliant at keeping track. Maybe it was a natural attention to detail, or perhaps an effect of living with Beck, who had notes everywhere. Either way, the girl was a wonder at helping her keep everything up to date.
“He spiked another fever,” Lacie muttered, her wide blue eyes fixed on Georgianna through the murk of the low lamplight. “Miss Oaks gave him something to help him sleep.”
Georgianna lifted her head, glancing away from the notes for a second. Lacie’s round face gazed fretfully at her, her long, red hair pulled back and braided down between her tiny shoulders. The girl was much smaller than most of her age, an almost boyish frame that had yet to blossom fully with the flowers of her gender.
“How does he feel now?”
For a moment, Lacie hesitated. Her hand hovered above his forehead for a few seconds before she pushed back a fringe of unkept curls and placed the back against his pale skin. Georgianna found it sweet how Lacie could now dress wounds with relative ease yet still felt nervous checking a temperature.
“A bit better,” she murmured, looking to Georgianna for confirmation.
She made her way over and, careful not to place her hand down too quickly and risk waking him, she pressed her skin against his own.
“Yeah, feels like it’s going down,” she agreed.
She glanced at the wound Lacie was redressing, a nsiloq mark half uncovered, red and sore. Georgianna frowned. She felt a twinge of sadness every time she saw the young man, Jacob. From what she knew, Jacob had been sold as a drysta, a slave to an Adveni, not long after the Adveni arrival, and as a young teenager had been submitted to systematic abuse. She had seen a lot of torture over the years, she had healed a lot of different wounds, but this young man was different.
Jacob Stone was barely twenty-one years old, and yet he’d been beaten, whipped, and given five different nsiloq marks, a pattern drawn into the flesh by a laser of Adveni design. Every Adveni had a nsiloq, a test to prove themselves ready for adulthood. Georgianna knew it hurt more than anything, and she couldn’t imagine how the young man had endured five before he snapped and made a run for his freedom.
It wasn’t common for Veniche to be given a mark, not that Georgianna had seen. She’d heard stories whispered amongst the Belsa that the Adveni sometimes used the nsiloq to torture on an invisible setting. It caused the same pain and brought the same screamed confessions, but left no trace of ever being used.
That was not the case with Jacob. Every design stood bright on his flesh. Swerving lines of blue over his calf, a geometric pattern in red on the front of his shoulder, circles and spikes in red and blue on his torso, stretched over his ribs. The red designs reminded her of burned flesh when it scarred. The blue marks, on the other hand, shone in his skin. The nsiloq laser didn’t put ink into the skin the way Veniche marks did. It was molecular, or so she had been told during one of her shifts behind the bar at Crisco, where she worked, by a particularly drunk Adveni. The laser targeted the cells and changed their design, creating a change of colour in the skin. She hadn’t really understood, not having had the technology to study the building blocks of the body, but she couldn’t deny that the effect was beautiful. Well, it was beautiful when it wasn’t forced on a young drysta because his owner wanted to hear him scream.
Reaching out, she kept her hand against Lacie’s, stopping the girl from re-bandaging the most recent mark. Against his almost ghost-like flesh, the design was an angry, dark red, the lowest setting on the nsiloq laser. The design was shaky, unlike the smooth lines of an Adveni nsiloq, and it was clear that Jacob had been held down while it was administered, probably writhing and begging to be released. Georgianna frowned and leaned closer. It wasn’t bleeding; the laser didn’t produce blood, but it was certainly causing the young man a lot of pain, even weeks after its application.
“Leave it open a while,” she instructed.
“But, but it hurts him!” Lacie complained, looking desperately up at the older woman. Georgianna released Lacie’s hand and rubbed her fingers into her eyes.
She wanted to be kind to Jacob and leave Lacie to wrap the wound, she wanted to be nice to all the patients that came through the Way, but she knew that even if she had to be the bad guy, it would help them more in the end.
“Just a short while, I promise.”
Lacie frowned, looking between Georgianna and the unconscious Jacob before nodding and undoing the bandage she’d been wrapping over the mark.
Checking behind her to make sure there wasn’t a patient in the bed, Georgianna slid down onto it, dumping her bag next to her and slipping the strap from her shoulder. Lacie had been with her, training to be a medic, for almost a year. Most Veniche started training for their profession by their twelfth birthday, but Lacie’s capture by the Adveni and her years spent as a drysta meant that, by Veniche traditions, she was a long way behind.
Beck Casey, the leader and marshall of the Belsa, had found Lacie, fourteen at the time, beaten half to death and starving in a back alley of the Oprust district. It had taken quite a bit of coercion, Georgianna had heard, getting Lacie to trust him enough to carry her down to the Way for treatment. Since that day he’d treated the girl like she was his own, and from what Georgianna saw between them, Lacie loved him as a father in return.
While the going had been tough in the beginning, earning the trust of a skittish young woman, she could not have asked for a more attentive student. Then again, it wasn’t as if she had taken a student before. She didn’t know exactly how well Lacie should be doing at this point. She’d been only sixteen when the Adveni invaded, only recently accepted as an adult within the Kahle herself, not in the position to take on a new trainee. Now, at twenty-six, Georgianna had yet to take on a new medic. She didn’t feel safe bringing a young student down to the Belsa territory with her, and she couldn’t have expected the student’s parents to be okay with her affiliations: not until Beck had asked her to help Lacie in exchange for a few coins a week.
They managed about twenty minutes before Lacie broke down and begged that they dress Jacob’s wound. Georgianna, unable to watch the forlorn look on the girl’s innocent face any longer, nodded and allowed Lacie to redress the nsiloq mark. She didn’t know what dressing or keeping it open would do, it wasn’t often that she treated nsiloq marks. The Adveni had their own medics, their own systems, not to mention that they’d been dealing with the marks for decades, maybe even longer.
When the Adveni had arrived on Os-Veruh, in their big, impressive ships and with their fancy technology, it had been like something out of the stories her father used to tell her as a child. Almost everyone knew the story of the meteor and the floating ships, how they left before Os-Veruh’s seasons changed. As her father also told stories about talking coyotes and bears, however, she had begun to wonder about the truth in the history as it had been described to her. Her father said that the story had been passed from one generation to the next for over five hundred years, but even as a child Georgianna had known far too much about how a story changed with each telling.
It had been just after her sixteenth birthday when they arrived. Scouts from within the Kahle tribe had travelled ahead to check the trail as they did every season, and returned with news that there were large shining clouds above Adlai. The tribe had travelled onward, wanting to see the phenomenon. When they arrived, it had seemed like all of her father’s stories had come true. The Adveni, as they called themselves, used to call Os-Veruh home. Having found another planet to inhabit after leaving in one of the ships, they had flourished, but the desire to return to their home planet had always been great. Scouts had been sent, and upon seeing that their home world remained, they had come back, and they planned to stay.
Now—looking at the injuries of the young man across from her, seeing the suffering of the people within the compound every time she visited, forced to live by the foreigners’ laws and serve their whims, living in the tattered remains of what had once been a challenging but understandable life for a Veniche—Georgianna wished they had never returned at all.
***
Sitting in front of a patient from the camps who had come in after a robbery, Georgianna had finished stitching the wound closed and smeared the yellow paste of the lutiner flower sparingly over it to speed recovery.
Unfortunately, robberies and attacks were more common now than they used to be, especially in the camps, where the Adveni presence was less pronounced. It wasn’t as easy to hunt while in one place with so many others. The trail had been much easier for hunting, and by the time the different tribes reached Adlai for the heat, they had enough stores to keep most families relatively comfortable. There had always been robberies of course, by those who moved alone instead of with a tribe, or those who had been banished for committing a crime, but these days they seemed to happen every other day—more often in fact. As times became harder, more people began only looking out for themselves.
“I hope it’s okay that I came down,” Kael said quietly.
Georgianna glanced up from the bandage as she wound it tightly around his arm.
“Of course it is.”
“I wouldn’t normally. Keep to myself, you know? Don’t like a lot of trouble, but this wouldn’t stop bleeding and…”
Tying one end of the bandage to the other, Georgianna patted him lightly on the shoulder.
“There’s no need to explain,” she smiled. “You needed help.”
Kael nodded as she turned away to note down his visit.
Georgianna had left Lacie in the end car with a collection of hyliha leaves while she treated him. While the leaves weren’t useful for much more than easing a heat rash, Georgianna had given them to the young girl to practise making paste out of the herbs that could be collected. Hyliha trees grew everywhere, having adapted to the planet’s altered seasons, so the leaves were ideal for practising on before moving on to some of the rarer, more useful substances.
“I don’t have much,” he mumbled shyly as Georgianna scribbled her notes.
Looking up, Georgianna glanced over her shoulder at the man and finally turned around to face him:
“Kael, don’t…”
“I will make good!” he interjected before Georgianna could speak further. “I have some pelts drying. I’ll bring one down!”
“That is far too much for a simple cut, especially when you already lost so much in gaining the wound.”
Kael stared down at his knees, dragging his teeth over his lip worriedly. She sighed. She hated taking from people who couldn’t afford it. However, it wasn’t her supplies that she was using up down here. While she was happy to do the work for a bowl of stew or some other kindness that families could afford, the Belsa needed things they could use.
“Look,” she blurted quickly. “I’m going to have to see you in a couple days anyway, to make sure that’s healing the way it should, and take out the stitches. So, how about we trade then?”
Kael looked up, finally meeting her gaze. He nodded gratefully.
Georgianna returned to the last car once Kael had said his goodbyes and set off along the tunnel. She looked in to find Lacie keeping watch over Jacob, making her own notes in a small book. Either Lacie hadn’t realised, or the two were keeping an easy silence, but Jacob was awake.
“How’re you feeling?” Georgianna asked, moving further inside.
Lacie lifted her head, her gaze shifting to Georgianna before she looked at Jacob. He was curled in the corner of his bed, looking far younger than he was. The moment Georgianna had spoken, however, his expression contorted in panic. His wide brown eyes darted around the car, and he quickly pushed himself up. Pressing his back against the end of the bed, he hunched over his knees, pulling them tight to his chest.
She took a step back, chewing on her bottom lip. Even Lacie, who had been the closest to Jacob since his arrival, moved away from him, giving the terrified young man as much space as she could.
“I’m sorry, Jacob. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Jacob shook his head violently, but didn’t say a word.
With a single glance from Lacie, she took another step back.
“I’ll… I’ll be in the other car if you need me.”
Lacie placed her notes next to her knee, but she didn’t even look at Jacob or Georgianna again. She stared at her feet, hands clasped in her lap, perfectly still.
Georgianna climbed down from the car, wishing that every injury was as easily cured as Kael’s.
YOU ARE READING
Dead and Buryd
Ficção Científica"You are an inmate, not a medic. You should get used to that." On the planet Os-Veruh, the native Veniche have endured a decade under the oppressive rule of a race of invaders, the Adveni. When Georgianna Lennox, a Veniche medic, discovers her child...
