Doma Reel’s hands were covered in dark, sticky blood to the wrists. But her fingers moved with the steady, unrushed certainty of a woman who had dressed twenty years of heavy-duty amputations in the tram tunnels.
She had pulled out three jagged fragments of flattened lead from Bram Ash’s chest muscle. She used a pair of curved blacksmith’s pincers she had sterilized in the glowing charcoal of the fire bowl. Each fragment had been dropped into a shallow pewter dish on the corner of the flour bench with a sharp, heavy ping. The main musket ball had torn fully through his upper torso. That left an exit wound the size of an apple beneath the right shoulder blade. But the shattered fragments of the acromion bone were crushed into white gravel that ground against the exposed upper-arm nerve web with every breath.
With a small silver-plated spoon probe, Doma carefully scraped the margins of the broken bone bed. She worked step by step. She dragged out flakes of scorched wool, black grains of fouling from the gunpowder charge, and tiny splinters of limestone grit that had entered the wound when Bram struck the cobblestones during the raid. Every pass of the metal spoon brought fresh dark-blood slow leak, but she didn’t flinch. She wiped the instrument clean against a pad of boiled linen before probing deeper into the cavity.
