Doma Reel stood over the corner of the table, her arms crossed over her chest, watching Len adjust the rawhide knot at his hip. She didn’t look at the bell. Her dark, experienced eyes were fixed entirely on the boy’s left arm.
The sleeve of his brown courier coat was rolled up past the elbow, pinned in place with a copper safety needle-point arrow. Beneath it, the three layers of linen wrap that Doma had applied that morning were soaked through with dark, rusted blood and yellow serum, stiff as dried rawhide against the swollen flesh. A faint, sickening smell of nearby tissue fever rose from the cloth. Not the foul stench of black flesh-rot, but the sharp, hot reek of strained tendons and deep bone-skin trauma.
“Take off the coat, Len,” Doma said, her tone leaving no room for negotiation.
Len paused, his right hand resting on the handle of his sounding pole. “Doma, we have forty minutes before the shift bells—”
“I said take off the coat,” she interrupted. She stepped forward and reaching for the brass buttons at his collar with her blunt, calloused fingers. “You’ve been walking for five days with an open puncture. You hauled yourself out of the Orchard sump by one heel. You took the shock of an unbolted check plate on that wrist. If I let you climb the Star tower ridge with that arm hanging loose, the radius will snap like a dry pine twig the first time you grab a…
