Ivara Quill didn’t let her hand tremble as the calcium clicked back beneath the torn deep skin.
It was an incomplete, brutal reduction. She knew the mechanics of human anatomy too well to pretend otherwise. Without orthopedic traction screws and an assistant to hold the counter-pull, the jagged ends of the radius were overlapping by half an inch, the torn fibers of the pronator teres pinched between the rough calcium faces like shredded wool in an iron clamp. The jagged edges had ground away the bone-skin margins. That left tiny chips of bone floating within the bloody blood bruise that was already swelling the forearm to twice its natural girth.
But the bone was back inside the sleeve of muscle.
The sharp spear of the radius was no longer exposed to the sulfur mist and the fungal spores drifting off the stale drainage water chute. The acute, crushing tension on the median nerve was partially relieved. The mottled, cyanotic hue of Len’s fingernails softened into a dull, lifeless slate-gray as a trickle of blood found its way back into the deep palmar arch. The wrist blood vessel remained pulseless under her tourniquet. But the collateral breath flow through the inner-bone branches was enough to prevent immediate tissue black rot.
