The technician tried to sit up when Tessa cut his sleeve.
“Leave it,” he said. “I can still use the arm.”
“You can use it better without hot metal in it.”
He looked down as though the injury belonged to someone who had taken his seat. A strip of casing had pierced the outer sleeve and caught beneath it. Tessa steadied his wrist, asked the receiving medic to hold the lamp, and worked the cloth away without pulling on the embedded fragment. His breath went shallow. She stopped long enough to explain what she was doing, then let him choose which hand would hold the edge of the blanket.
They were in a widened service landing now used as an inward triage point. The route to the surface remained marked, and the workers who could walk waited against the opposite wall for an escort. Tessa had asked for the landing because it was out of the electrical corridor and left room for a stretcher to turn. It was still a poor treatment room. Dust settled on everything uncovered. Every few minutes the lamp changed brightness when its bearer shifted.
The technician’s name was Evin. He gave his age and his usual medical details with the distracted fluency of someone answering a familiar form. When Tessa asked about numbness, he looked toward the downward stairs.
