During the midday rest by the mounting block, while Mina checked the spring-ash wrap over his left ribs, Seyun thought about Pera’s question. Why are you guessing what we carry before you look at our feet?
For months, whenever he had watched Mina work in a clinic or a mountain shed, he had admired how she never diagnosed a patient from across the room based on who was groaning the loudest. A man shouting at the top of his lungs always had air in his windpipe. The patient sitting silently on a stool with white fingernails and shallow collar-breathing was the one whose lungs were failing. Mina spent her first half-breath looking at physical facts that couldn’t be easily faked—the sink of a heel, the tension of a thumb tendon, the rhythm of an exhale—and when she needed to know more, she asked a plain one-word question.
Seyun sat on the western mounting block during the midday break with a bowl of Mother Renn’s hot barley soup between his hands. He watched Mina and her new sixteen-year-old apprentice Halin check tester Tov’s wrist after the barrier knockdown.
Tov insisted three times that the falling plank hadn’t touched his head. Even so, Mina didn’t take his word for it, nor did she assume he was concussed. She spent five quiet seconds looking at the size of his pupils in the noon light, checked how evenly his heels settled. Just then, he stood up. Then he felt the tension of the tendon…
