The woman waiting for Neri’s splint fitting did not want anyone looking at her leg until she had finished her lunch.
Halden stopped beside the bed, accepted the ruling and moved the visitors to the next room.
“She’ll be easier after the beans,” he said.
“Pain?” Sera asked.
“Partly. Mostly she paid attention to the meal bell and wants the same courtesy from us.”
Iven carried the wrapped fitting through the doorway. He had expected a demonstration of need severe enough to overwhelm argument: a row of suffering bodies, the chief engineer pointing at them like marks in an account. Instead Hearth’s clinic had people eating, arguing, sleeping and insisting on the small powers they still possessed.
That made the heat pipes more important, not less.
Warmth ran along guarded channels beside the walls. The windows admitted light without a cold draft crossing the beds. A rack held clean linen above a drying coil. At the far end, a porter and a patient were negotiating whether walking to the courtyard counted as exercise if the patient intended to sit down as soon as she arrived.
