Mara woke in the yard office with her left forearm wrapped.
She did not remember being carried down the service stair. The Tern, the river road, the yard gate: all gone. She remembered the red light in the chamber’s windows, and Sera saying lit, and then she was lying on the cot in the yard office under two blankets, with her left arm in a sling across her chest and wrapped from wrist to elbow in clean white gauze.
The day board hung on the wall by the door. Tavin’s board, a slate where he chalked the day and the shift every morning. It said Day 9. And under it, in a different hand, Pell’s: late.
A woman was sitting on the stool beside the cot. Tall, brisk, her black hair cropped short as a soldier’s. A stranger, a guild doctor with the badge on her coat, nothing like the Low Brace clinic physician. She was writing in a notebook on her knee.
“You’re awake,” the doctor said. “Good.” Her eyes stayed on the notebook. “Burns across the left forearm. Second degree, most of it. Some third, on the inner wrist, where the cradle frame’s edge was.” She wrote something. “They’ll heal. They’ll scar. I won’t tell you otherwise.”
