The school’s charged recovery classroom smelled of damp clover, engine grease, and rainwater dripping through rusted corrugated roofing into fifty-five-gallon drums.
The receiving steward had accepted Luis’s four-unit portable medical cell once its transport work ended. It was now on the school ledger, covering the one-unit shortfall before the new measured salvage arrived. The classroom’s own boundary remained a paid ordinary environmental ward, not a healing field.
Evelyn Mercer sat on the edge of a canvas cot in the center of the swept classroom floor, her stockinged feet resting on an empty oats sack. Over her shoulders she wore a faded green quilt from Room Four at Candlewake, its binding frayed at the corners.
She held an enamel tin mug in both hands. The broth was pale chicken stock flavored with dried leeks from Gideon’s pantry, salted just enough to make her drink in measured swallows.
June stood ten feet away by the blanket trolley where the spare blankets were stacked. In her left hand she held a wooden hairbrush with half its bristles missing—the brush carried through forty miles of mud, two checkpoints, and weeks of fear. Her knuckles were white against the pine handle.
She took half a step forward.
