For fifteen minutes, the sunken service chute became a field surgery suspended between two hostile forces.
Paxa Sel worked with the cold, clockwork speed of an apothecary who had dressed fractures under fire in three country rebellions. She knelt in the dust beside the corporal’s shattered right leg, her shears cutting through the seam of his riding boot with decisive, rhythmic snaps of the carbon-steel blades.
“Kezra, take the heel,” Paxa commanded in a low, level voice. “Left hand under the calcaneus, right hand over the instep. When I count three, you apply steady, four-pound traction along the line of the shin. Don’t jerk. Don’t twist. Hold it dead straight until I tell you to ease.”
Kezra gripped the corporal’s boot heel. She felt the heat and violent swelling of the injured limb through the leather. The young soldier groaned, his fingers clawing into the fiery gravel, his eyes rolling back as his knuckles turned white.
“One. Two. Three. Pull,” Paxa said.
Kezra leaned her shoulders backward, applying her weight through her arms in a smooth, nonstop traction.
The displaced calf bone clicked softly as the bone surfaces realigned beneath the skin. The corporal gasped, a ragged, choking sob tearing from his chest. But the unnatural twenty-degree twist in his foot vanished, returning the limb to its natural axis.
