Paxa Sel was already moving before Kezra’s forehead could touch the stone.
With the lightning reflexes of an upland physician who had caught a dozen falling miners, Paxa hooked both arms under Kezra’s armpits. That turned on her left heel to absorb the ninety-pound girl’s weight against her own hip.
Paxa lowered Kezra smoothly onto the double-folded wool blanket beneath the shade-tarp. She right away raised Kezra’s feet on a timber baulk to force blood back toward her brain cortex.
“Fellis! Canteen!” Paxa snapped, her fingers already locked onto Kezra’s neck-artery pulse.
Fellis Dain scrambled across the flags, dropping to his knees beside the blanket and uncorking the wooden canteen of salted mint infusion.
Kezra lay motionless, her face as pale as skimmed milk, cold sweat beading along her temples and upper lip. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Her slender forearms and thigh muscles twitched with reflex, rhythmic fine-motor tremors. The clear body signed name of severe neuro-blood-vessel shock.
The twenty minutes that followed the collapse were a masterclass in upland emergency medicine.
Paxa Sel didn’t panic. She didn’t shout or shake Kezra’s shoulders. Working with the calm, careful smooth speed of a physician who had managed dozens of traumatic injuries in the mining camps, Paxa loosened Kezra’s collar, checked her airway. Then she kept a nonstop, light squeezing on the neck-artery pulse.
