Paxa Sel set her heavy leather medicine chest on the first step of the eastern air-flow turret, unstrapping the brass buckles with the unrushed, careful calm that had steadied dozens of panicked patients during winter cave-ins. She was thirty-six years old, with sharp, observant dark eyes, grey-streaked black hair cropped short at her jawline. The steady, capable hands of a surgeon who spent her life setting fractured bones and sewing torn flesh. Beside her sat her travelling satchel, filled with rolled linen bandages, willow-bark tinctures, and two tuned bronze pitch pipes she used to test ear damage.
She didn’t look at Sergeant Kroll or the spear guards standing ten paces away. She looked only at Kezra Venn. Paxa Sel had spent twelve years working the mining camps and quarry roadstations of the Spine before joining Kezra’s expedition. She had seen every variety of trauma that rock and iron could inflict upon human bone, but more importantly, she understood the strange, insidious sickness of class progression. She had treated mappers whose hands shook with permanent tremors from over-activating high-scale parcels, scouts whose lungs were scarred by toxic gas chimney pipes, and warriors whose joints were fused by poorly managed cooldown recoils.
