Chapter 12 Sharp Questions
Chapter 12 Sharp Questions
Becca had learned early in her career that the body never lied.
People lied. They edited and omitted and deflected with impressive creativity, particularly people who had been trained to do exactly that. But bruises told the truth about direction and force. Burns told the truth about source and temperature. Lacerations told the truth about angle and intent. The body kept an honest record of everything the mouth chose not to say.
She worked through the team in the order they presented themselves, which was itself information. Tessa first, self-contained and efficient, extending injured limbs with the minimum necessary cooperation. Then Jin, who submitted to the examination with the detached patience of someone accustomed to being studied. Soren, who catalogued his own injuries with clinical precision before she could ask. Leila, who winced once and apologized for it.
Rafe and Eric she saved for last. Not a conscious decision. Just the way it fell.
"Sit," she told Eric, pointing at the nearest table.
He sat. She ran through the standard checks, pupils, pulse, the fresh bandaging she'd applied less than an hour ago on his ribs.
"How did you get the shoulder bruising?" she asked, her pen moving across the intake form.
"Contact with a hard surface."
"Which hard surface."
"Stone."
She looked up briefly. "Headstone or wall?"
A beat. "Wall."
She wrote it down and didn't note that his eyes had moved left before he answered. "Any impact to the head? Ringing, blurred vision, nausea?"
"No."
"Dizziness in the last hour?"
"No."
"Any sensations you wouldn't describe as standard impact injury?"
He met her eyes then, and she saw the calculation in his, the quick internal audit of how much the question was asking versus how much he was willing to answer. "No," he said.
"Good." She finished the form and moved to Rafe.
He was already sitting, shirt off again from when she'd worked on his shoulder earlier. She began a secondary check on the bandaging, which was holding, and noted two additional abrasions along his forearms she'd been quicker with the first time.
She unwrapped the preliminary dressing on the left arm and stopped.
The burn ran from just below the elbow to the inner wrist in a pattern that was wrong in three separate ways simultaneously. The edges were too clean, the kind of definition that required a precise heat source, not contact with ambient fire or an accelerant splash. The color progression was wrong, too, graduating from red to a deep, bruised grey at the center in a way she associated with cold burns rather than heat burns, which made no physical sense. And the shape of it, she tilted her arm slightly under the light, was almost deliberate. Not a wound that had happened to a person. A wound that had been applied to a person.
She held the arm steady and began cleaning it without changing her expression.
"Pain level," she said.
"Four," Rafe said. "Maybe five."
"That's underreporting."
"Six, then."
She applied the first layer of dressing, choosing a non-adherent cover specifically because whatever had caused this, direct pressure on the wound bed was going to make it worse. "What did this come into contact with?"
A pause. Not evasion, she thought. Genuine uncertainty about how to answer.
"Energy discharge," Rafe said finally. "Indirect contact."
"From what source?"
"Unknown."
She looked at him steadily for two seconds, then looked back at the wound. "Unknown as in you didn't see it, or unknown as in you don't have a classification for it."
Rafe was quiet for a moment. Across the room, she heard Eric shift on his table.
"The second one," Rafe said.
Becca nodded once, wrote atypical burn, etiology unclear, possible energy source in the notes field, and moved on to the right arm, which showed a similar pattern at lower intensity. She treated it the same way. Clean dressing, non-adherent layer, light wrap. She worked without commentary.
When she finished, she moved to the basin and ran the tap, working soap through her hands in the thorough, methodical way she always did after field treatment. She kept her back to the room.
The silence had a specific texture. She'd noticed it during their earlier planning sessions, when the conversation would reach a certain point and the air would change slightly, compress, the way it did before people chose their words very carefully. She had learned to recognize that texture and catalog it alongside everything else.
She turned off the tap.
The burns on Rafe's arms were unlike anything in her clinical experience or her training, and she had both a broad clinical experience and thorough training. The edges spoke of precision. The color gradient spoke of something that operated outside the thermal scale she understood. Whatever had caused them had not been designed in a laboratory. Or if it had, it was no laboratory she'd ever encountered documentation from.
She dried her hands, folded the towel, and set it on the basin's edge.
"I'll check everyone again in the morning," she said to the room, still facing the wall. "If the burns show any change overnight, fever, spreading discoloration, increased sensitivity, I want to know immediately. Not in the morning. Immediately."
"Understood," Rafe said.
She turned around. The room held its particular silence. Four people looked at her with the careful neutrality of people who were waiting to see what she was going to ask next.
She picked up her tablet and marked the session as closed.
"Get some sleep," she said.
She crossed to her desk, sat down, and opened the intake forms without looking up again. She heard them move toward the door, heard the quiet exchange of low words she wasn't meant to catch, and then the soft sound of the door closing behind the last of them.
Becca sat alone in the medical bay and stared at the notes on Rafe's form.
A typical burn, etiology unclear, possible energy source.
She had written it as a placeholder. A holding space for information she didn't yet have.
She stared at it for a long moment, then closed the file.
It would come to her eventually. It always did.