Chapter 252 The Obstinate Patient
POV: Isla | The Shelter medical wing, Rookeries
The shelter's medical wing has expanded twice since the raid, which is the specific expansion that happens when the number of people requiring ongoing care exceeds the space initially allocated for it, and the expansion has been managed through the specific Rookeries method of solving space problems, which is to identify adjacent rooms and repurpose them and adjust the workflow accordingly and not stop moving long enough to feel the weight of how much the workflow has expanded.
I have fifteen hybrid children requiring ongoing medical management. Six of them have ability profiles that Katherine and I identified as requiring active suppression support, the specific intervention for fae-hybrid children whose abilities were either artificially suppressed by the Order's protocols and are now emerging without the regulatory framework that would normally develop them gradually, or were triggered beyond their capacity to manage and which are now producing physical symptoms when they spike. Three others have blood chemistry disruptions from the preservation and experimental procedures that require weekly monitoring and intervention. The remaining six are physically stable but are in the psychological care track with the human psychologists, which is its own category of ongoing attention that overlaps with the medical in ways that require me to be present for coordination.
And Lucia, whose incubator requirements I have been managing alongside everything else, the specific medical profile of a dhampir-wolf-fae hybrid two months from birth in a preservation chamber requiring daily parameter checks and twice-weekly developmental assessments that I do because the Parliamentary medical team from the summit has returned to Parliament and the fae healers rotate through on a schedule that does not cover every day.
I have been doing this for two weeks since the summit and I have been doing it with a left arm that is not functioning the way a left arm should function, which is a fact I have been managing around by adjusting how I do everything that requires two hands, which is most of what I do, and which I have not mentioned to anyone because mentioning it produces the conversation I do not have time for.
The silver poisoning residual is not a new concept to me. The Hermetic offensive strike that hit me in the facility left silver-infused energy in the wound tissue, which is the Order's specific weapon design, the energy carrying silver properties into organic material, and the silver in organic material produces the specific progressive response that silver produces in supernatural biology even at trace levels, which is that it continues to cause damage as long as it is present and which, in muscle and nerve tissue rather than bone, produces the specific kind of progressive damage that I have been watching in the patients I treat when they come in with silver wounds and which I am now watching in my own left arm.
Callum has said it twice. Cormac has said it once. Dante said it yesterday with the directness he has for things he has decided need saying, which is directly. Katherine said it this morning before she went to her workroom, with the specific clinical precision of someone who has assessed the situation and who wants me to understand the assessment is not optional information.
"I'll rest when they're safe," I tell each of them, which is the accurate answer and which is also the answer that closes the conversation because there is no counter-argument that does not reduce to telling me that the children can wait, which they cannot, which everyone knows.
The wound is infected. I know this because I dressed it myself this morning and I can read a wound, and the infection has the specific quality of a silver-poisoned wound infection, which is different from an ordinary infection in the way that silver involvement changes the tissue's response to standard treatment, and the infection spreading into the arm tissue above the original wound site is the specific progression that means the treatment window is narrowing.
I am aware of this. I have been aware of it for four days. I have been managing it the way I manage everything, which is by prioritizing the most urgent thing and placing the less urgent things in the queue, and the children are more urgent than my arm.
The hybrid child on the table today is Wren, who is seven years old and who has a blood chemistry disruption from the Order's procedures that produces periodic crises when the disruption spikes, and today it has spiked and I have been managing it for forty minutes with the specific focused attention of someone who knows what they are doing and whose left arm is providing less assistance than it should, and I am compensating for the left arm by adjusting the position and the angle and the technique and it is working, and then it stops working, not the procedure, the arm, the specific moment when the arm produces no response to what I am asking it to do, the specific quality of a limb that has reached the threshold of what it can continue to ignore.
The floor comes up to meet me in the specific way floors arrive when your body has made a decision your conscious mind did not authorize.
Callum is through the door before I understand I am on the floor, which means he was nearby, which means he has been nearby, which means the conversation I have been closing for two weeks has been continuing in the background in the form of him being in the vicinity without appearing to be watching.
He is beside me and his hands are on my shoulders and his voice has the quality it has when he is managing something that is frightening him, which is controlled and focused and which is the voice he uses when he cannot afford to be frightened.
"Isla."
"I'm fine," I say, which is what I always say, and Wren is still on the table and the crisis is not resolved and I attempt to stand and the arm produces the specific response of a limb that has decided it is finished.
"You can't save them if you're dead," he says, and he says it with the specific quality of a true thing that is also the only argument I have not been able to close the conversation against, because it is the only argument that uses my own framework rather than asking me to step outside it.
He picks me up, which he does with the careful competence of someone who has been around enough physical crises to know how to move a person correctly, and he puts me in the medical bed in the room adjacent to the treatment room and he looks at the arm with the expression that tells me he is reading exactly what I have been reading for four days and which confirms the timeline.
"Katherine," he calls, to the corridor.
"I'm here," Katherine says from the doorway, which means Katherine was also nearby, which means the conversation has been happening in a more organized way than I realized, and which means the children are going to be managed while I am in this bed, which is the only argument I was actually making.
I let myself be in the bed. I look at the ceiling of the room that I built with Valentina two years ago, which has the quality of a space that has been organized for purpose and which has her in its design in ways that are not visible but which I know are there.
The arm needs treatment I should have accepted four days ago.
"Fine," I say.
"Good," Callum says. "Don't move."