Chapter 246 Healing the Town

Chapter 246 Healing the Town
The garrison’s main hall always smelled of burnt lime and lye, no matter how many times Delia scrubbed it. Dried sweetroot sachets hid behind the window hinges, failing to help. The new order didn’t bother painting over the scorch marks from the occupation or patching the bullet holes in the southern lintel. They needed the building functional, not pretty. Delia made the space her own with the pragmatism of someone who never expected anything to stay put. Workbenches lined the west wall, each herb pouch double-labeled. A row of old army cots sat along the east, with a standing chalkboard in the center. Delia’s neat, compact handwriting covered the board in cross-hatched columns—traditional remedies on the left, magic-based variants on the right, and a centerline tallying what worked or failed.
Daisy arrived every morning at seven sharp, not for treatment but to run the day’s catalog. Delia insisted on twenty minutes at the table—just the two of them—to compare notes and log what Daisy had seen. Which districts’ blight receded overnight? Which soil patches relapsed? Were the kids following her showing side effects from too much exposure to the new current? Delia never tried to talk Daisy out of the work. She just recorded the data and circled the important bits in blue. When the log was up to date, Delia would check Daisy’s wrists against the previous morning. She had started measuring the luminescence of the silver overlay, as if tracking the city’s pulse through Daisy’s veins, and checking for any sign of the black returning beneath it.
Once the basics were done, Delia moved on to training the new staff. Three ex-resistance members, none of whom had seen a surgical instrument before last week. She worked them hard: reading symptom logs aloud, quizzing them on spotting infection before it became critical, distinguishing magical relapse from fever, and applying splints to those who might be actively rejecting reality. Daisy usually stayed to watch, not because she was needed, but because the sound of Delia’s teaching voice reminded her of when the worst thing to fear was failing a quiz.
She liked the way Delia read every entry in the log, even the embarrassing ones: “Day sixteen. Daisy reported loss of vision in the left eye for seven minutes. Pulse steady, no convulsions. Vein progression at 80%, silver overlay 60%.” She didn’t hide the failures or skip the near misses. It wasn’t about shame, just about accuracy.
After lessons, Delia always took Daisy down the corridor to the old officer’s quarters. Maribel’s room was the quietest in the building, a former command post with a single window looking out on the dead grass of the inner courtyard. The bed was narrow, the sheets clean but thin. Maribel lay perfectly still, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a rhythm that matched the second hand on Delia’s battered watch.
Delia gave the same report each day: “No change. Pupils respond to light. Reflexes good. But she’s not ready to wake up.” The words never changed.
Meanwhile, Delia refined her theory—magical coma, not a failure of the ritual, but a side effect of shielding Daisy from the last spike of Varian’s mind. “It’s a defensive state. Her brain is just waiting for the next threat.”
Daisy sat with her mother for ten minutes, always the same. She held Maribel’s hands and felt how light they were compared to the old days. Tracing the contrast between the silver on her own skin and the paper-pale of her mother’s arms, she spoke during every visit—usually about the day’s work: what ground had responded, what kids had shown up, how the blight at Lantern Street was officially in retreat.
She didn’t expect Maribel to hear. It was just a thing she did.
Delia found Daisy at the back door, eating cold beans from a tin. Delia’s tone was matter-of-fact. “You’re behind.”
Daisy wiped her mouth. “Needed to see the eastern ward before the kids got there,” she replied.
Delia nodded once. “Three new cases this morning. Soren is on shift, if you want to check in.”
Daisy shrugged, but she went. The eastern ward was just a single room at the corridor’s end, crammed with old cots and a rolling cart stacked with salvage. Soren was at the far end, hauling bricks from a collapsed archway into a window-side pile. His hair was cropped close, his hands bandaged at the knuckles. He moved the bricks with a steadiness Daisy hadn’t seen in him before. He looked up only when she stood directly in front of him.
Daisy didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Cornelius got a message this morning. Your brother’s in the northern perimeter camp, moving south. They’ll bring him in within a day,” she said, direct.
Soren didn’t drop the brick, or even set it down. He held it in both hands, then nodded once. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“You’re doing good work here,” Daisy told him.
He shook his head, but not as a denial. “Just trying to pay the balance.”
Daisy let him have it. She spent a minute watching him, then turned to leave.
At the door, he called after her: “Is it really getting better? The ground?”
Daisy paused before answering. “If you write it down every day, you can see the line move.”
He smiled, not much, but it was there. “That’s enough.”
Daisy left him to it. She found her way back to Delia, who was already teaching the second class of the day, the three new apprentices bent over the chalkboard, copying the latest cross-reference.
Delia glanced at Daisy, then at the work gloves on her belt. “Market patch?” Delia prompted.
“Eighty percent. Should hold overnight.”
Delia made a note. “If it goes backward, let me know.”
“Always,” Daisy replied.
She left the building and crossed the plaza to the new worksite. Her boots left silver smears in the dust. Although the city remained far from restored, the visible signs of progress affirmed that their efforts mattered. For Daisy, this incremental improvement provided sufficient purpose to continue the work each day.