Chapter 9 #3
The smell hit first. Alcohol, sharp and medicinal, and under it the thick sweet-rot of infection.
A concrete shed near the water, one lamp hanging from the center beam, casting a weak yellow light.
Cots lined both walls, most of them empty.
A salty breeze pushed through the open doorway and cut some of the heat, but it couldn’t touch the smell around the far cot, where a small shape lay under a thin wool blanket dark with sweat.
Heddy.
I crossed the room in four strides and dropped to one knee beside the cot.
Up close, the smell was worse. Her fur was matted and damp, not from the rain but from fever sweat.
Her chest rose and fell in shallow, rapid hitches, each breath pulling a wet, rattling sound from deep in her lungs.
Her eyes were half-open, the whites gone yellow and veined with red.
They tracked when my shadow fell across her, focusing with effort.
“Captain,” she whispered. Her voice was a thread, barely there.
I put my hand on her forehead. Her skin burned. The heat radiated through my palm like I’d laid it on a stove.
“Heddy. I’m here.”
She tried to lift her hand. I took it. Her fingers were hot and trembling, the pads dry and cracked.
The blanket had slipped low on her torso, and I could see the bandage over her lower abdomen, stained dark brown and yellow at the edges.
The wound from Fatu Hiva. The gunshot I put in her when I came back and found the Ci Dyn had taken the women.
I’d cleaned it, packed it, and left the bullet where it was.
At the time, I hadn’t cared if she lived or died. She had been lying in bed ever since.
The bullet was still in there, but until now, infection had been prevented.
Unfortunately, those efforts had failed.
I knew it the moment I touched her. The infection had been winning ground quietly while the fleet celebrated, eating its way through muscle and tissue, turning the lead and the surrounding flesh into a slow poison that her body couldn’t fight anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Each word cost her. “I made… bad choices. Stood against you. I should have listened.”
Her thoughts reached me before she finished speaking.
Not in words, but in pulses: regret, sharp and sour.
Shame. The memory of Fatu Hiva, of the wolf woman who led them, of her own finger tightening on the trigger at the same moment mine did.
She had been trying to protect Gascha and the others.
She missed. I didn’t. German Shepherd ears, that was what I remembered most when I looked at her then.
“Don’t,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant. “Don’t apologize. Just breathe.”
She gripped my hand with what little strength she had left. Her claws pressed into my skin, not hard enough to break it.
“Thank you,” she said. “For them. My sisters. You kept your word.”
I stayed there, one knee on the concrete floor, rain dripping from my hair onto the blanket, and didn’t look away from her face.
Her eyes held mine, glassy but present, and in them I saw the stubborn pride that had made her stand against me in the first place.
It was still there, under the fever, under the pain.
It was the part of her that wouldn’t quit.
The door opened behind me. Cool air swept in, carrying the salt smell of the channel, and then the soft, precise click of boots on concrete.
Taylor.
She moved to the opposite side of the cot without a word. Her brown eyes swept over Heddy’s body in a fast, clinical way. Her hands hovered over the bandage without touching it, then moved to Heddy’s neck, checking pulse with two fingers pressed to the carotid. Her face didn’t change.
“Core temperature elevated to approximately 104.2 degrees Fahrenheit,” Taylor said.
Her voice was flat, the same tone she used to read ship diagnostics.
“Respiratory rate 28, shallow and wet. Pulse 132, weak and irregular. Pupils reactive but sluggish. The infection has progressed to sepsis. Blood pressure is likely critically low, though I lack equipment to confirm.”
She looked at me across Heddy’s body. “We must get her to the Horizon’s medical bay.” The facts, laid out in the order they mattered.
I nodded once. “How long?”
“If we move now, her survival probability increases from approximately 12% to 68%, assuming the medical bay’s equipment is functional and the antibiotics we have on board are effective against the specific strain. Every minute reduces both numbers.”
I slid my arms under Heddy’s body, one behind her shoulders, one under her knees.
She weighed nothing. A Ci Dyn her size should have been solid, dense with muscle.
She felt like a child, bones and fever and not much else.
I lifted her carefully, keeping the blanket tucked around her lower half, mindful of the wound.
Her body went rigid at the movement. A small, broken sound escaped her throat, not quite a whimper.
“I got you, Heddy,” I said, my mouth close to her ear. “I got you.”