Chapter 5 Nola
On day nine, Thresh almost dies, and it's because of a sandwich.
I'm in the medbay running blood work on Syl, her scales looking marginally better since Fen boosted the humidity on level two, when Fen crashes through the door.
Her grey-green scales are flushed with the particular shade that means adrenaline in Keth physiology, a darkening around the jaw and temples that I've learned to read from the species files.
"Thresh," she says. "Mess hall. Now."
I grab my emergency kit and run. The mess hall is thirty seconds away at a sprint, which is thirty seconds too long when someone might be dying, so I do it in twenty.
The corridors blur past, gray walls and yellow lighting and a startled face or two.
My shoes slap against the metal corridor floor.
My kit bangs against my hip with each stride, the contents rattling in their organized compartments.
Two residents flatten against the wall as I pass, eyes wide.
The air in the corridor tastes like adrenaline and recycled oxygen and somewhere, faintly, fresh bread.
When I get there, Thresh is on the floor next to a table, and the first thing I notice is that his scales have gone from their usual darker green to a mottled gray, which is very bad.
The species files were specific about this: gray mottling in Keth indicates systemic vascular collapse.
The body is shunting blood away from the skin to protect the core organs.
The second thing I notice is that his throat is swelling shut.
He's propped against the table leg, one hand on his neck, the other flat on the floor. His amber eyes are open and focused on me with an intensity that communicates the severity more than any words could. He can't speak. The airway is closing.
"What did he eat?" I drop to my knees beside him, already pulling the emergency kit open.
My hands move on autopilot. The kit has a specific organization that I drilled into myself during my first week: top layer trauma, second layer cardiac, third layer respiratory and allergenic. I go to the third layer.
"He tried the new bread," someone says. A human resident named Olek, standing nearby with wide eyes and flour still dusting his forearms. "I made it. I used a grain from the last supply run. It was supposed to be good."
"What grain?"
"Terran wheat."
Wheat. I mentally cycle through what I know about Keth biology, which has increased significantly in the past week thanks to those species files.
Keth have a documented list of anaphylactic triggers, and gluten proteins are on it.
Not all Keth react, but the ones who do react fast and severe.
The mechanism is different from human allergies.
In Keth, the gluten protein triggers a cascade in the three-chambered heart's regulatory system, causing the smooth muscle around the vascular walls and airway to contract simultaneously.
It's not just the throat closing. It's the whole system locking down.
Thresh's eyes are open. His slit pupils are dilated, wide and round instead of their usual vertical slits, and his breathing is a horrible rasping sound that tells me his airway is maybe sixty percent closed and dropping. Forty percent. Thirty. Each breath is smaller than the last.
"Thresh, I need you to stay still." I'm already pulling epinephrine from the kit, then I stop.
Epinephrine is calibrated for human physiology.
Keth vascular systems are different. The heart equivalent has three chambers, not four, and the blood pressure regulation operates on a different feedback loop.
A standard human dose of epinephrine could send a Keth heart into arrhythmia.
I grab the datapad from the bottom of the kit where I've been keeping my species notes. I flip to Keth emergency protocols. My hands are not shaking. My hands are never shaking when it matters. That's the one gift I have: the worse things get, the stiller my hands become.
Anaphylaxis in Keth. Epinephrine analog: adrenaline base adjusted for three-chamber cardiac system. Dosage: sixty percent of human standard. Injection site: ventral thorax, between the third and fourth scale rows.
I've never injected a Keth before. The scales are real.
They're hard, like overlapping plates of polished ceramic, and the injection has to go between them, into the softer tissue beneath.
In a textbook, this is a diagram with neat arrows.
In real life, it's a man on the floor of a mess hall whose throat is closing while forty people watch.
"I'm going to give you an injection," I tell him. "I need to access your chest."
His hands are shaking. He reaches for the collar of his jacket, can't manage the clasp, his fine motor control compromised by the vascular collapse.
I undo it myself, pushing the fabric aside.
His chest is scaled like the rest of him, darker tones of green, but between the scale rows there are strips of softer, smoother skin, paler green, almost translucent.
I count the rows. First, second. Third and fourth. There.
I adjust the dosage on the hypo. Sixty percent.
I line up the needle with the gap between the scales.
The gap is maybe six millimeters wide. I need to hit it cleanly or the needle bends against the scale, and a bent needle is a wasted dose, and I have four doses total, and each wasted dose is one less chance to save someone.
I push the needle into the soft tissue between the scales.
He hisses. A sharp, sibilant sound that I feel more than hear. I hold the injection for a five-count and withdraw.
"Give it thirty seconds," I say, watching his throat. Around us, the mess hall is dead silent. Fen is behind me, I can feel her presence. Olek hasn't moved. The residents are frozen in the particular stillness of people watching something they can't control.
Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. At twenty-eight, the swelling starts to recede. His breathing goes from rasping to labored to rough but functional. The gray mottling in his scales begins to retreat, green creeping back like color returning to a painting that was fading.
"Keep breathing," I say. "Slow. In through the... do Keth breathe through the nose?"
"Yes," Fen says from behind me, her voice tight with controlled fear.
"In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Slow." I have my fingers on his wrist, which is not the ideal pulse point for a Keth, the primary pulse point is on the neck below the jaw ridge, but it's what I can reach without repositioning.
His pulse is rapid and thready but stabilizing.
The three-beat rhythm is uneven, the middle beat weak, but it's there. All three chambers firing.
Thresh looks at me. His amber eyes are glassy but focused, and there's something in them that wasn't there before. Not gratitude exactly. More like recalculation. The kind of look you get when an equation you thought was solved produces a new variable.
"You knew the dosage," he says. His voice is rough, damaged from the swelling, each word scraping past tissue that was crushing itself shut a minute ago.
"I've been reading."
"The injection site."
"I've been reading a lot."
He stares at me for a long moment. Then his head drops back against the table leg and he closes his eyes. "I hate wheat," he says.
I laugh. I don't mean to. It just comes out, this sharp burst of relief-tinged amusement, because five seconds ago I was watching his throat close and now he's making dry jokes on the floor of the mess hall.
The sound breaks the tension in the room.
Someone exhales loudly. Someone else sits down heavily.
"No more wheat," I say. "Ever. I'm adding it to your file.
Fen, I need you to check the kitchen inventory.
Any Terran grain products need to be labeled and kept separate from the Keth-accessible food supply.
Separate shelf. Separate containers. I want a visible marker, something bright, on everything that contains gluten. "
"On it." Fen moves toward the kitchen, then stops and looks back at me. Her expression is complicated. Relief and something else, something I think might be the look of someone whose worst fear just almost happened and then didn't. "Thank you."
"It's my job."
"It's more than that."
The mess hall slowly comes back to life.
Conversations resume, tentative at first, the way sound returns after an explosion.
Olek is apologizing to everyone within earshot, his face stricken with guilt that's going to need addressing because the last thing this kitchen needs is a cook who's afraid to cook.
I'll talk to him later. Right now, Thresh.
I get Thresh to the medbay. He argues about walking, which I take as a positive sign because if he has the energy to argue, his airway is clearing.
He insists he's fine. I insist he's not.
We compromise in the way that people do when one of them is a security chief with control issues and the other is a medic who has treated miners with pickaxes embedded in their shoulders: he walks, but I walk beside him with my hand ready to catch him.
In the medbay, I make him lie on a treatment table and monitor his vitals for two hours, during which time he tries to leave four separate times and I tell him no four separate times with escalating clinical justifications.
"I have work to do," he says.
"You almost died."
"Anaphylaxis is rarely fatal with treatment."
"You didn't have treatment thirty minutes ago. You had a bread allergy and a floor. Lie down."