Chapter 5 Nola #2
He lies down. Whether because I'm right or because arguing with me is exhausting, I don't know.
Either way, he stays. I can see him fighting the stillness, his eyes tracking around the medbay, his fingers tapping against the table in a rhythm that I suspect matches his security check routine.
He's running the station from a treatment table.
I let him. Forcing him to stop thinking would require sedation, and I'm not there yet.
I run a full allergy panel while I have him captive. Might as well. He tolerates it with the resigned patience of someone who has realized that resistance is futile but wants the record to show he objected.
"You're allergic to Terran wheat, obviously," I say, reviewing the results on the ancient scanner. "Also showing sensitivity to synthetic alcohol compounds, which means whatever passes for booze on this station could give you a reaction."
"I don't drink."
"Good. And your cortisol equivalent is through the roof, which in Keth means your stress hormones have been elevated for..." I check the reference range, comparing his levels to the baseline in the species files. "Months. Maybe years. Chronically elevated."
"I run a refugee station at the edge of space. Stress is part of the job description."
"Chronic elevated stress hormones lead to immune suppression, cognitive decline, and eventually systemic organ damage.
In Keth, the timeline is faster than in humans because your endocrine system is more reactive.
You're burning through your reserves. Your body is running on emergency mode full time, and emergency mode has a shelf life. "
He sits up, ignoring my look. "Are you telling me stress will kill me?"
"I'm telling you that this station needs you alive, and the pace you're keeping is not sustainable. You need to delegate. Sleep more. Let other people carry some of the weight."
"There is no one else."
"There's Fen. There's the residents who've been here long enough to be reliable. And there's me."
He looks at me. That assessing look that I've gotten used to over the past nine days, the one that says he's filing everything away, cross-referencing, looking for the lie.
But there's something different in it now.
Something that wasn't there before I put a needle between his third and fourth scale rows and pulled him back from suffocation.
"You're offering to take on responsibilities beyond medical duties?"
"I'm offering to handle the medical side of things completely so you can stop trying to be a doctor on top of everything else. That's one less thing on your plate. If you let me."
He's quiet for a long time. Long enough that I go back to checking the allergy panel results and let the silence sit. I've learned that Thresh communicates as much in his silences as in his words. Pushing him to fill them is counterproductive. He processes in stillness the way I process in motion.
"Okay," he says finally.
"Okay?"
"You handle medical. Fully. I'll stop interfering."
"I didn't say you were interfering. I said you were overextended."
"The distinction is noted." He swings his legs off the table. "Can I leave now?"
"If you promise to eat something that isn't wheat and sleep for more than four hours tonight."
"I'll eat something that isn't wheat."
"And the sleep?"
"I said I'll eat something that isn't wheat."
He leaves. I let him, because keeping Thresh in the medbay against his will is a battle not worth fighting today. The important battle was the one on the mess hall floor, and I won that one.
I clean up the treatment table and restock the emergency kit.
I've used one dose of epinephrine, adjusted.
I have three more. Three more chances to save someone from an allergic reaction before the supply runs out.
I put the Keth dosage calculation on a card and tape it to the inside of the kit lid, so that if I'm ever not the one reaching for it, the information is right there.
The supply list for Captain Voss is now four pages. I add Keth-compatible epinephrine analogs near the top, underlined twice.
Later, Fen finds me in the medbay. She brings food, which is how Fen shows affection apparently, a tray with protein blocks and a cup of the herbal tea that someone discovered in the back of the kitchen stores.
She's decided that I fall within the radius of people she cares about, and she's communicated this decision through the medium of meal delivery.
"He told me you yelled at him about his stress levels," she says, settling onto a stool.
"I didn't yell. I presented clinical evidence."
"For Thresh, that's worse." She picks at her food.
"He's been alone in this for a long time.
Before I got here, before any of us, it was just him and the station.
Three years of running everything. He doesn't know how to share the weight because sharing it means trusting someone enough to hand it over, and the last time he did that, on a different station, people died. "
I file that information. A different station. People died. A story I don't have details for, but which explains the architecture of his distrust.
"I'm not asking him to trust me. I'm asking him to let me do the job he hired me for."
"With Thresh, those are the same thing."
I think about that. About the way he looked at me on the mess hall floor, gray-scaled and choking, and how the first thing he said when he could speak was about the dosage.
Not thank you. Not are you sure. He noticed that I knew the right amount and the right injection site.
He noticed the competence before the care.
That's who he is. He trusts actions, not words. Proof, not promises.
Fine. I can work with that. I've been proving myself my entire career.
To professors who assumed a mining colony kid wouldn't make it.
To supervisors who gave me the worst shifts to see if I'd quit.
To patients who looked at my face and wanted an older, more experienced doctor, someone who looked like they'd been doing this longer, as if years were a substitute for attention.
I know how to prove myself. It's one of the few things I'm really good at.
That and falling asleep fast and organizing supply closets and reading the species medical literature for seven different alien physiologies in under two weeks.
My skill set is narrow but deep, like a well dug in hard ground.
"He'll come around," I tell Fen.
"He's already coming around," she says. "You just can't tell yet because his version of warming up looks exactly like his version of being suspicious. The difference is very subtle."
"What's the difference?"
"When he's suspicious, he watches you. When he's warming up, he watches you and pretends he isn't."
I think about the security cameras. The way he always seems to know where I am.
The way he showed up in the medbay doorway last night and told me to sleep in a voice that wasn't an order.
The way he delivered the species files personally instead of sending them via the internal message system, which would have been more efficient and less revealing.
"Huh," I say.
Fen smiles. It's a Keth smile, which involves the eyes more than the mouth, a softening of the scales around the orbital ridges. "Yeah. Huh."