Chapter 9 Nola
The station has a rhythm, and I'm learning to feel it.
Mornings are quiet. The recyclers hum louder at night, cycling the air through filters that Fen replaces on a schedule she keeps in her head, which means the early hours have a different quality, a stillness that isn't silence but the absence of mechanical effort.
The station breathes lighter before dawn.
People rise slowly. The mess hall fills in waves: early workers first, the maintenance crew and the kitchen staff, then families with children who've been up since the lights started their gradual brightening, then the people who've earned the right to sleep in by doing late shifts.
It's working. In the past four weeks, I've gone from "the new medic" to "Nola.
" People use my name. They come to the medbay for small things, not just emergencies: a headache, a sore muscle, a question about whether something they're feeling is normal.
Berec stopped by yesterday to ask if his cough was getting better.
It is. He asked the way someone asks when they want confirmation, not diagnosis, when they want to hear from another human being that the trajectory is positive.
These small visits are the foundation of trust. When people come to you for the little things, they'll come to you for the big things, and the big things are what save lives.
This morning, Vira comes in.
She's been coming every few days. Not for treatment, not exactly.
In medical school they taught us about the concept of a "therapeutic space," a physical location that a patient associates with safety, where the act of simply being present produces a calming effect on the nervous system.
The medbay has become Vira's therapeutic space, and I protect that designation with the same seriousness I'd protect a medication regimen.
She comes and sits on one of the chairs, the one nearest the supply closet that has become hers by the quiet consensus of repeated use, and doesn't say anything.
I work around her and don't push. Sometimes she stays ten minutes.
Sometimes an hour. Last time she stayed for thirty minutes and then said, "The light in here is nice," which was the most she'd spoken to me since I arrived.
She was right about the light. I replaced two of the overhead panels with warmer-spectrum bulbs from Fen's parts inventory.
The medbay glows instead of glaring now.
Today she sits down, folds her pale green hands in her lap, and after a few minutes, she says, "I have nightmares."
I keep organizing the supply shelf. I don't turn around. Eye contact right now would feel like pressure, and pressure is the last thing she needs. The bandage rolls in my hands are a prop, something for my body to do while my attention is entirely on her voice.
"I'm sorry," I say. "Nightmares are hard."
"About the camp." Her voice is thin, stretched, like fabric that's been pulled too tight and might tear.
"I dream I'm still there. I wake up and it takes a long time to remember I'm not.
The walls look the same in the dark. The sounds are similar.
The recyclers and the camp ventilation systems, they make the same noise. "
I put down the bandage roll and turn, slowly.
I sit on the stool across from her, at a distance that's close enough to be present and far enough to not crowd.
Three feet. I measured it once, during residency, when a counselor told me the optimal distance for trauma conversations was "close enough to reach but far enough to breathe. " Three feet.
"That sounds really frightening," I say.
"It is." She doesn't look at me. She's looking at her hands, at the scales that are pale with the particular pallor that means sustained stress in Keth. Healthy Keth scales are vibrant, saturated with color. Vira's look washed out, like a photograph left in the sun.
"Does anything help? When you wake up, is there something that reminds you where you are?"
She thinks about it. Her fingers trace the edge of one scale on her wrist, a self-soothing gesture. "The gravity feels different here. The camp had lighter gravity. When I wake up and feel how heavy my body is, I know I'm on the station."
"That's a really good anchor. The physical sensation of where you are, grounding yourself in that. Your body knows the truth even when your mind is still catching up."
"Will they stop?"
I want to say yes. I want to give her the comfort of certainty, to wrap the answer in soft cloth and hand it to her like a gift. But I've told patients the truth my entire career and I'm not going to stop now, not here, not with someone who has been lied to enough.
"They usually get better with time. Less frequent, less intense. I can't promise when. But the fact that you're here, that you came here and told me about it, that's a significant step. You're not carrying it alone anymore."
She looks at me. Her scales are the pale green of young Keth, and in the medbay light, the warm light I installed specifically because harsh lighting makes people feel like specimens, they have an iridescent quality that makes her look fragile and luminous at the same time.
"Thresh told you about the camp," she says.
"He told me enough to understand. He didn't tell me details. Those are yours."
"I don't want to talk about the details."
"Then we don't. We talk about whatever you want to talk about, or we sit here quietly, or you can help me sort these bandages, which is incredibly boring but oddly satisfying. There's something about putting things in order that makes the brain settle down. At least that's my theory."
Something happens to her face. It takes me a moment to recognize it because I haven't seen it from her before. She smiles. It's small, tentative, the expression of a face relearning how to make it. But it's there.
"I could sort bandages," she says.
We sort bandages together for forty-five minutes.
She's meticulous, which I suspect is a personality trait and not just a task preference.
She sorts by size, then by type, then by expiration date, and when she's done, the bandage shelf is more organized than I could have done alone.
Her hands are steady during the sorting.
The task gives them purpose, and purpose steadies what anxiety would shake.
"Same time next week?" I say when she gets up to leave.
"Maybe." But the maybe has a shape to it that feels like yes.
After Vira leaves, I check on Renna. Her leg is healing well.
The infection has retreated from the muscle tissue, the wound bed pink and granulating the way healthy tissue should.
The swelling is down. She's back on light duty in the kitchen, which she insisted on with the particular stubbornness of someone who needs to be useful to feel safe.
I let her, with restrictions. No standing for more than two hours at a stretch.
No heavy lifting. Dressing changes daily.
"You're a good doctor," Renna tells me while I change the bandage. She sits on the treatment table with the patience of someone who has become comfortable in this room, comfortable with me.
"I'm a thorough doctor. 'Good' is subjective."
"It's not. Good means you care about whether I'm okay, not just whether the wound is healing. Those are different things."
I don't know how to respond to that, so I finish the bandage change and pretend I need to check something on the terminal. The cursor blinks at me. I blink back.
In the afternoon, I find Thresh in the mess hall.
He's been different since Voss's visit. Not more tense, exactly, but more focused, his movements tighter, his pauses briefer.
He's always been focused, but now there's an urgency beneath it, like someone who's been maintaining a fortress and just learned the siege is coming.
He's talking to Fen and two of the longer-term residents, Olek and a woman named Taris who has a quiet competence that I've noticed in the way she organizes work crews. They're gathered around a datapad showing schematics. When I approach, the conversation pauses.
"Don't stop on my account," I say. "Unless it's classified."
"It's the defense plan," Thresh says. No hesitation. No deflection.
"Then I should hear it." I pull up a chair. "If something happens, I need to know where to set up medical triage, where the likely casualty zones are, and how to get to injured people."
He studies me for a moment, the amber eyes doing their assessment, and then nods. "Sit."
He walks me through it. The station has three main sections: residential, operational, and the docking bays.
In an attack, the residential section would be sealed and defended as the primary shelter.
It has its own power supply, water recycling, and enough stored food for seventy-two hours.
The docking bays are the most vulnerable, the point where any boarding action would begin, the doors designed for cargo, not combat.
The operational section, where the medbay is, sits between them.
"Your medbay is in the worst possible location," he says.
"What?"
"It's between the likely attack zone and the defended zone. If fighting reaches the corridors, you're in the crossfire."
"I'm not moving the medbay."
"I'm not asking you to move it. I'm telling you the risk so you can plan accordingly."
I look at the schematic. He's right. The medbay's position means that during an attack, I'd be treating wounded in an area that could become a combat zone.
The solution isn't relocation, it's preparation: secondary medical stations in the residential section, emergency supplies cached in defensible positions, triage protocols that account for the possibility that I might not be able to reach the main medbay.
"I need to set up emergency medical caches," I say. "At least two. One in the residential section, one near the docking bay approach. Basic trauma supplies: tourniquets, hemostatic agents, painkillers, pressure dressings. Enough to keep someone alive until I can get there."
"I can allocate the supplies," Thresh says.
"I'll write the cache inventories tonight. And I need to train people. Basic first aid. Tourniquet application. How to stop bleeding when the doctor can't get to you. Because if this goes sideways, I'm one person, and one person can't be in three places."
Olek shifts. "You think it's going to come to that?"
"I think preparation is free and regret is expensive," I say. It's something my mother used to say on the colony, usually right before checking the mine seals for the third time. Mining colony wisdom: you check the seals before the pressure drops, not after.
Thresh looks at me. Something in his expression is different from the assessment I've grown used to. It's closer to recognition. Like he's seeing someone who thinks the way he thinks, who runs the same calculus of probability and preparation, and finding it unexpected and not unwelcome.
"Tomorrow," he says. "First aid training. Mess hall, after the morning briefing. I'll announce it."
"I'll prepare the curriculum."
"Good." He folds up the schematic. The meeting is over.
As I walk back to the medbay, Fen falls into step beside me. "You know he's never let anyone into the defense planning before."
"He didn't let me in. I sat down."
"Same thing. He could have told you to leave. He didn't. Do you understand what that means for Thresh?"
I do. I understand that for a man who carries everything alone because delegation equals risk, allowing someone into the planning is an act of trust so significant that he probably hasn't processed it himself yet.
He's probably running a post-mortem on the conversation right now, examining each moment where he shared information he could have withheld, and wondering if he made the right call.
"I understand," I say.
"Good. Because he's going to pretend it didn't happen, and you're going to need to act like it's normal until he catches up."
The walk back to the medbay takes me through the residential corridor on level three.
The doors are closed, most of them, thin metal panels that offer the illusion of privacy more than the reality of it.
Behind one door, I can hear Salo's voice chattering about something to Mika, the boundless energy of a five-year-old who doesn't know what Helix is and, if I have anything to do with it, won't need to for a long time.
Behind another, the low resonant hum of Pahl doing his evening meditation, the subsonic vibrations traveling through the floor and up through the soles of my shoes.
The corridor smells like dinner, reconstituted vegetable stew and the distinctive warm-bread scent that Olek has perfected now that he's learned to make Keth-safe flatbread with rice flour instead of wheat.
I spend the evening in the medbay, writing first aid training materials.
Tourniquet application for humans and Keth, with adjusted pressure points for each species.
Hemorrhage control. Shock management. How to keep someone alive for ten minutes when help is ten minutes away.
I draw diagrams. I write instructions in simple language, clear and direct, because in an emergency, no one has time for medical jargon.
These are things I hoped I'd never have to teach at a refugee station. But hope is not a strategy, and the Fringe is not forgiving of people who plan for best case scenarios.
I write the materials. I check my supplies. I look at the medbay that I've spent a month turning into something functional and try not to think about what happens to it if the people Thresh is afraid of actually come.
Then I put the thought away. Not because it isn't real. Because the fear is not useful right now. What's useful is the training. The preparation. The work.
I'm good at the work. It's the one thing that's never let me down.