Chapter 43
Kang takes the floor. He sits with his back to the wall, knees up, arms folded in the posture of a man waiting for someone to break the silence.
I watch him from the narrow mattress, too tired to care if it looks like I’m taking advantage, too wrung out to hide the tremor in my fingers.
The room is little more than a concrete box, a single bulb strung from a scavenged wire, but the air is a couple degrees warmer than the tunnels and there’s a blanket at the foot of the cot that smells faintly of detergent and someone else’s sweat.
I let myself drift, counting the breaths between Kang’s glances in my direction.
It’s a rhythm: every third inhalation, he checks me, as if I might disappear if not monitored.
I should find it suffocating, but instead it’s almost comforting, like the silent companionship of two animals curled in the same den, each pretending the other isn’t there.
The last three days have been a blur of running, bleeding, not dying.
The absence of noise feels unreal. It leaves room for the ache in my shoulder to expand, crawling from collarbone to fingertips.
I wonder if this is what normal people mean by safe.
Kang breaks the silence first. “You should rest,” he says. Not an order, not exactly, but a suggestion armored in habit. His voice is low, softer than I remember from the cell blocks, almost tentative.
I swallow, then force my tongue to move. “You too.”
He almost smiles. “Maybe later.”
A pause. He picks at a loose thread on his uniform, eyes down.
In the thin yellow light, the bruises along his jaw are starting to bloom, green and purple.
There’s a scab on his temple where the fence caught him, and a shallow cut along his cheekbone.
He looks more human now than he ever did in Authority blue. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.
I close my eyes, try to let the pain slide into the background. It doesn’t work.
After a minute, I hear movement in the hall. Not footsteps—too light for that—but the whisper of fabric against stone, a hush that grows until it’s at the door. There’s a knock. Three quick raps, not Authority cadence.
Kang is on his feet in an instant, standing between me and the door before I can even prop myself up. He’s not armed, but he holds his hands loose at his sides, ready to go for a gun if one materializes. Old habits, I guess.
The door opens, and a woman steps inside.
Early fifties, maybe, with gray-streaked hair in a tight braid and hands stained with what looks like iodine.
Her eyes are dark and sharp, the kind that see every secret.
She wears a patched Authority jacket over hospital scrubs, the name badge sanded blank.
She looks at me, then at Kang, then back to me. “You the one with the shoulder?”
I nod.
She sets her kit on the foot of the cot. “Name’s Doctor Yen. Maven said you’d be stubborn.”
I can’t help myself. “they exaggerate.”
She snorts, then jerks her chin at Kang. “He staying, or you want privacy?”
He looks at me, waiting for the cue.
“Stay,” I say, surprising myself with how much I mean it. He relaxes a fraction, but stays standing, arms crossed over his chest now. He’s a wall, a barrier between me and the rest of the world.
Dr. Yen pulls on gloves, the latex snapped at the wrists. “Maven said to keep it quiet, but you’re kind of a legend around here. Half the kids want to be you. The other half want to run the other way.”
I laugh, a sound that jerks my wound. “They’re smarter than they look.”
She grins, then unwraps the bandage at my shoulder.
The gauze peels away, sticky with dried blood.
She doesn’t flinch at the sight, just hums to herself as she unpacks her tools: tweezers, a pair of slender forceps, a vial of clear liquid.
The smell of alcohol cuts through the room, sharp enough to override the moldy concrete.
“This will hurt,” she says, voice flat. She doesn’t waste time.
I nod, already bracing.
She prods at the entry wound, then slips the forceps inside. I clench my jaw, refusing to make a sound. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kang step closer, his hand gripping the edge of the cot, knuckles white.
“Relax,” Yen says, not looking up. “You tense, I dig deeper.”
I exhale, try to let my body melt. It works for about half a second, until she pulls out the first fragment—a jagged sliver of metal, dark with blood. She drops it into a tray. “That’s one,” she says, almost conversational.
Kang shifts, moving to stand behind my head. I feel the heat of his hand as he hovers it near my neck, like he wants to touch but isn’t sure he’s allowed. I tilt my head back until it brushes his wrist. He stiffens, then lets his fingers settle on my collarbone, gentle and deliberate.
The second fragment takes longer. Yen curses under her breath, working the tweezers back and forth. My vision goes white at the edges. I feel the tremor in my arms return, but I keep them at my sides, gripping the blanket so hard it leaves patterns on my palms.
Kang notices. He shifts his hand from my collarbone to my hand, lacing our fingers together. The contact is electric, anchors me to the room. Every time I flinch, his grip tightens, as if he can pull the pain out through his skin.
Yen finally pulls the last fragment free, dropping it into the tray with a metallic clink. She irrigates the wound with something that burns, then dabs it dry. “No nerve damage,” she announces. “You’ll have a scar. Maybe two.”
“Add it to the collection,” I say, voice hoarse.
She smiles, then slathers the wound with a thick paste that smells of mint, iodine, and something vaguely floral. “Old remedy,” she says. “Wild bergamot, mashed with astringent and a little lidocaine. It’ll fight the infection and numb the edge.”
She wraps the shoulder in clean gauze, her hands steady. “Keep it dry for twenty-four hours. Change the dressing at dawn. And don’t try to punch anyone for at least a week.”
I laugh again, this time without pain. “No promises.”
She packs up, gives Kang a once-over. “You need anything?”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine.”
She nods, then points at him with the forceps. “Keep her alive. Maven will have my ass if she dies before the next council meeting.”
He almost smiles. “Understood.”
Dr. Yen closes her kit, then leaves with a brisk efficiency that makes me miss her before the door even hisses shut. For a minute, the room is silent, save for the hum of the overhead bulb and my own ragged breathing.
Kang doesn’t let go of my hand. Not right away.
Finally, I look at him. “You can relax now,” I say, a little teasing.
He shrugs, but his eyes are softer than before. “You did good.”
I want to tell him he did, too, but the words won’t come.
So we just sit, in the quiet, our hands joined on the battered cot, pretending there is nothing outside these four walls that can touch us.
For the moment, it’s almost true.
It takes a while for my pulse to settle.
I keep expecting some Authority goon to bust down the door and drag us back to zero, but the only sound is the soft clatter of Kang pacing the length of the tiny room.
He moves with the kinetic energy of a caged wolf: restless, coiled, all the more dangerous for how quiet he’s being.
I press my hand to the fresh bandage, feeling the throb underneath. Dr. Yen’s paste is already starting to numb the wound, but the ache runs deeper, into bone and memory.
I wait for Kang to start talking, but he doesn’t. He just stands by the door, arms folded, eyes fixed on the nothing at his feet.
I can’t help it—I start to laugh. It comes out brittle, but real. “You know,” I say, “I think you scared her.”
He looks up, startled. “Who?”
“The doctor.” I grin. “I thought you were going to snap her neck for touching me.”
He blinks, surprised by the accusation. “She was moving too fast,” he says, which is so perfectly Authority that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing again.
I raise an eyebrow, trying to make my face do the things it used to do when flirting still meant something. “Would you have shot her?”
A muscle jumps in his jaw, but he catches himself before going full stone face. “Not unless you asked.”
I roll my eyes, but it feels good to poke at him, to see the cracks in his mask. “Relax. I’m not in the market for a bodyguard.”
He smirks, just a little. “Could have fooled me.”
It’s a dangerous line, and we both know it. For a second, the air between us is charged, the way it used to be in the block during late shift, when no one was watching and the only thing keeping us from killing each other was the mutual exhaustion.
He steps closer, not all the way, just enough to erase the illusion of distance. His gaze drops to my shoulder, then to my face. He lifts his hand, slow, gives me time to stop him. I don’t.
His fingers trace the edge of the bandage, so light it’s almost not a touch at all. The heat of it burns straight through the gauze, down into the place where the pain lives. I go still, breath snagged in my chest.
He doesn’t pull away, not immediately. His thumb lingers, then drops to the inside of my elbow, where the skin is thin and scarred from old needles. His eyes follow his hand, unreadable.
“You should rest,” he says again, but this time there’s something else in his voice—an apology, maybe, or a promise.
I want to say something biting, to keep the joke going, but all I can do is nod.
He steps back, the connection severed. I feel the loss of it like a small violence.
He crosses to the door, checks the lock out of habit. “I’m going to scout,” he says, already Authority again. “Check the tunnels. See if there’s another way out.”
“You think we’ll need it?” I ask, softer than I mean to.
He turns, catches my eye. For a second, his guard drops all the way. “We always need a way out.”