5 Kaia #3
Do your rounds. The thought came hard, almost desperate—give the hands a task, break the trance, be the Steward and stop being whatever this was. I pushed off the doorframe and went into the room, and I did not let myself look at the man, and the not-looking cost me more than any posture ever had.
I found Cora by the cold windows.
She wasn’t laughing with the others. She sat apart, knees drawn up, a cup of warm water going cold in her hands, and her shoulders had the particular caved-in curl I’d watched come over a hundred new intakes in their first hard week—the body learning what it had lost. She was young.
Twenty-three, twenty-four. Too young to have folded down so small.
I crouched at her level. “Cora.”
She startled, then tried to straighten, tried to give me the composed face the potential dormants learned to give the staff. It didn’t hold. Her chin crumpled. “I’m sorry, Steward. I’m fine. I just—” Her voice cracked clean down the middle. “It’s stupid.”
“It isn’t.”
“It’s sugar.” She said it like a confession, like the worst thing about her.
A tear got loose and tracked down her face, and she scrubbed it away furious with herself.
“My nan made these little almond cakes. Every Sunday my whole life. And I keep—I keep tasting them. And there’s nothing here, there’s the broth and the water and the tonic, and I know it’s cleansing, I know it’s supposed to help, but I feel so—” Her hands turned over, empty.
“I feel hollowed out. Like they scraped the inside of me. Like there’s nothing left that’s nice. ”
The withdrawal of comfort is the first purification. The flesh mourns the chains it loved. The wild rose must be trimmed so the garden can bloom.
The verse rose up clean and immediate, the same justification I had applied to a hundreds of patients before her—the belief that the Order’s harsh treatments were a necessary pruning of their feral nature—and I waited for it to settle the way doctrine settled everything, to fold this weeping girl into a shape I could process and log and leave.
It didn’t settle. It sat there in my mouth, sour, and I looked at Cora’s hollowed-out face and the cold cup in her hands and I thought about a market square loud and bright and unafraid, about an old man asleep in the sun with his mouth open, about coins warm from a hundred ungloved hands, and the thought that came up under the verse and drowned it was not a verse at all.
She’s not sick. She’s just sad. And we did it to her.
My hand moved to my pocket before I’d decided anything. The foil bit my fingertips.
A little more won’t hurt. It wasn’t doctrine. It wasn’t anything my mother had ever said. It was just true, the way the smell of frying onions was true, the way the dog’s bark and the child’s shriek and the fiddle had been true.
“Your collar’s twisted,” I said. “Hold still.”
Cora blinked. I reached for her collar—I had done this a thousand times, the small fussing motion that read as nothing to anyone watching—and with my other hand I drew one foil drop from my pocket and folded it into her fingers and pressed her fingers closed.
She went very still. She felt the shape of it. Her eyes came up to mine, huge, and I watched her understand, and I watched the joy break across her face like the sun coming up—sudden and total and so bright it frightened me.
“Steward—”
“Slowly,” I murmured, straightening her collar that hadn’t needed straightening. “Under your tongue. Make it last.”
And then I heard the boots.
Heavy. Rhythmic. The unhurried stride of a man who believed every floor in the building belonged to him, coming down the corridor from the east doors, and my ears knew it before my mind did.
Miller.
Cora was still lit up with her impossible joy, her hand drifting toward her mouth, the foil catching the window light, and the wrapper gave the smallest crinkle as her fingers worked it—
The boots changed rhythm. Slowed. He’d seen something. Across the room, around the corner, he’d seen the shift in her, the light in a face that was supposed to be hollowed out, and his stride altered to bring him toward us.
I could not move my hand to stop her without the motion itself being the evidence. I could not warn her without my voice carrying. If he reached us, if he saw the foil, Cora went to isolation and I went in front of an inquiry.
I knelt there frozen with my hand on a girl’s collar and counted his bootsteps closing—three, two—and had nothing. No citation. No procedure. The rulebook had no page for this, because the rulebook had never imagined a Steward would be the one with the contraband.
Then the room exploded.
“WHOA—okay—nope—”
Tommy came up out of his backwards chair as if the floor had bucked him, arms windmilling, and his hip caught a stacked tower of plastic cups on the broth counter and sent the whole thing scattering across the tile in a clattering bright cascade that pulled every head in the room.
He stumbled three steps directly into Miller’s path—directly, helplessly, a great clumsy ox of a man losing a fight with his own feet—and fetched up close enough that Miller had to rock back on his heels to keep from wearing him.
“Warden—hey—man, thank God, quick medical question—” Tommy had both hands up, crowding the air between them, and the words came in a breathless desperate torrent that left no gap to step around.
“So my left arm’s been tingling, right, but here’s the thing, it’s only when I think about the color blue—is that the tonic, or am I having a stroke?
Because my intake chart did not mention strokes, and I feel like, legally, somebody should’ve—do you guys do a waiver?
Is there a stroke waiver? Because if I’m gonna stroke out over a color I want it on record that nobody warned me—”
“Get off me.” Miller shoved him.
Tommy reeled, apologizing, catching himself on the counter, somehow knocking two more cups loose in the process.
“Sorry—sorry—inner ear thing, I’ve got a documented—is it the white slip for that or the blue slip?
Because Kyle said blue’s for the tingling but the tingling’s connected to the color blue, so does it cancel out, or—”
“Ask your Steward.” Miller’s face had gone the dull red of a man who could not find a thing to arrest someone for and hated it.
He looked over Tommy’s shoulder—one last sweep of the room, the windows, the girl by the glass—and Cora’s hands were folded primly in her lap now, empty, demure, the foil gone and her cheek faintly working, and her face had composed itself into the slack misery of any other suffering patient.
Miller’s eyes found me. Held a beat. Found nothing.
“Keep your California idiot on a leash, Thorne,” he said, and shoved past Tommy hard enough to stagger him, and walked out the way he’d come.
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding. Cora caught my eye and her composed misery cracked, just at the corner, into the smallest, most criminal flicker of delight, and then she ducked her head and was a sad girl by a window again.
I stood up. My knees did not entirely want to.
“Soooo,” Tommy said.
He’d come up beside me. I hadn’t tracked the motion—I’d been watching Miller’s back—and now he was simply there, in the space a Steward’s authority was supposed to keep clear, close enough that the heat came off his chest and reached me through two layers of cloth, close enough that the scent rolled over me unfiltered.
Crushed green. Sun-warm stone. The banked fire.
It poured up the back of my throat and the thing under my ribs came up off its haunches and strained, glad, thrilled, lit from within, and the heat that had been pooling all morning between my thighs surged into something so specific and so unmistakable that my breath stuttered on the inhale.
I was wet.
The realization arrived with a cold bright clarity that had nothing cold about it.
The thin fabric of my undergarments was damp against me—from watching him work the room for thirty seconds, from the proximity of his chest, from nothing more than the smell of him reaching me through six feet of institutional air—and the shame of it climbed my throat in a hot wave and right behind the shame came the want, and the want was so much larger than the shame that I had to press my teeth together to keep from making a sound.
The clown was gone. That was the worst of it.
The clatter and the babble had vanished off him the instant Miller cleared the door.
What stood beside me now was still and warm and watching me with a focus so total the hair lifted along my arms. Without the confused patient act to soften his features, the sharp angle of his jaw was suddenly, startlingly obvious, and as he shifted his weight, I caught the powerful flex of his forearms beneath the rolled-up sleeves of the flannel he wore under the Order’s uniform for patients.
He’d seen.
He’d seen the whole of it—the candy, the collar, the boots, my frozen hand—and he’d thrown himself in front of it with cups and jokes, and he was looking at me like a man who’d just been handed a secret he intended to keep warm for a very long time.
“Didn’t peg you for a smuggler, sweetheart,” he said. Low. Just for me. The word sweetheart went down through me and kept going, the way it had at the intake desk, and lit up everything it passed.
“I don’t—” Provision— the citation came reflexively, the armor, the spine. “Patient morale is within a Steward’s discretion. A stable guest is a—” My voice did the thing it had no permission to do. It thinned. It shook. “—a compliant guest. I was within procedure.”
“Right. Procedure.” His mouth tilted. His gaze moved over my face, unhurried, taking inventory—the color I could feel in my cheeks, the breath I couldn’t make even—and dropped, deliberate, to my mouth, and stayed there long enough that my lips parted under it without my leave. “That what they call it?”