|
For No Miser’s Sake
By Kuliundheft
Part III With Mouse bleeding his grasp, Vincent ran out of the training room and overtook Dominic and Joshua and the strangers within a minute. “Move aside!” he called ahead, and everyone immediately flattened themselves against the tunnel wall as he rushed past them. He was nearly halfway when he heard the emergency message for Father go out over the pipes. A digging crew dodged out of his way and watched him pass with wide eyes as he made his way from the outer chambers toward the innermost chambers. The call went out just ahead of him as he threaded his way through the most populated corridors. And finally, finally, he made it into the hospital chamber. He startled Mary, who was taking care of scraped elbows and knees. “Vincent! I heard the message on the pipes. What—?” “He has a knife wound. In his side.” He laid Mouse out on a surgical table and paused for a moment to take a few gasping breaths. His arm throbbed in time to his hammering pulse, but he tried to put it out of his mind. “A knife wound?” Mary asked. She looked down at Mouse. “Oh! But—how? Who?” Vincent shook his head. “Strangers.” He reached out to take Mouse’s hands away from the cloth he’d put over the wound, but the hands were limp now. “Mouse? Mouse?” He got no answer; Mouse’s eyes were closed, his jaw slack. “It’s a lot of blood,” Mary warbled. “Vincent, your arm!” Vincent placed Mouse’s hands at his sides and took the cloth away, throwing it into a bin. He took up a pair of scissors and started cutting away Mouse’s clothes. “Father will need his instruments. Thread for sutures. Gloves.” “Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” She got to work setting up the area for surgery. Vincent was tearing through Mouse’s undershirt when he heard Jamie’s high, frantic voice outside. She and Father entered a moment later. He issued orders, which Mary followed in a practiced rhythm while Vincent and Jamie stood on the side and looked on. After Father had scrubbed up and had a good look at the wound, Vincent could see from his eyes, tell from the worry flowing off of him, that this was going to be a difficult procedure. It was only when he found Father’s gaze on him that Vincent realized he had been pacing. He stopped, ignoring the way his muscles tensed up along his limbs, almost trembling with the need for release. “Mouse will need blood,” Father said. “Jamie, help Vincent find the most suited donors. The records are in my chamber.” “Is he going to be okay?” Jamie asked. “The sooner he gets blood, the better his chances,” Father answered. “But—” “Jamie,” Vincent said quietly. She cut her protests short and nodded, setting her jaw. She turned and led the way out of the hospital chamber. The journey to Father’s chamber was a matter of quick strides down a single tunnel. Jamie blundered straight in, Vincent directly behind, but they both stopped short at a young girl’s squeal of terror; the three strangers sat at Father’s chess table, flanked by Dominic and Joshua, and the youngest girl cowered in her father’s lap, her eyes riveted to Vincent’s face and full of tears. Her big sister and her father drew closer together, gaining a few inches further away from him. And his desperate impulse to turn away, to shroud himself in cloak and shadow, mixed badly with the potent safety of Father’s chamber and the candlelit comfort of home. It left Vincent with a feeling in his guts like he’d swallowed hot lead. He had never felt the need to secret himself away here. He had never been that dark, scuttling intruder among these walls. Winslow and Pascal looked up from where they’re been talking in low tones by the spiral staircase, and the uneasy silence expanded into every corner, every breath, in the room. “Just ignore them, Vincent,” Jamie said, her voice harsh and high in the tension of the moment. “They’re not worth it. Isn’t that what Father’s always saying?” “How is he?” Pascal blurted as Winslow asked, “Mouse?” Vincent pulled his gaze away from the strangers, finding worry in the faces of his family. Focusing on them pulled his world a little closer to right-side-out. “We don’t know yet. We’ve come to find suitable blood donors.” Silence threatened to overwhelm them all again, but the memory of his task, of the precious minutes they were wasting, minutes Mouse might not have to dally, spurred Vincent’s strides toward the drawer that held Father’s medical records, Jamie at his heels. Pascal crossed the room to them. “Vincent, your arm—” He looked down at it, at the wide stain of blood drifting downward from the jagged tear in his shirt sleeves. Its throb had become background noise, and he preferred it to stay that way. “It’s fine,” he answered. But as he reached for the records, he realized he had blood, Mouse’s blood, smudged on his palms, streaked over his fingers, dotting the hair on the backs of his hands. His lip curled in frustration, anguish, but he stifled the growl before it could escape his throat. “Dominic, fetch Father’s basin and the water,” Pascal ordered. “A towel.” The young man obeyed, leaving his staff aside, and a moment later he scurried to Vincent’s side with the necessary items. Vincent cleaned the blood off of his hands, and the familiarity of it made him sick, made the hot lead in his stomach turn cold and solid, and he struggled to keep his face impassive under the silent gazes of those around him. He only realized he’d stopped to stare into the pinkish water for too long, thinking of minute plumes of red in the Mirror Pool, when Pascal’s hand touched his shoulder. “He’s going to be fine,” Pascal told him, his voice heavy with a compassion that shamed Vincent for his loss of focus, for allowing his mind to drift from the task he’d been given, from Mouse’s need. “Father will see to it.” Dominic held out the towel solemnly, and their camaraderie, their sympathy was all almost too much to bear. If they only knew— “Mouse is O-positive. That’s good, right? Common?” Jamie said, holding his file in hand. Clipped to the front of every tunnel dweller’s medical file, a slip of paper listed vital statistics; sex, height, weight, blood type, date of last exam, et cetera. With no facilities to maintain reliable blood stores, the slips made it possible for anyone to find possible donors quickly and without delving into the personal information inside the folders. While Vincent used the worn terrycloth on his hands to soothe his thoughts, the pain in his arm to ground himself, Jamie started the hunt for other O-positive files. She stacked them for him to examine, though some he could discard out of hand; Alexander was too old, Melissa was pregnant, Wade had left the tunnels nearly a year ago. The ones that he couldn’t easily dismiss, he opened and examined. There were only a few people in the community allowed into the medical files, and somehow, Vincent had always been one of them, for no obvious or official reason, except perhaps his constancy at Father’s side when turmoil and tragedy visited. Jonathan, Sarah, and Vivian charged into the chamber then. They stopped at the sight of the strangers; they met the grim gazes of their fellows. “It’s true, then?” Jonathan demanded. Vincent kept his back to them; he couldn’t afford any more distraction, but he registered Jamie turning away from the files. “Mouse?” Sarah asked. “We don’t know yet,” Winslow said. “Well, what happened?” Vivian asked. “The strangers—” “We don’t know exactly what happened, yet,” Winslow answered pointedly. “Yes, we do,” Jamie countered. “We were all there. The stranger stabbed Vincent, and then Mouse.” “Vincent doesn’t look any worse for wear,” Jonathan observed. “He couldn’t stop one man with a knife?” Vincent bowed his head over the file he was trying so hard to read, to search for anything that would exclude Cullen from giving blood. “And what kind of talk is that, Jonathan?” Winslow demanded, his tone full of warning. “There wasn’t any warning, or any reason. The topsider just went crazy,” Jamie said. Winslow held up a hand. “Hush, Jamie. That isn’t helping, either.” “You didn’t see him,” she pressed. “You didn’t see how it was. He stabbed Mouse, and I don’t even know if he’s okay!” Pascal laid a hand on her shoulder. “We’re all worried about him, Jamie.” But Jamie wasn’t finished. “The only reason he got as close as he did is because Vincent was busy trying to get me out of the way.” She looked at Brian. “Vincent’d have taken your arm right off, otherwise.” Vincent bowed his head lower over the medical records. “Jamie…” “Now that is enough,” Winslow boomed. “If you can’t keep that mouth of yours under control, I’ll send you out to the furthest sentry point I can think of until you cool off.” Jamie glared mutinously, but she kept her peace. Pascal shook her shoulder comfortingly before letting go. When she met Vincent’s gaze, the hurt and fire in her drained away, and she lowered her eyes in silent apology. They went back to their task without another word on the subject, and within twenty minutes, they had the names of five people with a suitable blood type, who were in good health, and who would likely be nearby. Pascal offered to put the call over the pipes. Back in the hospital chamber, with Mary quizzing the prospective donors, Vincent sank down into a chair to wait. He listened to the drone of voices beyond the screens; Father sounded calm, but then he always did when he was doctoring. He fell into the pattern of complex technique and precise timing with confidence and not a small measure of faith. Anyway, the words and voices were floating and detached in Vincent’s head. He couldn’t focus on any of them; he had too many of his own thoughts warring for dominance in him to take on more. He dropped his forehead into one hand and let his mind drift, too tired and too full of fear and guilt and anger to do anything else. With nothing else to occupy him, the throbbing ache in his arm became impossible to ignore, but it also anchored him to the present moment and everything that had happened. He looked up when Jamie sat down on the bed next to him with bandages and scissors in one hand, a bowl in the other, and a cloth draped over one shoulder. “Let me see your arm,” she said. “Jamie, you don’t have to—” “I want to,” she answered at once. “There’s no telling how long Father will be with Mouse.” The pain of the uncertainty went unspoken between them. “Besides,” she continued. “It’s my fault you couldn’t stop him.” Vincent met her gaze steadily. “Jamie, none of this is your fault.” “You couldn’t fight back because you were helping me. And then I made you fall.” “There isn’t anything you could have done differently. Don’t blame yourself for what other people have done.” “I wanted to get out of your way. I wanted to stop him myself. Mouse shouldn’t have—he’s no good at fighting, but I could have—” “Jamie, you did everything you could in those moments.” “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t anything like enough.” He touched her hair with his good hand. “It was everything, in that moment. And there’s no changing it now.” She looked away, and he dropped his hand. After a moment, she nodded, suddenly all business. “All right. Doesn’t mean your arm doesn’t need to be looked at until Father can stitch it. Give it here.” With gentle amusement that turned into a wince, he lifted his arm. She cut away the layers of his sleeves and apologized when she pulled the fabric away; his blood had dried the shirt to the thick hair underneath, and it pulled the sensitive skin. With the towel and the bowl of antiseptic, she dabbed blood away. It still burned and it still ached, but Vincent did his best to keep still and let her work. It was no small relief when she finally laid a bandage over his arm and wrapped it all in gauze. As inexperienced as her hands were, they were gentle and thorough, and it would hold until Father could attend to it. Anyway, there was always something about having a wound cleaned and bandaged that made it more tolerable. Once she was finished, Jamie gathered everything she had used and set about cleaning it all. Then she came back to sit on the bed and share his silent vigil. After some long while that could have been minutes or an hour, Jamie looked up at Vincent. “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he? Father can fix this?” “I don’t know,” Vincent answered. He didn’t meet her gaze. “We got him here quickly. He’ll have blood. He’s young, strong. We can only wait. And hope.” “Can’t believe Jackie brought them all down here,” Jamie said. “The whole point of Below is to keep that kind of topsider poison Above. She knows that. Everyone knows that.” “The point of Below is to heal the damage caused by the world Above,” Vincent countered. She subsided, and they went back to waiting for several minutes until she spoke again. “Jonathan was wrong to say what he said.” He looked at her, but he had no words to offer, either in agreement or denial. She looked down at her own hands. “And I’m sorry. For what I said earlier. I know it bothered you. I know I shouldn’t have. I was so angry. But I’m really sorry.” A droplet flashed in the lantern light, disappeared into her lap, and Vincent realized she was hiding her tears from him. He reached out with his good hand and touched the top of her head, the side of her face. She resisted looking up, but her shoulders began to shake. “Jamie…” She lurched forward then, and he gathered her close, rested his head on top of hers. Her fingers curled in the frayed fabric where he’d pulled his sleeve from its stitching, and he let her cry into his shoulder, offered soft words of comfort. Part of him wondered that she could find any solace in his embrace at all after she’d seen him so close to the edge, when she knew what he might have done, if she hadn’t stopped him. But her grief, her fear, her confusion flowed freely, and he was grateful that he could ease her thoughts by any margin. After some few minutes, the shaking of her sobs eased, but she lingered, letting her breathing slow. When she gathered herself to pull away, he dropped a fraternal kiss into her hair and released her. She sat back, wiping her eyes on the cuffs of her sleeves, dropping at least six years from her real age for a few moments. She looked toward Father and Mary, watched the bits of motion discernable through the screens, listened to the words exchanged, before she shook her head. “I can’t just sit in here. I have to…I’m gonna go back to Father’s chamber.” At his look, she hastened to add, “I’m not gonna cause any more trouble, I promise. I just…I can’t sit in here anymore. You’ll come tell us, as soon as there’s news, won’t you?” “Of course.” She gave him a weak smile and got up. He watched her go and then settled back in the chair to wait.
|