Chapter 71: Survive Until I Return
Chapter 71: Survive Until I Return
We didn’t do anything useful for the rest of it, and I’ve come to think that was the point.
She sat next to me on the crate and then on the floor and then, eventually, with her back against my good side and my arm across her shoulders, and we talked about nothing in particular for a long time. The arm. The temperature I’d been running. Whether the stitches were pulling because they were tight or because they were infected, which she settled by looking at them and telling me they were tight.
She fed me. That is the correct description of what happened; I said I wasn’t hungry and she put dried meat in my hand and waited.
"Tomorrow," she said. "What are you doing."
"Depends how the leg—"
"No. What are you doing tomorrow?"
I recognised the tone and gave up.
"Nothing," I said. "Presumably."
"Nothing." She twisted round to look at me. "I want to be specific, because I know exactly what nothing means to you and it involves a rifle. One full day. Sunrise to sunrise. No hunting. No going out for supplies. No scavenging that building at the end of the road that you’ve been eyeing since I arrived—"
"I haven’t—"
"You looked at it twice through the gap in the boards." Her ears flattened. "And no training. Not the footwork, not the drill, none of it, because you’ll do it wrong and tear something and then the whole day is wasted and so is the two hours we’ve just spent."
"That feels like a waste of a day."
"It’s not." She turned round properly. "Adrian, you nearly died four days ago because your body couldn’t do what your plan needed. Sitting still is the only thing in this world that fixes that. It’s not rest — it’s maintenance, and you’d do it for the rifle without arguing."
I opened my mouth and then closed it, because she was right and I hate that.
"Sleep properly," she went on, ticking it off. "Not four hours sitting up with the knife in your hand. Eat all of it, not most of it. Do the dressings twice. And sit down with everything you brought out of that building and actually read it, because I’d bet a great deal you haven’t looked at half of it."
"...I’ve looked at some of it."
"Mm."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:06:41]
Neither of us said anything about that. It had been in the corner of my eye all evening and I’d been carefully not narrating it.
"When the Call comes back," she asked, "will you use it again?"
"Yes."
"You understand what it costs. It may not roll D at all. Even if it does, half the time it selects someone else, and then for three more days you’ve got nobody." She said it flatly, like a woman laying out a trade. "There will be weeks where you need a fighter and the grade matters more than I do."
"I’ll make the Call again."
Liora looked at me for a moment.
"Good," she said. "I’d have been extremely unpleasant about any other answer."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:00:52]
She got up onto her knees in front of me and put both hands on either side of my face, carefully, avoiding the dressing at the back.
There was no speech. I’ve thought since about what I might have said and I don’t think either of us wanted one.
She kissed me. Once, unhurried, with her thumbs against my cheekbones.
"Survive until I come back," she said.
"I will."
"Say it properly."
"I’ll survive until you come back."
"Right." Her ears were flat and her voice had gone unsteady and she was smiling anyway, which is a combination I have only ever seen on her. "Then I’ll see you in three days, or six, or nine, and you’ll be insufferable about your footwork, and I’ll pretend to be impressed."
"You’ll be actually impressed."
"I’ll be actually impressed," she agreed, "and I’ll deny it—"
She was still speaking when she went.
Mid-word. Straight back into a training yard and an argument about a ridge line, with no time gone and Nessa waiting for the end of the same sentence without knowing it had ever been interrupted.
My hands were still up where her shoulders had been.
I sat there for a long time. There was a hollow in the blanket beside the crate where she’d been sitting and it stayed warm for a while, and I did not open a single menu, and I did not go and look at any numbers, and I made myself just be in the room with it.
The class had returned her to the exact place and instant she had left and begun the seventy-two-hour charge recovery. It did not require me to watch the windows for either fact to be true.
That’s a thing I’ve started doing on purpose. It would be very easy to bury this under a task.
The recovery day I actually kept.
I slept nine hours, lying down, which I had not done since before the hospital. I woke at midday, ate a full portion instead of two thirds of one, drank properly, and did both dressings — the arm first, which was tight and clean and coming along, then the back of my head, which I did by feel in front of a piece of mirror glass and which looked considerably better than it felt.
Then I sat on the floor with everything I’d nearly died for spread out in front of me, and read it.
The medical haul was the point and it was worth it: two full courses of antibiotics with the packaging intact, a proper suture kit, saline, and enough dressings to see me through a month of being an idiot. That alone justified the stairwell, and I let myself think so once and then stopped, because Liora would have had something to say about the reasoning.
But the paperwork turned out to be the real prize, and I’d nearly left it.
I’d taken it out of the admin office almost as an afterthought — a wedge of files, a facilities folder, and a district wall map with laminate over it. It took me four hours to work through and it rearranged everything I thought I knew about where I was.
The hospital had been part of a network. There was a supply and services folder listing every site the trust drew on: two water treatment stations, a fleet depot, a laundry facility, and a utility-maintenance compound out past the eastern reservoir road. All of them with addresses. Most of them with floor plans.
And there was newer material in among it. Somebody had been using that admin office long after the Merge — three hand-written sheets, dated, in two different hands, logging what had come in and out. Barter, not money. Four hides for one course amoxicillin. Bone, 3kg, for salt.
There is a trade economy running in this district. Not a settlement I’ve found, but people, moving materials, valuing hide and bone and horn at rates somebody thought worth writing down.
So everything I’ve been leaving on the ground is worth something to somebody.
I went back to the maps after that with a completely different question, and by early evening I’d found it.
The utility-maintenance compound. Nine kilometres east-north-east, on the reservoir road. Two hundred metres by one hundred and forty, inside a security fence. Two water storage tanks. A vehicle workshop with a pit and a bench. Three storage units. A generator house with a diesel standby set. Two gates — one vehicle, one pedestrian — and no other way through the fence line on the plan.
I sat with that plan on the floor until it got too dark to read.
Water on site. Walls. A workshop with tools in it. Somewhere to put things. Two entrances and only two, both of which can be watched by one man.
That’s not a shelter. That’s a base.