Blood and Coriander

The walk from the lagoon back to camp took long enough for Karen Owen and Glenda De Bruyn to have the conversation that the morning's urgency had not permitted. The sun was climbing quickly now, the landscape warming into the harsh clarity that Clivilius reserved for its daylight hours, when the terrors of the night receded into implausibility and the dust reasserted its dominance over every surface and sensation. Their footprints trailed behind them in the loose sand, brief signatures that the breeze would erase before anyone thought to follow.

Karen raised the subject that had been lodged beneath her ribs since the lagoon. The men had been odd. Not injured-odd or frightened-odd but evasive in a way that suggested something beyond ordinary pain was operating beneath Kain's resistance and Chris's willingness to stay behind. Karen had watched the water provoke a response in Kain that exceeded anything a wound should produce, and she could not reconcile Glenda's insistence that the lagoon healed with the anguish it had extracted from a young man whose fear of the water clearly predated his mauled calf. If the soil of Clivilius could germinate seeds in seconds, what was the water doing to human tissue, and at what cost?

Glenda's assessment was measured. She believed the lagoon possessed genuine therapeutic properties. She had observed their effects on Paul's arm and on Joel's recovery, and she suspected the healing process carried pain as an inherent component rather than a side effect. The men's insistence on privacy was, in her reading, the predictable response of people who would rather endure suffering without witnesses than admit to vulnerability. Karen accepted this without committing to belief. Her training had taught her that systems which appeared generous rarely operated without extracting balance elsewhere, and the lagoon had not yet revealed its terms.

Glenda's hand closed around Karen's arm mid-stride, not to halt her but to reassure. They would be fine. Chris would come for them if problems arose. The grip was firm and grounding, the gesture of a woman who understood that confidence, even performed confidence, had practical value in situations where certainty was unavailable. But Glenda's attention, once drawn to Karen's forearm, did not release. A scratch ran along the skin, fresh and vivid against the dust, a mark that had not been there the previous day.

The question was clinical. The answer opened a wound that Glenda had not known existed. Karen explained that Duke had scratched her during the night, when she and Chris had tried to help Jamie. Glenda's confusion was immediate and genuine. She had not known Jamie needed help. She had not known because the night had fragmented the settlement into isolated pockets of crisis, and the morning had not yet permitted the assembly of a complete account. The people of Bixbus had experienced the same catastrophe from different positions and emerged with different pieces of a story that no single person possessed in full.

Karen delivered the rest with the flat economy of someone who had already spent the night's grief and had nothing left to offer except the facts themselves. Duke had been attacked. He had not survived. Jamie had carried him to the river in the desperate hope that the water would perform the same miracle it had granted Joel. The water had not obliged.

Glenda stopped walking. The gasp that escaped her was involuntary, a sound that bypassed the composure she had maintained through a night of emergency surgery and a morning of carrying an injured man across hostile terrain. Her hand went to her mouth. Her eyes filled with the particular shine of grief arriving without appointment, the tears of someone confronting a loss she had not anticipated feeling so acutely. She and Duke had never been close. Their relationship had been one of mutual tolerance punctuated by the dog's talent for being underfoot at the worst possible moments. But the loss was not sentimental. It was structural. Duke had been part of the settlement's small inventory of living things, a presence whose absence diminished the whole in ways that could not be measured in affection alone. The community had lost its first member, and the creature responsible had demonstrated that Clivilius harboured predators capable of killing what the settlers could not protect.

They walked the final stretch in a silence that was not empty but full, weighted with the accumulation of information that had passed between them and the knowledge that more was waiting at the camp they were approaching.