Borrowed Hands

Karen found Kain exactly where she had left him. He had not moved from the base of the sandy hill near the Portal, his posture further diminished in the interval of her absence, the defiant energy that had propelled him across the dunes now fully spent. The Portal shimmered above him with its indifferent translucence, offering nothing, reflecting nothing, a five-metre monument to the distance between where Kain sat and everything he wanted to reach. He tried to rise when he heard her approaching and failed, his leg collapsing beneath the attempt with a grimace he could not entirely suppress before settling back into the dust with the controlled resignation of someone who had learned, in the space of a single morning, the precise limits of what his body would permit.

His first question was about Glenda. The hope in it was audible despite every effort to contain it — the expectation that Karen had returned with the doctor, with proper medical expertise, with the one person in the settlement qualified to assess his wound and tell him whether the leg he was clinging to would survive what had been done to it. Karen knelt beside him and delivered the truth with the care of someone who understood that this particular piece of information would land on ground already saturated with loss. Glenda had gone. She had departed with Jamie and Charity to hunt the Portal pirate who had taken Joel, driven by a conviction about her father that had seized her at the campfire with a force that neither Paul nor anyone else had been able to counter. The settlement's only doctor was somewhere in the Clivilian desert, pursuing a mission that was part rescue and part revelation, and she had not indicated when or whether she intended to return.

The news moved through Kain in visible stages. Disbelief arrived first, widening his eyes and draining the residual colour from a face already pallid with blood loss. Then came the anger — sharp, justified, and aimed at a situation rather than a person — the particular fury of someone who has been wounded and then abandoned by the one individual whose professional obligation was to treat him. The anger collapsed almost immediately into something heavier and quieter, the exhaustion of a young man who had absorbed too many blows in too short a span and whose capacity for outrage had been consumed by the sheer volume of what the morning had demanded. He asked why Glenda would do this. Karen could not answer. She did not know. None of them knew, and the absence of explanation was itself a wound that no bandage could address.

Karen opened the medical supplies she had gathered from Glenda's storage crate. The crate had been impeccably organised, its contents labelled and compartmentalised with the precision of a woman whose professional identity expressed itself through order even when the world around her offered none. Clean bandages, antiseptic solution, gauze, hand-labelled vials — each item arranged in careful rows, a small archive of competence left behind by someone who had departed too quickly to take it with her. Karen drew what comfort she could from the straight lines and predictable textures. Glenda's presence lingered in the methodical placement of supplies the way a musician's presence lingers in a room after the instrument has been packed away.

The wound beneath the old bandages was worse than Karen had prepared herself for. The gash in Kain's calf was angry and swollen, its edges discoloured, the tissue surrounding Glenda's sutures inflamed in ways that spoke of a healing process that had been interrupted too many times by a patient who refused to rest. The stitches themselves troubled Karen. They were uneven, hastily knotted, some already loosening — work that bore no resemblance to the methodical precision she had come to associate with Glenda's hands. The observation lodged itself in Karen's thoughts alongside the growing catalogue of things about Clivilius that did not add up, filed beside the lagoon's violent healing and the soil's impossible generosity and the voice that sometimes spoke to her in the quiet of her tent.

Karen cleaned the wound with antiseptic and redressed it with fresh bandages, her hands steady and deliberate, performing a role she had not been trained for with the focused competence of a woman who had spent decades conducting fieldwork in conditions that demanded improvisation. She was not a doctor. She was an entomologist who had spent her career studying the delicate systems that sustained life in environments most people dismissed as unremarkable. But hands that had handled specimens and soil samples and the fragile architecture of insect colonies could handle gauze and tape, and the fundamental principle was the same: attend to what is in front of you with the care the situation demands, regardless of whether you possess the formal credentials to do so.

Kain endured the treatment with the particular stoicism of someone whose pride constituted his last functioning defence. He told Karen he would be fine once he had crutches, the optimism in his voice so thin it served as its own contradiction. Karen did not challenge it. She understood that hope, however implausible, performed a therapeutic function that no antiseptic could replicate, and that contradicting it would serve no purpose except to add cruelty to a morning that had already provided more than sufficient quantities.

She finished the dressing, tied off the final bandage, and told Kain she would return. There were things to attend to at camp. She asked whether he would be all right alone, and his nod came too quickly, too firmly, the performance of capability by a man who possessed very little of it but who would not surrender the pretence while anyone was watching. Karen rose, brushed the dust from her knees, and looked down at the figure seated at the base of the hill — young, wounded, stubborn, alone with a closed Portal and an open wound and the particular loneliness of being the one person everyone else had moved past on their way to somewhere more urgent.