It's Burning

"The difference between medicine and torture sometimes comes down to whether you trust the person holding you underwater."

"Why don't we head back to camp for a bit," I suggested, pushing myself to my feet with a sense of purpose that I hoped masked the panic simmering beneath the surface.

I tried to sound casual, keeping my voice light, as if the suggestion were born of nothing more than practical consideration. As if I wasn't acutely aware of every sensation in my arm—the throb of the puncture wounds, the strange numbness spreading outward from them, the cold certainty that something was very, very wrong.

"Jamie's got a loud voice; he'll yell out if he needs us."

I gave Glenda's elbow a gentle tug, signalling it was time to leave the water's edge. The truth was, I needed to get away from the lagoon. Needed to create some distance between myself and that strange, beautiful, terrifying body of water that had already touched me in ways I didn't understand. Every moment I spent near it, I felt the pull—the memory of Joel's grip, the phantom sensation of those fingernails carving into my flesh, the way the grey had crept up my arm like frost spreading across glass.

At first, she resisted, her body tensed with a mix of professional duty and personal interest in the unfolding situation by the lagoon. I could feel the reluctance in the way she held herself, the way her gaze kept drifting back to Jamie and Kain and the miracle they were witnessing in the water. Joel was breathing. Joel was somehow alive. Of course she wanted to stay and watch. Any doctor would.

But I was insistent, and eventually, we started our quiet walk back to camp, each step taking us away from the immediate tension but not from the undercurrent of unease that seemed to permeate the air. My arm hung at my side, and I was careful to keep my sleeve pulled down, careful to angle my body so that the damaged flesh stayed hidden from her view.

We walked in silence, each lost in our own thoughts, the only sound the soft crunch of our footsteps in the ever-present dust and the distant murmur of voices from the lagoon. My mind raced through possibilities, calculations, desperate hopes. Maybe the river water had worked. Maybe the grey was gone. Maybe I was panicking over nothing.

We hadn't gone far when Glenda stopped abruptly, her gaze fixed on my arm.

"What's wrong with your arm?" she inquired, her tone shifting from curiosity to concern, her head nodding toward the limb in question.

I followed her gaze and felt my stomach drop. The sleeve had ridden up slightly during our walk, exposing a sliver of skin that was unmistakably grey—darker than before, the discolouration spreading beyond where it had been when I'd washed it in the river. The ash-coloured flesh looked wrong in a way that transcended simple injury, wrong in a way that spoke of death and decay and things that shouldn't exist in living tissue.

Reacting instinctively, I whisked my arm away from her view, a feeble attempt to deflect her attention. The movement was too quick, too defensive—the kind of reaction that only drew more attention rather than less. The kind of reaction that screamed guilt, that announced I was hiding something.

"Oh, it's nothing," I replied, hoping my voice sounded more convincing than I felt.

Glenda, however, was not to be deterred. She reached across my body with determination, her fingers wrapping around my arm with a firmness that demanded compliance. Her grip was stronger than I would have expected—the grip of someone accustomed to restraining patients who didn't want to be examined.

"This doesn't look like nothing," she stated, her voice carrying a weight of seriousness that made my heart sink.

She pushed my sleeve up further, exposing the full extent of the damage—three parallel lines where Joel's fingernails had carved into my flesh, surrounded by skin that had turned the colour of old ash. The wounds themselves were dark, almost black at their centres, and the grey radiated outward from them like cracks spreading through ice. It had grown since I'd washed it in the river. It had grown despite my desperate hope that the water had cured it.

"Tell me what happened."

The command in her voice left no room for evasion, no space for half-truths or deflection.

Feeling the tremble begin in my lower lip, I bit down hard, trying to steady myself against the surge of emotions her question unleashed. There was no hiding it now. No pretending it was nothing. The flesh around the three small holes had darkened further since the incident. It looked wrong—profoundly, viscerally wrong—in a way that went beyond simple infection or bruising. It looked like death spreading through living flesh.

"Joel dug his fingernails into my arm when he first... woke up," I managed to say, the words feeling inadequate to describe the surreal nature of the event.

I hesitated at "woke up," unsure if that term truly captured the essence of what had transpired. Woke up implied sleep, implied normality, implied a state that could be reversed as easily as it had begun. What Joel had done was something else entirely—a resurrection, an impossibility, a nightmare made flesh. He hadn't woken up. He had come back from the dead. And when he'd grabbed me, some part of that death had transferred itself to my arm.

"That was when you screamed?"

Glenda pieced together, her memory connecting my reaction to the moment of Joel's unexpected resurgence. Of course she remembered. Everyone must have heard me—that shriek of terror that had torn from my throat without conscious thought, that animal sound of pure fear that I hadn't even known I was capable of making.

My face flushed with embarrassment, the heat rising as I nodded in confirmation. "Yeah."

The admission felt like a confession of weakness. I had screamed. Like a child in a haunted house, like someone who couldn't handle what they were seeing, like a man who had lost all semblance of composure and control. The fact that what I'd been seeing was a dead man grabbing my arm with superhuman strength, his fingernails carving into my flesh while his eyes stared at nothing and everything—that didn't make the memory any less humiliating. I was supposed to be the one holding things together. I was supposed to be the calm, practical businessman who could handle any crisis. And I had screamed.

The shift in Glenda's expression was immediate, her professional curiosity now marred by a deeper, more contemplative concern. Her face turned serious with thought, reflecting the unusualness of the situation and the potential implications of my injury. I could see her medical training engaging—the assessment, the differential diagnosis, the calculation of risks and possibilities. But this wasn't in any textbook she'd ever read. This wasn't anything that any medical school in any world had prepared her for.

"Is it bad?" I asked, my voice laced with a caution that betrayed my fear of the answer.

I didn't really want her to respond, hoping perhaps that my question could remain rhetorical, unanswered. As long as she didn't say it, maybe it wouldn't be true. As long as she didn't put words to the horror spreading across my flesh, maybe I could pretend it wasn't happening.

"Well, it's not bloody good," Glenda replied.

I chuckled nervously, a sound more of discomfort than amusement. The laugh caught in my throat, half-strangled by fear.

Glenda certainly knows how to put things bluntly, I thought, her straightforwardness a grounding force in the midst of our surreal circumstances. There was something almost comforting about her directness—no false reassurances, no gentle lies, no attempts to soften the blow with meaningless platitudes. Just the truth, however uncomfortable. At least I knew where I stood.

"Come," she instructed, a tone of authority mixed with a hint of an idea sparking in her voice.

Something had shifted in her demeanour—from diagnosis to treatment, from assessment to action. She had seen the problem. Now she was going to do something about it. I found myself following her, driven by a mix of curiosity and trust. What choice did I have? My arm was turning grey, spreading death across my flesh, and I had no idea what was happening to me. Glenda was the only medical professional within an entire dimension. She was the only one who might have any idea how to stop this.

We quickly made our way back to camp, the urgency of her stride compelling me to match her pace. My arm throbbed with each step, the wounds seeming to pulse in time with my heartbeat. The grey flesh felt cold—colder than it should have been, colder than the rest of my body—as if the blood had stopped flowing properly through that part of my arm.

"Wait here," she instructed before disappearing into the supply tent.

Left to my own devices, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, the nervous anticipation building. The camp felt too quiet, too empty, with everyone else still at the lagoon witnessing Joel's impossible recovery. I stared at my arm, watching the grey skin in the harsh sunlight, imagining I could see it spreading even as I watched. Was it growing? Was it moving? Or was that just my fear, projecting nightmares onto reality?

What did Glenda have in mind? But then again, she did save Jamie's life, so I don't have any reason not to trust her, I reminded myself, trying to quell the rising tide of anxiety.

She had extracted a charcoal splinter from Jamie's chest using nothing but her bare hands and improvised tools. She had stitched together a throat that should never have been healable, that should have been a one-way ticket to death. If anyone could figure out what to do about my greying arm, it was her. If anyone could pull a miracle out of this disaster, it was Glenda.

When Glenda emerged, bandages in hand, her determination was palpable. Her jaw was set, her eyes focused, her movements quick and purposeful.

"We need to go back to the lagoon," she announced, already moving away.

The words hit me like a physical blow. Back to the lagoon. Back to the water where Joel had grabbed me, where my skin had first turned grey, where something impossible and terrifying had touched me. The thought of submerging my arm in that strange water again—of willingly placing my wounded flesh in the same substance that had somehow brought Joel back from the dead—made my stomach clench with primal fear.

"Glenda, wait!" The words tumbled out of me before I could stop them. "It's only a minor wound. I'm not sure we need the lagoon."

My protest was half-hearted, a part of me still clinging to the hope that maybe, just maybe, we could handle this without returning to that place of mystery and fear. The lagoon had done something to Joel—something miraculous, yes, but also something deeply unsettling. What if it did something else to me? What if it made things worse instead of better? What if the cure was more terrifying than the disease?

Glenda stopped and eyed me cautiously, her gaze probing. She knew I was holding something back. Of course she knew. Doctors always knew when patients weren't telling them everything.

"Go on," she encouraged, sensing there was more I hadn't shared.

"Well," I began, dragging out the word as I tried to marshal my thoughts. The confession felt like admitting weakness, admitting that I had kept something from her, that I had tried to handle this on my own and failed.

"I've already washed it in the river by the lagoon and the flesh seemed to return to normal within a few minutes. So..."

"And then without the water it turned grey again," Glenda finished my sentence, her mind working quickly to piece together the implications.

Her expression shifted—not alarm, exactly, but intense concentration. The kind of focus a doctor brings to a puzzle that doesn't fit any known pattern. I could almost see her thinking, running through possibilities, forming hypotheses, designing experiments in her mind.

"Interesting. Let's try this river water then," she said, nodding toward the river running behind the tents, her decision made with a characteristic blend of curiosity and decisiveness.

The river—not the lagoon. Different water, but perhaps the same healing properties. A compromise between my fear and her treatment plan.

"It can't hurt. Can it?"

The question was more to myself than to Glenda, a verbal manifestation of my lingering doubts. Everything in this world seemed capable of hurting us in unexpected ways. The very ground we walked on seemed hostile. The sun beat down with unusual intensity. The darkness held terrors we couldn't name. Why should the water be any different?

Glenda shrugged, a gesture that encapsulated her uncertainty. "We shall see."

Her response, while noncommittal, carried an undercurrent of hope—a willingness to explore all possibilities in the face of the unknown. It wasn't a guarantee. It wasn't even reassurance. But it was something. It was forward motion. It was trying.

"Go," Glenda prompted, her voice firm as she pointed at the clear, flowing water just a few inches below where we knelt along the riverbank.

The seriousness in her tone, combined with the urgency of our situation, left no room for hesitation. The river burbled past, deceptively peaceful, giving no indication of what it might do to my wounded flesh. It looked like any river on Earth—clear water over stones, gentle current, the soft sound of flow that usually meant peace and tranquillity. But nothing in this world was what it seemed.

I submerged my arm into the water, bracing myself for the familiar, comforting tingling sensation I had come to associate with the healing properties of these mysterious waters. The coolness enveloped my skin, and for a moment—just a moment—I thought it would be the same gentle relief I'd experienced before.

Instead, a strong, unexpected burning sensation surged through my arm, catching me completely off guard.

The pain was immediate and savage—nothing like the soothing wash I'd felt in the river earlier. It felt like someone had poured acid into the wounds, like fire was racing through my veins, consuming everything in its path. The burning was so intense that for a moment I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but feel the agony tearing through my flesh.

Instinctively, I began to retract my arm, the pain overwhelming, every nerve screaming at me to escape the source of the agony. My body moved without conscious thought, pure animal instinct driving me to flee from what was hurting me.

But Glenda's hand shot out, grasping my arm with surprising strength.

"That wasn't long enough," she said, her determination evident as she thrust my arm back under the water's surface.

Her grip was iron, unyielding, holding me in place despite my desperate attempts to pull away. She was stronger than she looked—or perhaps desperation gave her strength she wouldn't normally possess.

"It's burning!" I shouted, panic edging into my voice as I struggled against her firm grip.

The sensation was unlike anything I had anticipated, a fierce, consuming fire that seemed to gnaw at my flesh from the inside out. My vision blurred with tears I couldn't control—not tears of emotion, but the body's automatic response to overwhelming pain. I could feel my arm trying to jerk free, could feel my whole body leaning away from the river, but Glenda held me fast.

"Wash your arm," Glenda instructed, her tone brooking no argument, even as she acknowledged my discomfort with a brief, sympathetic glance. "I don't think I should touch it."

Her words, though confusing at first, began to make sense as I considered the potential risks of contamination—both to me and to her. Whatever was in my wounds, whatever had turned my skin grey, she didn't want it on her hands. The realisation was both sensible and terrifying. She was treating me like a biohazard. She was treating my arm like it contained something contagious, something dangerous, something that could spread if she made direct contact.

My heart raced, shock and a burgeoning sense of betrayal mingling as I wrestled with Glenda's unexpected assertiveness. She was hurting me. She was holding me in pain and refusing to let me escape it. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to fight her, to tear my arm free and run, to get away from the water and the pain and the woman who was causing it.

Yet, as I forced myself to focus on the wound submerged just below the surface of the water, a grudging realisation dawned on me. She was right. Through the distortion of the water and my own tears, I could see something happening to my skin. The grey was receding, pulling back like a tide going out, replaced by the pink of healthy flesh. The ash colour was dissolving, dispersing, fleeing from whatever the water was doing to it.

With a resigned sigh, I ceased my struggles and began to gently swirl the water around my arm, watching with a mixture of awe and disbelief as the skin gradually began to return to its normal colour. The intense burning that had initially seized me slowly ebbed away, replaced by a dull ache that seemed almost welcome in comparison. Pain I could handle. The burning had been something else entirely—something that felt less like healing and more like purging. Like the water was burning away the contamination, cauterising the infection, destroying whatever had been trying to claim my arm.

The transformation was mesmerising, a tangible sign of hope in a situation fraught with uncertainty and fear. As the minutes passed, the pain and the initial panic gave way to a profound sense of relief. Glenda's unyielding stance, though jarring, had guided me through the pain to a semblance of healing. Sometimes the path to recovery requires us to endure discomfort. Sometimes you have to trust the person causing the pain, trust that they're doing it for your benefit, trust that the agony is temporary and the healing is real.

Sitting back on my heels, I lifted my arm from the water, noting with a mixture of relief and astonishment that the evidence of the trauma had faded significantly from my skin. The three parallel lines were still visible—fainter now, but present, like scratches that were already starting to heal—yet the grey had vanished entirely. My arm looked almost normal again, aside from the wounds themselves. Human. Pink. Alive.

"Give me your arm," Glenda ordered, her voice carrying a sense of urgency that snapped me back to the present.

As I extended my dripping arm toward her, Glenda began to wrap the wound tightly with the bandages she had prepared. Her movements were confident, practised—the hands of someone who had wrapped countless wounds in her career. Figure-eight patterns around the wrist, overlapping layers to ensure coverage, tension adjusted to support without restricting. But then, suddenly, she stopped, her hands pausing mid-motion, which immediately sent a wave of panic through me.

"What's wrong?" I asked, my voice tinged with the anxiety that Glenda's hesitation had sparked. Had she seen something? Was the grey coming back already? Was there something worse happening that I couldn't see?

"I'm not sure if it will make any difference, but it's worth a try," she murmured, more to herself than to me.

"What is?" I pressed, desperate for any sliver of understanding.

Without answering, Glenda carefully unwrapped the bandage from around my arm and submerged it in the river. Watching her, a realisation dawned on me.

Ahh. Now I understand. Even if it makes no difference, it's a genius idea to try.

She was going to soak the bandage in the river water. Keep the healing properties in contact with my wound even after we left the riverbank. It was so simple, so obvious in retrospect, that I felt foolish for not thinking of it myself. Keep the cure touching the disease. Maintain the treatment even when the patient couldn't stay at the source. It was basic medicine applied to an impossible situation, and it might just work.

Glenda looked up, catching my gaze with a hint of satisfaction in her eyes. The look of someone who had solved a puzzle, who had found an answer when the question seemed impossible.

"It might help to keep the properties of the water on the wound for longer. If we can change the dressing whenever it completely dries out, with a bit of luck, your wound should heal fully," she explained, her smile reflecting a blend of hope and determination.

A treatment plan. An actual plan, based on observation and logic and the scientific method applied to a situation that defied all science. It was the most reassuring thing I'd heard all day. It was something to hold onto, something concrete in a world where nothing else made sense.

I shrugged, the gesture a silent concession to her plan. "Go for it."

With a renewed sense of purpose, Glenda wrapped the soaked bandage around my wound once more. The wet fabric was cold against my skin, but it was a welcome cold—the cold of healing rather than the cold of Joel's dead-not-dead grip. The cold of hope rather than the cold of death. Yet, as she worked, her brow furrowed in concentration, a clear sign that her mind was already racing ahead to the next challenge.

"The sun is too hot," she observed, breaking the silence that had settled between us. "I'll have to find something to protect it, try to keep it moist for longer."

She rubbed her temples, a gesture of deep thought, as she murmured, "But what?"

The question, though whispered, echoed loudly in the silence that followed. The Clivilius sun beat down on us, relentless and indifferent to our struggles. It would dry the bandage within hours, maybe less. And then what? Back to the river every time the cloth dried? An endless cycle of soaking and rewrapping until the wound finally healed—or until it didn't?

Closing my eyes, I allowed myself a moment of raw honesty.

This place is a fucking disaster.

I thought, the words a silent acknowledgment of the overwhelming challenges we faced. Joel's resurrection, my infection, the concrete that needed curing, the sheds that needed building, the night terrors that waited in the darkness. Every time we solved one problem, three more appeared in its place. Every time we found hope, something new emerged to threaten it. We were always running, always reacting, always one step behind the disasters that seemed determined to destroy us.

But we were still here. Still breathing. Still fighting.

I opened my eyes and looked at the bandage wrapped around my arm—wet, temporary, improvised. It wasn't a cure. It was barely even a treatment. But it was something. And in Clivilius, something was better than nothing. Something was progress. Something was one more day of survival.

"We'll figure it out," I said, surprising myself with the conviction in my voice. "We always do."

Glenda looked at me, and for a moment, something like gratitude flickered across her features. Then her expression returned to its customary focus, her mind already turning to the problem of keeping the bandage moist in the relentless heat.

We were survivors. Improvisers. People who had stumbled into an impossible situation and were refusing to lie down and die. And as long as we kept refusing, we had a chance. As long as we kept fighting, kept trying, kept applying whatever intelligence and creativity we possessed to the problems this world threw at us, we might just make it through.

The wound on my arm throbbed beneath its wet wrapping—a reminder of danger, yes, but also of healing. Of hope. Of the strange, inexplicable properties of this alien world that could kill us or save us, depending on circumstances we were only beginning to understand.

I flexed my fingers experimentally, watching the bandage shift with the movement. The arm still worked. The flesh was still pink. The grey was gone, at least for now.