The Carry

The morning that followed the worst night in Bixbus's brief history began with Glenda De Bruyn kneeling beside Kain Jeffries in the medical tent, preparing a syringe of antibiotics and discovering that the situation was considerably worse than the wound itself. Kain's calf, torn open by something that had dragged him through the darkness, was ugly but responsive — the nerves still fired, the pain still registered, the tissue was damaged but alive. The problem was the other leg. The leg that had not been touched. Kain could not feel it. Could not move it. Could not explain why a limb that had escaped the attack entirely had ceased to function overnight.

Glenda tested it with the methodical efficiency of a physician who understood that the gap between what she could diagnose and what she could treat had widened overnight into something she could not bridge with the resources available in a canvas tent in another dimension. The uninjured leg was warm to the touch but neurologically absent. Kain's eyes, when he understood what she was telling him, filled with a terror that had nothing to do with the creature that had mauled him and everything to do with the particular horror of a body betraying itself from the inside.

Glenda's assessment was swift and her conclusion unequivocal. They needed to get Kain to the lagoon. The body of water that had played some role in Joel's impossible recovery from death was the only therapeutic resource Clivilius had offered them, and whatever properties it possessed represented the sole hope for a condition that was progressing faster than her medical training could account for. The instruction was delivered as a command rather than a suggestion, born from the particular authority of a doctor who has run out of conventional options and must now place her trust in something she cannot explain.

Kain's resistance was immediate and visceral. He did not want the lagoon. The refusal carried a quality of dread that exceeded anything the night's predator had produced, a terror rooted in a previous encounter with the water whose details he could not bring himself to articulate in present company. The lagoon did things to the body that bypassed consent and rational thought, and the memory of what it had done to him was sufficiently devastating that he would have preferred to risk his legs rather than submit to its influence again. He could not say this. The shame was too complete, the experience too intimate, the audience too wide. He simply shook his head and whispered his refusal into the tent's stale air.

Glenda did not accept it. Chris Owen, who had arrived at the tent still half-dressed after being woken by Glenda's urgent summons and Karen's sharp-tongued encouragement, attempted to reassure Kain that the creature responsible for the attack had been killed. The reassurance was genuine but misdirected. Kain's fear was not of what waited outside the lagoon but of what waited within it. The distinction was lost on everyone except Kain himself, and he did not possess the language to correct them without exposing the thing he most wanted to keep hidden.

The first attempt to lift Kain failed. Chris, working alone with Glenda, could not manage the dead weight of a muscular young man whose legs provided no assistance whatsoever. The three of them collapsed in a graceless heap on the tent floor, and the silence that followed contained the specific frustration of people confronting a physical problem that willpower alone could not solve. Karen Owen appeared at the tent entrance before Glenda could go to find her, having intuited from the sounds of urgency that her help would be needed. She assessed the situation, accepted her role without question, and positioned herself to support Kain's waist and legs while Chris shouldered the heavier burden of his upper body.

They carried him out of the tent and into a morning that offered clarity without comfort. The daylight was merciless in what it revealed: the carcass of the shadow panther that Charity Lawson had killed during the night lay beside the remnants of the campfire, its body a confirmation that the sounds and the terror and the blood had not been a collective nightmare. The sight of it registered with each of them differently — Glenda catalogued it as evidence, Karen absorbed it as data about the ecosystem they inhabited, Chris noted it and kept walking, Kain did not see it because his eyes were closed and his mind was occupied with the dread of where they were taking him.

The journey to the lagoon was measured in sweat and shifting grip and the steady, insistent seep of blood through the bandages Glenda had wrapped around Kain's wounded calf. The terrain between the settlement and the water offered nothing in the way of assistance — uneven ground, loose dust that shifted beneath their boots, a gradient that punished every step with the additional effort of elevation. Karen and Chris established a rhythm that was awkward but functional, their bodies learning to coordinate around a burden that was heavier than either had anticipated. Kain's lean frame carried the dense musculature of a young man who had spent years in physical labour, and that weight bore down on their arms and shoulders and lower backs with the particular mercilessness of a load that could not be set down or redistributed.

Glenda walked ahead, her attention divided between the path and the patient, monitoring the bandage's deterioration with the grim awareness that every minute of transit was a minute of continued blood loss. She described, when Karen asked, what had happened during the night: the pursuit of Lois into the darkness, the ambush by a creature she now understood to be a shadow panther, Kain's mauling and the agonising journey back to camp. The account was delivered with clinical economy, the details selected for relevance rather than drama, the voice of a woman who had spent the night performing emergency surgery by torchlight and was now conducting a medical evacuation across hostile ground on three hours of sleep.

The lagoon appeared as they crested the final rise, its surface so still and clear against the surrounding desolation that it looked less like a natural feature and more like something placed there deliberately. The water caught the morning sun in flashes of silver and pale turquoise, pristine and impossibly calm, set against a landscape of scorched earth and muted ochre that had offered nothing but dust and violence for the past thirty-six hours. There were no trees around it, no grass, no insects, no sound. The silence that surrounded the lagoon was not the absence of noise but the presence of attention, as though the water itself was aware of their approach and was waiting to see what they would ask of it.

They lowered Kain to the bank. The sand shifted beneath their boots as they eased his weight down, leaving deep impressions that recorded the final steps of a journey that had cost all of them more than the physical effort suggested. Kain lay on the ground with his eyes still closed, his jaw clenched against a future he could not prevent, his body delivered to the one place in Clivilius he had sworn he would never return to.