4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
The Doctor Without a Clinic
A body in the river. A camp full of people who'd rather argue than act. And a scream from the lagoon that doesn't wait for anyone to finish their sentence. Glenda has treated trauma before — cardiac arrests, epidemics, casualties in places where resources ran out before hope did. But nothing in her training prepared her for a boy with his throat cut ear to ear who hasn't stopped breathing.
Some rivers carry water. Others carry warnings.
Henri's bark is the first sign that something is wrong — sharp, urgent, nothing playful in it. What follows is worse: a young man floating face-down in the crystal-clear shallows, feet tangled in rocks, body utterly still. The group fragments immediately. Keep the body or let it go? Evidence or liability? Proper burial or pragmatic disposal?
Glenda argues for retrieval, for examination, for answers. A rough autopsy might tell them something. Might help them understand what kind of place this is, what kind of danger they're facing. But the river doesn't wait for consensus. Paul retches. Luke loses his footing. And the body slips away downstream, claimed by the current before anyone can decide what to do with it.
Then comes the scream.
The run to the lagoon is brutal — loose dust, steep slopes, lungs burning. But Glenda doesn't stop. Can't stop. That sound came from Jamie's direction, and in Clivilius, screams don't echo without reason.
What she finds at the water's edge defies everything she knows. The body has been recovered. Jamie is cradling it, tears streaming, accusations flying at Luke. And when Glenda kneels to examine the wound — that precise, clinical slice across the throat — she discovers something impossible.
He's breathing.
Barely. Shallowly. In defiance of every medical principle she's ever learned. His circulatory system should have collapsed. His brain should have starved. And yet his chest rises and falls beneath her palm, and those striking blue eyes seem to meet hers with something that doesn't belong in a corpse.
They carry him back to camp together — Jamie, Luke, Kain taking over when Glenda's leg cramps. The boy hangs between them like a question without an answer, water dripping from his clothes, the dust coating everything.
She came to Clivilius as a doctor. Now she's learning that medicine here follows different rules — and the dead don't always stay dead.
