Second Wind

The smell hit Pima before she reached the receiving hall: wet paper left too long in a drawer, and under it, the sweetish rot-and-resin stink she'd pulled out of the duct a day and a half ago with her own two hands. She'd scrubbed that smell off her forearms with vinegar until the skin went pink. It had no business being back.

She rounded the admissions desk at a jog, tray of evening dressings forgotten on the counter, and found cot six — one of the South Ward overflow beds pushed under the riser after the water cut folded two wards into one room — shaking.

Doma was an old dockhand with a collapsed lung and a voice like gravel in a bucket, and right now he wasn't using either. His heels drummed the frame. His lips had gone the color of a bruise three days old, and the fine hairs at his temple stood wet and flat like he'd been dunked. Above his cot, the duct grille wept a thread of pale, fibrous white into the room, feathering at the seam the way frost feathers a window.

"Jala." Pima's voice came out flatter than she meant it, which was how she knew she was already scared. "Duct's back. Cot six is seizing."

He was there in four strides, big hands already reaching for the restraint straps out of habit, and she caught his wrist before he could buckle anything down.

"Not restraints. He's not fighting anything. He's not getting air." She pressed two fingers under Doma's jaw, found the pulse fast and thready, then bent close to his open mouth and breathed in instead of talking. Thin. Sweet at the back of it, the same sweetness as the grille. "The new growth's choked the duct again, and it's pulling good air out of this room faster than the room's making it. He's been closest to the vent the longest. That's why it's him first."

"Sari's rounds are in fourteen minutes."

"Then we don't have time to wait for Sari's rounds." She was already moving, hauling the supply cart two-handed toward the cot, mind running ahead of her hands the way it used to in the Lanu practicals, before the practicals stopped mattering. "I need the feeding tube kit, the hand bellows from the resuscitation shelf, and the beeswax tin. Not the salve tin. The sealant."

Jala didn't ask why. He went.

She worked while he was gone, tilting Doma's head, clearing his tongue, counting the gaps between breaths — four seconds, five, six, the numbers climbing the wrong direction. When Jala came back she took the rubber feeding tube and fed it past Doma's teeth to the back of his throat, not down, just past the blockage of his own tongue, and fitted the bellows' nozzle to the free end.

"This isn't going to fix the duct," she said, working the bellows once, testing the give. Air whistled out the sides where the fitting didn't seat. "It's going to buy him lungs while you fix the duct."

"How."

"Peg under the seam, twist to the lever point. You watched me scrape it last time. This time it's grown back thicker and it's grown back fast, which means whatever's under the floor isn't just healing. It's answering."

She didn't have time to sit with that thought. The bellows leaked again on the second squeeze, a thin hiss at the join, and she swore under her breath, pulled the tube free an inch, and smeared a ring of beeswax around the fitting with her thumb before reseating it. Third squeeze held. Doma's chest rose under her palm, not much, but real, air where a minute ago there'd been none.

"Go," she told Jala, and slapped the leverage peg from her kit into his palm.

He'd already dragged the service ladder under the grille. He went up to the top rungs, wedged the leverage peg into the seam the way she'd shown him on the sluice-door hinge, and leaned his weight into it. The growth inside gave a wet, tearing sound, like a bandage pulled off too soon. A fresh smear of pale resin welled out around the peg and ran down the inside of his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up.

"Jala—"

"I feel it." His voice didn't change pitch, which was somehow worse than if it had. He kept twisting. The seam groaned open another half inch, enough that the thread of white stopped feeding and the air above the cot thinned out clean instead of sweet. He pulled the peg free and stepped back down the ladder in no hurry at all, the kind of care that told her exactly how much the not-hurrying was costing him.

On the cot, Doma's color was coming back, gray sliding toward pink at the lips, his breathing catching a rhythm on its own that let Pima ease the bellows off and slide the tube free. His eyes opened, unfocused, found the ceiling, found nothing, and slid shut again — asleep, not dying. She checked his pulse once more to be sure. Steady. Slower.

Only then did she look at Jala's arm.

The resin had eaten a stripe across his forearm four inches long, skin gone shiny and raw, weeping at the edges like a burn from a stove rather than a cut from a blade. He was looking at it the way a man looks at a bill he already knows he can't pay.

"That's not the same stuff from the first duct," Pima said. "That didn't do this to my hands."

"Fresher." He said it like he was reading a label. "Green wood burns the fire different than dry."

"Sit down. Let me wrap it before—"

"Two minutes." He was already rolling his sleeve down over the wound, wincing once, quick, when the cloth dragged the raw skin. "I'll tell her the ladder again. Caught it on a rung bolt."

"You used that excuse two shifts ago." She'd heard him say it to Sari herself, standing in the hallway with a different, smaller mark.

"Then I'll tell her I'm clumsy." No rasp of a joke under it this time. His face had gone still in a way she hadn't seen on him before, and she understood, watching him, that the dry lines were armor he put on deliberately, and that right now he didn't have one left to reach for.

Down the corridor, a door swung and settled, and boot heels started toward the ward at Sari's exact, unhurried pace — the rounds clock in her body more reliable than any bell in the building.

Pima had eleven seconds, maybe twelve, to decide what she was looking at: a man who'd torn a growing thing open with his bare strength so a stranger could keep breathing, standing in front of her with the evidence of it burning under his sleeve, waiting to find out whether she'd hand him a lie or make him tell the truth alone.

She picked up the tray of forgotten dressings from the desk, unclipped the second-to-last roll of gauze, and pressed it into his good hand instead of his hurt one.

"Wrap over the sleeve," she said. "Tell her you scraped it loading the linen cart. I'll back it."

Jala looked at her for one long second, something passing behind his eyes that wasn't quite gratitude and wasn't quite shame, and then Sari's shadow crossed the doorway, and there was no more time to decide anything at all.