Sari's Suspicions

The gauze roll on the desk still smelled faintly of carbolic, and underneath it, fainter, something scorched — not burned cloth, burned skin, the smell Pima's hands had carried out of the receiving hall and hadn't managed to scrub off yet.

Sari stood in the doorway with the supply ledger open against her forearm like a hymnal, and she did not look at Jala first. She looked at the ledger, then at Pima, and said, "Two rolls of gauze used tonight. The requisition sheet says one."

Jala, by the window, went very still in the particular way of a man deciding whether stillness would help him.

"Go check on Doma," Pima said to him, not to Sari. "He'll want water when he wakes."

Jala looked at Sari, got nothing, and went. His boots were quiet on the tile. Pima had never noticed before how quiet he could make them when he wanted to.

Sari waited until the door had shut behind him, then set the ledger flat on the desk and turned it so Pima could see the page, the tidy columns, the small pencil tick marks that were Sari's own handwriting counting supplies the way another woman might count sheep.

"That leaves one roll on the shelf, when the ward used one roll a week for three months before you started." She did not raise her voice. She never raised her voice; Pima had learned that the quieter Sari got, the closer she was to something she couldn't file. "And there's an hour missing from your card during the vent fault. Not logged as break, not logged as duty. Just gone."

"I was in the supply room."

"I checked the supply room log. You weren't."

Pima said nothing. The silence went on a beat longer than was comfortable, and Sari let it, the way she let silences sit during rounds, waiting for a symptom to declare itself.

"Jala says he scraped his arm loading the linen cart," Sari said. "I've seen cart scrapes. They don't run in a straight line like that, and they don't weep the way his was weeping when I changed his dressing an hour ago." She folded her arms. "I'm not asking you to explain Jala's arm. I'm asking you what you're doing with my supplies and my hours, and I want the truth, because I am tired, Pima, and I do not have the patience tonight to write up a nurse I like."

There it was. Not an accusation laid down like a fist — a ledger, opened, items checked off in order, waiting for Pima to either close it or blow it open. Pima ran the three items again in the half-second she had: the gauze, the missing hour, the arm. Three separate lies would need three separate stories, and stories multiplied risk. One true thing, offered early, cheap enough to give away and expensive enough to satisfy, would swallow all three and leave nothing underneath for Sari to keep digging at.

"I'm looking for my brother," Pima said. "Tano. He worked here before I did. He went into the lower level a fortnight ago and didn't come back out, and I've been using my off-hours to try to find where he went." She let that sit, flat and plain, no tremor built into it on purpose. "The gauze was for me. I cut my hand on a shelf bracket down in storage. I didn't log the hour because I didn't want anyone stopping me before I'd looked."

The part about Tano was true in every particular. The hand was not; there was no cut, no bracket, nothing on her skin for Sari to find if she asked to see it. She watched Sari's face do the arithmetic, watched her line the new fact up against the burn on Jala's arm and find that it very nearly fit, close enough that pushing harder would cost more than it bought.

"Tano," Sari repeated, like she was testing the name for rot. "I remember the name. Nobody's said it out loud on this ward since he stopped showing up on the roster."

"Yes."

"You should have told me the first night."

"You'd have put me on day rotation and kept me out of the lower wards entirely."

Sari's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Yes. I would have." She closed the ledger, but she didn't stop talking, and that was the part Pima hadn't expected — the ledger closing was supposed to be the end of it. "There was a nurse here, eleven years ago. Utta. Night shift, same as you, before the roster locked the way it does now. She went looking for a patient's family member who'd gone down past the second landing, and she came back asking questions I didn't have answers for, and I went to the day matron and asked them for her."

"What did the matron say?"

"That Utta had transferred out. That I should mind my rotation and stop asking things that weren't my business to ask." Sari's fingers, still resting on the ledger's cover, pressed flat, whitening slightly at the knuckle, though her voice never changed register. "I was twenty-six. I minded my rotation. I have minded it for eleven years, and in eleven years nobody has asked me a question I could not answer with a rule." She looked at Pima directly then, something unguarded moving loose behind her eyes for exactly as long as it took to say the next sentence. "You just asked me one I can't answer with a rule either. I don't know where Utta went. I never found out. I stopped looking because I was told to, and I have regretted it in a specific, particular way every year since, and I am not going to do that to you."

It wasn't kindness exactly. Pima had seen kindness on this ward — Jala's rough, wordless kind, doled out in dressings and silence — and this had a harder edge to it, something closer to a debt being paid against an old account rather than opened new.

"So you're not writing me up," Pima said.

"I'm not writing you up." Sari picked the ledger back off the desk, tucked it under her arm the way she'd carried it in, already composing herself back into the shape the ward expected of her. "I am telling the requisition office the second roll went to a hand injury, mine, so the numbers close clean. And you are going to tell me if you find him. Alive or otherwise. That's the price."

"That's fair."

"It is not fair. It is what I'm asking for, which is different." Sari was already at the door, already half back inside her own procedure, but she paused there with her hand on the frame. "Utta's file is still in the cabinet in the day matron's office. Third drawer. I looked once, years after, when nobody was watching. There was nothing in it past her intake form. Not a discharge, not a transfer order, not a death notice. Nothing." She let the door swing half shut behind the words, so that the last of them came through the gap instead of into the open room. "I think about that drawer more than I tell anyone."

Then she was gone, her footsteps falling into the same even, unhurried rhythm they always had, as though the last five minutes had never happened at all.

Pima stood by the desk a long moment, the ledger's absence on the wood somehow louder than its presence had been, and understood that what had just passed between them wasn't forgiveness. It was a loan, and loans came due. She would owe Sari the truth about Tano whenever she finally had it, the whole truth and not the clean, cut-down version she'd just handed over — and she had no idea yet which version Sari could survive hearing.