“I’d like to watch sometime,” Beckett says, as if Nathan never spoke, “and see how it’s done.” I think he’s sincere in that. He’s watching everything now. The food, the manners, the plates. And he’s going for the preserves again, just to show he can.
“Actually,” says Annis, “we’d be grateful if you all stayed in the house for now, until … ” No one knows how to fill this blank, so the table goes silent. Again my guilt is hot. I’ve put them in a terrible position.
“If they were coming about the false information last resting, they would’ve done it already,” says Grandpapa. “But we have to assume we’re being watched.”
How often, I suddenly wonder, is this house being watched?
“Nathan, I need you to take the children to the metal shop.”
“Why can’t she watch them?” He means me.
“Because Nadia has people coming to see her.”
I’ve already tended to a sprained wrist, a second-degree burn, and a birth. The last one didn’t actually need much of my help, but Nathan was not pleased to come down from the loft at waking and discover it.
“I’ll watch them,” Jillian says unexpectedly. She smiles at Annis, her eyes big and blue, and I wonder what she’s playing at. But Annis is captivated by those eyes, so uncommon, and so close to Nita’s. And now Jillian is eating a second piece of bread. Did Nathan just put that on her plate? He’s looking at her from the corner of his eye. And she knows it.
There’s a knock on the door, and we all go still, except for Annis, who goes to the closed curtain. “Mika,” she says. “Nadia, are you finished eating?”
Mika, unfortunately, needs her hand stitched. I go as fast as I can while she sweats, half my mind on this house. Without Nita here, smoothing over the rough patches, protecting me from what might hurt, I feel that for the first time, my eyes are fully open. How did Mika know I was here to stitch her hand? How do any of them? No one ever questions me or my unusually good grasp of medicine, no more than Annis has questioned Beckett. They never seek me at my supposed home on the far end of the Outside. I am just Nadia, and I come to Annis’s house and I heal them. It’s the way things have always been. But the way things have always been doesn’t exactly make sense. And there’s a hole beneath Annis’s floor.
Being Knowing, I think, has not kept me from being naive.
Then I don’t have time to wonder anymore, because a broken nose comes in, which there’s not much to do about, and a five-year-old boy, crying in his mother’s arms. The boy concerns me. He’s pale, sweating when it isn’t hot, and when Angela, his mother, sits him on the table, I can feel that his skin is more than two degrees too high—unusual for an Outsider, unheard of Underneath. He’s vomited twice into one of Annis’s pots, and there’s a point of pain when I press on his side. A pain that makes him shout. His mother gathers him close, strokes the little boy’s mop of soft brown hair.
“How long has he been like this?” I ask.
“Three days. Has he eaten something that disagrees?”
I don’t answer, just close my eyes, searching my memory. I don’t like what I find. I think I Know what I should do. I Know what the training recitations say I should do. I’m just not sure I can do it.
“Wait just a minute,” I tell her.
I hurry to the second resting room, slip inside without even thinking about knocking, shut the door, and lean on it.
Beckett straightens from a small mirror hung on the wall between the beds. He’s down to the tight shirt he was wearing when he first got here, wiping soap from his face, a long, thin blade in his hand. There’s also quite a bit of blood. Whatever he usually shaves with, it’s not a razor. It’s probably something I wouldn’t even understand.
“I’ve always wanted to try one of these things,” he says, waving the razor. “Turns out it’s terrible.” Then he runs his eyes over me. “What’s wrong?”
“What can the glasses see inside a person? Besides bones?”
“It depends.”
“Can you see an appendix? Could you tell if it’s inflamed?”
He rinses the blade in a bowl of water, brows together. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d know what I’m looking at.”
He’s right. This wouldn’t be clear. Not like a cracked bone. Then I’m decided.
“I need help,” I say. “I can’t ask … ” I leave the thought without finishing it. There’s not another soul I could ask.
He doesn’t even look at me a long time. He just says, “Tell me what you need.”
Ready?” Sam asks, and when I nod, she turns the lock on the front door.
We get to work, fast, Samara throwing a piece of cloth over the table we’ve already scrubbed, dousing it with a bottle of antiseptic that smells like alcohol and peppermint, me lighting every lamp I can find.
The little boy, Michael, is still, eyes closed, breathing hard in a way that’s all wrong for a kid, and that seems worse to me than the crying. Sam convinced his mother to leave him with us for three or four hours, so he could get several rounds of medicine for his stomach. Outsiders do not understand surgery, so what we’re doing here is against every bioethic Earth could think up.
I don’t know if I’d have the guts for it, when I knew I couldn’t forget if something went wrong. But when I asked Sam if she was sure, she said, “Eighty-five percent,” which didn’t seem that great, until she explained that there was an 85 percent chance that Michael was going to die if she didn’t do something. And, she reasoned, if she didn’t try, “Then what is all this Knowing for anyway?”
But one thing I’m learning about Samara Archiva: When she’s decided what to do, she’s fearless about it. Even when she’s scared of what she is doing. Like surgery. For the first time. On a child. On Annis Weaver’s kitchen table. Before Annis, or Nathan, or Cyrus, or Jill, or a wandering family member takes it into their head to walk into this room.
As soon as the lamps are done, I grab the medical kit from the resting room, bring it to the counter, and whisper, “You won’t believe what’s going on in there. The kids, they’re all in kind of a pile. Asleep.”
Sam looks up from pinning a scrap of cloth over her front. I can smell the antiseptic. “With Jillian?”
“I know. Weird, right?” Jill’s not actually having to fake her recovery yet, and the lack of light has both our sleep patterns in a mess.
Sam comes and stands next to me as I lay out the medical kit, tense. I start talking fast, because I know she will remember.