“Everything I have is field first aid, so super basic … ” She looks confused. “For when you’re traveling. Away from a city. For emergencies.” Now she nods. “And this is not my area, so … ” She nods again. I pull out a smaller pack with a face covering, gloves, clamps, and a kit of medical tools, all sealed in a clear film.
“This is the scalpel.” I show her through the package. “Slide your forefinger into the slot on top, and the knife will cauterize as it cuts. Slide your finger out when you want it to stop. And this”—I pick up a slim cylinder—“is for sealing a wound. Slide your finger in again, and run a ribbon of the cellular material between the two ends of tissue you want to fuse. The harder you press, the more material you’ll get.” I glance at her face, focused, storing the information in her memory. “So no sewing people up with thread, okay?”
She smiles. “Are you sure?”
“Definitely.”
“Help me wash.”
I stand behind her and pour water from the pitcher while she holds her arms out over the sink, sleeves folded up so they can’t fall, waiting while she washes up to her elbows. I probably should have moved back, given her more room, but I don’t want to. Her hair is tied away from her face, and I want to put my hand in it, like I did in the caves. But I also don’t want to give her another memory she didn’t ask for. She holds out her arms and I rinse with the pitcher again, then open up the face covering and let her get it in place.
I can see only her eyes now, through the thin film of the containment barrier. She looks half Earth, and half Canaan. “Okay?” I ask. Her shoulders rise and fall. She nods.
It takes just a few seconds to let the infuser calculate the dose of anesthetic and get it into Michael. I stay behind him, so he won’t see anything he doesn’t understand, Sam hanging back for the same reason. But he’s so out of it, I’m not sure he even noticed when it went in.
When his eyes close and stay that way, I get his clothes off fast and lay him on the table, the cloth still damp from antiseptic, and use more of it to scrub his abdomen and right side, and basically everywhere I can reach. He’s breathing deep and slow, but he’s sweating, his skin coming out in gooseflesh. I cover up his lower end, because it seems like the right thing to do, and then I wait for Samara. She’s not with me. She’s inside her mind. Going through her information.
Then she opens her eyes and says, “Watch his breathing and his heart rate. Tell me if it changes. Wait, can you see blood pressure?” she asks. I nod, and slide on the glasses. I’m pretty sure my own vitals are changing as we speak.
Samara unseals the package of instruments, laying them ready, and feels carefully around Michael’s side, poking and probing. Then she picks up the scalpel and cuts a five-centimeter gash into his smooth brown skin.
I know it’s why we’re standing here, but somehow, I can’t believe she actually just did that.
I’ve never thought of myself as squeamish. Part of anthropology is the study of bodies, and I’ve seen a lot of them, in various states of dead. But this is different. There’s a pulse beating, living blood I can smell, and the smoke of burning tissue making wisps in the lamplight. I can’t look at it.
I watch Sam instead, focused and with her fingers bloody, working quick inside the boy’s body. I hear her hiss once, the clank of metal as she switches tools, and after a few minutes she’s triumphant, holding up a red-and-pink piece of flesh no bigger than Michael’s little finger.
And then her eyes get big. She has nowhere to put it. And Jasmina has just started crying in the other room.
“Here!” I grab one of the sanitized cloths we had ready for dabbing blood, and hold it out. And Sam drops Michael’s severed appendix into my palm.
Okay.
She gets right back to work. I can hear Jill shushing Jasmina in the resting room.
“How’s his heart rate?” Sam whispers.
“A little fast.” Like mine.
“Breathing?”
“Normal.” Mine’s not.
The resting room has gone quiet again. I hear a soft whirr, see the blinking green light on the end of the sealer, and think about the herbs on the ceiling until Samara says, “Beck, help me.”
I leave Michael’s wrapped appendix on the bench and come around the table. She’s ready to seal her original cut, and I can see the tissue she’s been working with through the wide gap of skin.
“Can you do the last one?” she asks. “I need two hands to hold the skin together and yours aren’t clean enough.”
I take the sealer, which is sticky, look away while she pulls the skin back together, then fill the cut with cellular fusion material. It sinks in, bridges the gap in Michael’s wound. Samara holds it in place for another minute, then lets go, wiping away the telltale smudges of blood. The incision looks like a small scrape. Like Michael brushed against something rough. And that’s it. In two days, he won’t even have that.
“Heart rate?” she says. “Blood pressure?”
I nod. No major change. Sam touches the mark gingerly with a finger, and then she pulls off the face covering and she smiles. A real one, like I haven’t seen since she was jumping off those roots in the caves.
“That,” she says, “was amazing.”
“Was it infected? His appendix?”
“What? Oh, yes. It nearly burst when I was cutting it. Do you want to see?”
Nope. Never again. I look at Michael, still deeply asleep. “He would have died?”
“Yes, he would have.”
“Then you did good,” I say. “Really good.”
She smiles like that again, huge, which is exactly what I wanted. And then we both spin around, guilty, and with bloody hands. Jill is standing in the doorway of the resting room, her short hair rumpled, the undyed cloth Sam put on her rolled up at the arms and legs. And her eyes are huge.
“What … are you doing?”
Sam doesn’t even bat a lash. “Being pretech,” she replies.
Jill needs to watch what she says to the Knowing, because it’s not like they’re going to forget it. That was a jab going right back to that awful conversation at the lake, in the caves, when Jill tried to tell Samara that her training wasn’t “advanced.” And the meaning wasn’t lost on her. Jill steps back.
“Is he dead?”
“No,” I say. “Of course not. It was an appendix, Jill.”
And now she’s looking at the stained sealer on the table, at the infuser still sitting on the bench, and the open cloth lying beside it. She looks up and our eyes meet. It’s a gaze that lasts a long time. I don’t think Jill has realized until now just how far off the path of careers and protocol I’ve strayed. How far I probably will stray.
“They don’t understand surgery, so don’t say anything, Jill. The kid would have died without it.”
And I can hear her telling me, without her saying it, that I swore an oath to never influence, alter, or interfere with an emerging history. Screw protocol.