The road south from the hardened waystation was quieter than the road north had been, and Ren was the reason. Nobody walked near him. Nobody walked far from him either. His arm was wrapped, and the underside of the bandage was not the right color.
He did not favor the arm. That was the rule he had set down before Lira finished tying the knot, and he was going to obey it the whole march back, even though the arm was doing a thing under the wrap he did not have a word for that was not also a word he had promised himself he would not think.
The bleeding had stopped before first light. Under the wrap, the arm was warm in a clean way, not the feverish kind of warm. The wet on the sleeve had gone tacky to stiff to dry as the sun came up over the Fringe's far edge. The sleeve was brown now. It had been gray yesterday.
He had decided, in the sit, that the sleeve was the part of this he was allowed to be angry about.
Dask walked beside him for the first hour without saying anything. Dask was a loud person who had stopped being loud before the Shardback had landed and had not yet started again. The silence he put there was not heavy. He had set it down on purpose.
Ten meters ahead, Toma had not once looked back. He was walking a straight line at Lira's pace, eyes on the Group Six student in front of him, shoulders higher than Ren had ever seen them. He had come out of the shelter at dawn without saying anything and had taken his place in the pack without looking at Ren's face.
Dask's silence was a gift. Toma's silence was a cost. Ren understood the difference without liking it.
Fine, he thought. That's a thing I earned.
His boot had been pressing on the blister all night and was pressing on it now. A heel blister while the rest of his arm was doing what it was doing was absurd, and the absurdity of it did not make it up to his face, but it registered. The body doing its anomalous work under the wrap was apparently not deigning to do anything about the heel.
Sure, he thought. Go ahead. Don't fix the blister. Save it for later.
Cauldron came up out of the road in the afternoon. The patrol filed into the south-district transit yard behind Lira. The yard smelled of hot dirt and horses.
A vendor was turning fried meat on a brazier and the smell caught at the back of Ren's throat and made him think of the ration bar that had turned sour there last night. He swallowed. It did not go away.
The woman in the stall next to the vendor was sorting dried beans into cloth bags with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had done this eleven thousand times and had stopped finding it interesting nine thousand times ago. Ren watched her for about ten seconds. Then he stopped watching, because the beans were not interesting to him either and there was nothing useful about watching someone not be interested in beans.
The cohort was dismissed for debrief in small groups. Kessa went first, walking on the thigh. Paval went with her, shoulder in a sling. The rest were processed and sent along.
Lira kept Ren back with a small flat gesture. She stood two paces off and said, in the same clipped register she had held since the hardened waystation, "How are you feeling?"
"Fine."
Her eyes went to the bandage and came back. "Come see the medic."
"Okay."
She pointed with her chin toward the eastern end of the yard, then turned and walked to Berran. The two of them stood near the gate in the low-voice posture Ren had watched across ten minutes of stone and cold last night.
He walked east.
The medic's field station was a three-walled shed with a canvas roof pulled tight, a table, a bench, and a shelf of bottles and rolled cloths. The medic was a woman of maybe forty, sleeves pushed past her elbows, hair tied back with a piece of string. A Rank 2 Hunter's coat hung on a hook behind her. She did not look up when Ren came in.
"Sit."
He sat.
"Arm on the table."
He put his arm on the table, underside down, because that was how Lira had wrapped it.
She turned it over without asking. Her hands were warm and quick. She unrolled Lira's wrap in a spiral pull from the back of the wrist forward.
The field bandage came off in three loops. The gauze came off after that. The last of it lifted off his skin without catching on anything.
He did not look.
The medic looked.
She looked for a long time. Ren measured it at about thirty seconds, and he measured it because his body measured things now, and she did not say a single word across the thirty seconds. Her mouth did not move. Her eyes did not move. Her hands stayed flat on his forearm, one above the bite and one below it.
On the wall beside the bench was a clipboard with a blank triage form on top. A pen was clipped to it. The pen did not move. She did not reach for it.
She reached instead for a clean roll of gauze from the shelf behind her, unrolled it, wrapped his forearm neat and tight, tied the end at the back of the wrist, patted it once flat, and let go.
"Come back tomorrow. Morning. Before drills."
"Okay."
She stood up, went to the basin, washed her hands. "Go on."
He got up and walked out.
On the step down into the yard, he stopped for half a second because the thing the medic had not done was louder than anything she had done.
Okay, he thought. That's a thing now too.
The pen had stayed in its clip. She had looked at his arm for thirty seconds and not put a single mark on a form. She was going to do something with that, and he did not know what.
The Group Seven dormitory smelled of sweat and wet boot leather. It smelled exactly how it had smelled yesterday, and for one second on the threshold Ren was grateful to a room for simply smelling. Men's feet still got sweaty. Leather still got wet. The dumb daily arithmetic of the world was still adding up.
He crossed to bunk 16.
Toma was on his own bunk with a mending kit in his lap, working a stitch into the sleeve of his training coat. He did not look up as Ren came down the aisle.
When Ren was about two bunks away, Toma looked up.
Their eyes met for a second. That was long enough for Ren to see that Toma had been going to do this since he rolled his bedroll at dawn, had been trying to get the nerve on the road, had not had it until now, and was doing it now because Ren had come in and walked past the other bunks and that had been the last excuse Toma had for putting it off.
Toma nodded once, then went back to the stitch.
That was all.
Ren sat down on the edge of bunk 16 with his bandaged arm resting across his knee. The small thing sat under his ribs in the same place the small lifting had started holding open in the last few days. He did not make a speech of it, because Toma had not made a speech of it either.
He looked at the bandage. He did not unwrap it. He did not need to.
At full dark, he could not sit on the bed any more. The smell of the room had stopped being a comfort and become a pressure, and he needed air and he needed to not be the guy in the bunk with the wrap on his arm for a minute.
He walked out onto the dormitory steps. The stone was cold through his trousers, and he sat down anyway, elbows on his knees, bandaged arm across his knee where it did not pull.
Across the training ground, the supply shop door was open. The light was on inside.
Ren did not move. Brekken closed that door at sundown on his own schedule, and his schedule had been reliable to the minute in the five days Ren had been tracking it.
Somebody was in the doorway with Brekken. Ren's body registered her before his face did.
The girl was on the shop side of the threshold with her left hand on the doorframe and a notebook under her right arm. Brekken was in the shop light behind her, and they were talking. Brekken was nodding, a small slow nod, and he was listening while he did it. Neither of them had looked out into the yard. The yard was dark and the doorway was lit and their eyes were not adjusted for anything past the frame.
Ren did not look away. His Per 35 was counting, and it kept counting to six seconds.
The girl said something else. Brekken nodded again. She stepped back, said something final Ren could not parse, and turned. She walked off along the training-ground edge toward the far corner where the path cut through to the academic quarter, not looking behind her.
Brekken watched her go for another beat. Then he took the lantern off its hook and pulled the door shut behind him, and the yard went back to dark on his side.
Ren sat on the step and did not move for a full minute.
The two people in the academy who had looked at him as something other than a washout had looked at each other. They had not looked at him. They had not known he was there. They had not been performing anything for him.
That was worse.
Great, he thought, without heat. Great. Okay.
He got up off the step.
Back inside, the dormitory had gone down to its night sounds. Somebody was snoring on the far end. Somebody else was turning over in a bedroll. The lamps were out except for the low one on the corridor hook that stayed on until the bell.
He lay down on bunk 16 on his back and put the bandaged arm across his chest, because that was the only place to put it that did not pull. He closed his eyes.
He did not sleep.
This was not the wound-tight not-sleeping from the first two academy nights, and it was not the cold-stone not-sleeping from the hardened waystation. It was a flat-eyed waiting that did not have a name. Toma's nod was sitting under his ribs, the medic's unmoved pen somewhere above it, and the open door and the girl with the notebook and Brekken listening somewhere above that. Under the wrap, his arm was doing what it was doing.
First drills were at dawn. Dawn was a long way off.
He lay there and did not sleep.