“It’ll be fine, Dr. Jula. Let’s do this now. Ria will need this medi-cot soon.”
Dr. Jula nodded, glad that Star had worked out the problem so she didn’t have to explain. She’d never actually met Tonka, but she’d read about him, and spoken to others who knew him. She knew the Brun were intelligent, but not until meeting Star had she fully understood how intelligent they were.
She lowered the railing on the medi-cot, then reached for the controls on the stretcher that was still under Star. Keeping a close eye on the cubs, she raised the stretcher, then floated it to the corner of the room where Corin had put together a bed using a spare mattress covered with a thick quilt. She paused, thinking.
“What is it?” Star asked.
“This stretcher you’re on is disposable. It’s meant for one use only because it doesn't fold back up into a small square like it was before I put it under you. That’s why the control boards detach, so they can be used repeatedly. I’m wondering if I should put the stretcher down on the bed which wouldn’t be as comfortable as that mattress, or if you can stand up and move to the bed under your own power.”
“I’d like to try moving myself.”
Dr. Jula nodded in approval and slowly lowered the stretcher to the floor. Star gathered her legs beneath her, mindful of the cubs, then stood up. She arched her back like a cat, stretching muscles that felt tight and cramped from being in one position for so long, then shook herself.
“Any pain?”
“No, not at all,” Star replied. “I can tell that my leg and hip are not as strong as they should be, that I should be careful of them. But that’s all.”
“Excellent,” Dr. Jula said as she knelt to pick up Belle. She cuddled her for a moment while Star walked over to the bed and lowered herself onto it. She moved cautiously, but without a limp or a hint of pain. Once she was settled Dr. Jula put Belle close to her, then went back for Lonato.
“This bed is very comfortable,” Star said. “It was not necessary, but I appreciate it very much. I will thank Corin when next I see him.”
“It is necessary, Star,” Dr. Jula said. “Lying on the hard floor would aggravate your injury. Besides, why should we do less for you than we would for anyone else?”
“I have no answer for that, Dr. Jula,” Star said. “I can say only that I am grateful to be among such kind and compassionate people.”
Dr. Jula smiled, then knelt down beside the stretcher. She removed the control board from it, then pressed a button. Star was a little awed to see the strong platform that had carried her without even bending suddenly crumple itself up into a little ball smaller than Dr. Jula’s fist. She picked it up, carried it to a waste receptacle and tossed it in.
Star watched as the doctor worked quickly, cleaning the medi-cot, then checking small tanks and bottles underneath it. She went to the long counter with cabinets above and below it and took out a variety of items that Star didn’t recognize. Then she went back to the medi-cot and worked at the med-panel beside it for several minutes.
While she watched Dr. Jula prepare, Star kept part of her mind focused on the pain she sensed coming from Ria. It was distant now, and faded. Star hoped that meant Ria was unconscious, and that the pain was distant for her, too.
The door whooshed open suddenly, causing both Star and Dr. Jula to turn toward it immediately. They relaxed a little when they saw it was Corin. He paused two steps in, sensing the tension in the room. “What’s wrong?”
***
Tee was on his way up to the bridge in the elevator when he got the call from Thorn. His hand shook as he reached out to press a different button, choosing the deck the living quarters were located on. Seconds later the elevator stopped and he was running the short distance to Ria’s room before the doors were fully opened.
He hit the small panel beside her door, relieved when it slid open. Breaking through it would have cost too much time. As he looked around the empty room, he realized that the unlocked door should have told him she wasn’t here. Still, he took a few moments to check thoroughly, just in case. Seeing her things in the bathroom eased him a little. At least she wasn’t running from them. He left the room, then stood in the corridor thinking.
Ria didn’t know the Hilgaria. She couldn’t read signs, nor could she have read the diagram posted on the wall of her room. Thorn was checking the landing bay, Talon was checking the cafeteria, and he’d just checked her room. There weren’t any other places for her to go, so where in the seven hells was she?
He turned back toward the elevator, his thoughts racing in ever more frantic circles. He looked up and spotted the stairwell door. His eyes narrowed. The infirmary was one flight up. Would she? Yes, she would.
His heart climbed into his throat as he rushed the last few steps to the door and yanked it open. The too-familiar scent of Ria’s blood hit him hard. His katrenca clawed at his mind in a near panic, but he shoved it back. Ria needed his human side right now. He went up three steps and spotted her sprawled unconscious on the switchback landing.
She was on her back, feet and legs still on the steps leading up, one arm flung outward as though reaching for something, the other at her side with the cane still in her hand. Tee couldn’t see her face until he leapt up the next few steps and went to his knees beside her. Fear caused his chest to tighten to the point he could barely breathe when he saw blood covering half of her face. So much blood that he couldn’t even see where the wound was.
He tapped the vox in his ear with a shaking hand. The moment Talon answered, he spoke right over him. “I found her on the stairs between Deck 3 and 4. Hurry Talon, and tell Thorn.” He clicked off, then tapped it again.
“Infirmary,” Corin’s voice said into his ear.
“This is Tee, tell Dr. Jula to come to the landing between Decks 3 and 4. Now!”
He clicked off before Corin could ask any questions that he couldn’t answer anyway. He studied Ria more closely but saw no more blood or obvious signs of injury. That didn’t mean much, though. She could have broken half the bones in her body and he wouldn’t know it. He wanted to pick her up and hold her in his arms so badly that his fingers twitched, but he knew better than to move her.
He could see that she was breathing, though not deeply, and that worried him. When the stairwell door below flew open revealing Talon and Thorn, he literally felt weak with relief.
At almost the same moment Dr. Jula pushed the door above him open. Tee stood up to let Dr. Jula take his place, then moved up a step to clear more room for her on the landing. Talon and Thorn stopped just short of the landing on the opposite side so as not to crowd Dr. Jula, though Tee knew they wanted to touch Ria as much as he did.
“She was going up the stairs when she fell, obviously,” Talon said, studying the position of her body and the wound on her head. “She must have been going to the infirmary.”
“Tee, please vox Corin and tell him we need a hand scanner, some clean toweling, an inflatable collar, and a stretcher with a thoracic-lumbar immobilizer. As fast as possible.”
Tee made the call, relieved that the infirmary was so near their position. Corin arrived moments later with the requested items and Tee moved aside to let him get down to the landing with Dr. Jula. He knelt opposite Dr. Jula, taking care not to touch Ria’s body, then set the items down before handing her the scanner. Dr. Jula turned the device on, then looked at Corin with a frown.
“Corin, will you please clean some of the blood from her face so we can get a look at the wound?”
“What are the chances she’ll wake up and see me?” Corin asked while reaching for one of the towels he’d brought.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Jula said, her frown deepening. “What difference does it make?”
“To me, none, but to Ria, a great deal,” Corin said as he began to blot the blood from Ria’s face with hands as gentle as Dr. Jula’s. “She doesn’t like to be touched by men,” he continued. “Not in any way. I don’t want her to wake up and see me doing this. It woul
d upset her and possibly send her into a panic. That’s the last thing she needs at the moment.”
“How do you know this?” Dr. Jula asked as she turned the scanner on and reset it.
“The entire infirmary staff knows, Dr. Jula. She worked with us for four months, so it’s kind of an open secret. We’re always careful to avoid even accidental touches.”
“You offered to help her off with her jacket last night because she was having trouble with her broken arm,” Dr. Jula said. “I remember that.”
“Yeah, but I knew she’d refuse the offer. I still had to make it.”
“What’s her reaction if she is accidentally touched?” Dr. Jula asked, slowly passing the scanner over Ria’s body.
“She recoils,” Corin replied. “Almost as though she’s receiving an electric shock. I’ve seen her try to fight the reaction, but she can’t help it. She has an over the top startle response too. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”
“I noticed a sensitive startle response,” Dr. Jula replied. “But only in recent weeks. I put it down to the explosion.”
“She’s had it since she joined the staff on Jasan,” Corin said. “It’s more pronounced since the explosion, though.”
“She got upset with me for grabbing her arm yesterday, but she didn’t seem…panicked about it,” Thorn said.
“It’s human men she has a problem with,” Corin said, then he frowned and shook his head. “No, strike that. It’s men who aren’t Clan Jasani. She won’t even get in an elevator if there’re only men in it, whether it’s one or five doesn’t seem to matter. But if there’s a Clan male, even just one, she’ll get on.”
“That’s why you didn’t touch her when that crewman grabbed her on the Bihotza,” Thorn said. “You knew then why she got so scared.”
“Yes, I did,” Corin admitted. “It took her a few weeks to get over that incident, too.”
Thorn was frustrated with himself for not catching her aversion to being touched. They’d watched her for so long, he more than his brothers, and he’d learned a lot about her. But he’d never noticed that. He looked at Tee, then Talon, silently questioning, but they both shook their heads. They hadn’t noticed it either.
Corin had cleaned enough blood away from Ria’s face to reveal an odd angular cut near her temple. Since she’d obviously fallen backwards, and her feet were still on the steps, they couldn’t see how she’d gotten that particular injury.
“There,” Tee said, pointing at the corner of the steel railing as it turned at right angles at the landing. “It looks like she angled her body to try to grab the railing as she fell and hit that.”
Talon followed Tee’s gaze and saw the sharp corner. He looked down at the wound on Ria’s temple, his stomach icy. If she’d hit it just a bare half inch further down, it would have probably killed her.
Dr. Jula finished running the portable scanner over Ria’s body before moving to her head which she was most concerned about. Not only because she had an obvious wound there, but also because she was worried about the length of time Ria had been unconscious. She took her time passing the device over as much of her head as she could reach without moving her. Then she did it again before turning the device off.
“What’s the verdict, Dr. Jula?” Talon asked, not liking the expression in the woman’s black eyes. She picked up the inflatable collar and handed it to Corin, who set about getting in place without moving Ria’s head or neck.
“She has a dislocated and broken shoulder and a broken hip. I think they took the brunt of the fall. The injury to her forehead isn’t too serious. She hit that metal corner, but not hard. Her spine and neck are fine, surprisingly.”
Talon glanced at Corin, then back to Dr. Jula. “It’s a precaution,” she said. “My biggest concern is her brain, so I don’t want her head moved at all right now. This hand scanner isn’t powerful enough to tell me if she’s got a skull fracture back there without me turning her head, and I can’t do that.
“If she hit this steel floor hard enough, it’s possible that her brain will swell from the force of the impact. We need to get her back to the infirmary and under the big scanner as quickly as possible.”
***
Ria opened her eyes and was momentarily startled by the bright colors she saw courtesy of her infrared vision. She raised one hand to her temple which hurt for some reason. She found a knot there, and tenderness, but didn’t know why.
She caught a scent that was familiar, but not. She breathed in deeply and her entire body shivered with what she now knew was arousal. Just as she was trying to figure out why, a familiar voice spoke up.
“Hi there.” She turned her head slowly to the side and smiled.
“Tee,” she breathed softly, wondering how she knew it was him. “What happened?”
“You fell down the stairs, presumably on your way up to the infirmary.”
“Kólasi,” she muttered. “Well, at least I got where I was going.”
“Yes, you did,” Tee agreed, smiling. “You could have taken the elevator and gotten here without the trauma though.”
“I’ll try to remember that next time. How bad?”
“You hit the back of your head good and hard, but luckily your hip and shoulder broke your fall, literally, so no real damage was done to your skull. At the moment your only injury is that knot on your temple and another one on the back of your head.”
“Maybe I need to start wearing a helmet.”
“A helmet?” Tee asked archly. “Not nearly enough. Head to toe kevlex is what you need.”
“There you are, Ria, welcome back,” Dr. Jula said, approaching the other side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“A little sore, bit of a headache, but otherwise fine. Embarrassed mostly.”
“Embarrassed?” Dr. Jula asked as she turned to the med panel.
“Falling down stairs?” Ria asked, starting to shake her head before she rethought the action. “Tee said I crunched some bones.”
“Hip, and shoulder,” Dr. Jula said. “They were a lot easier to put back together than your skull would’ve been.”
“Oh, well in that case, yay for me,” Ria said, then sighed. “I think I need to change my name to Humpty Dumpty.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Tee asked in surprise.
“Because I keep breaking myself.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“You know, the nursery rhyme,” Ria said, then rolled her eyes at herself. “Of course you don’t know. Why would you know? Sorry.”
“No no, you need to explain who this Humpty person is, and what a nursery rhyme is,” Tee insisted. “Otherwise it’ll run around in my mind for days, driving me crazy.”
“What or who is a humpty?” Thorn asked coming to stand beside Tee.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Tee said. “She wants to change her name to this Humpty…something.”
Ria stared at them, wide-eyed.
“Ria, it’s so good to see you awake,” Star said happily, resting her chin on the edge of the bed near her head.
“Hi Star,” Ria said, glad of the distraction. Her head hurt too much to laugh at the moment. She smiled at the Brun while reaching over to stroke the side of her head. “You’re up and walking around. How’re you feeling?”
“Much better,” Star said. “My hip is a little weak, but Dr. Jula says it will get stronger soon. Thorn took me on a short walk to see some of the ship. It was very interesting.”
“That’s fantastic,” Ria said. “How’re the little ones?”
“They’re doing very well,” Star said just as the sound of high pitched squeals filled the room. “And they’re hungry. I best go feed them before they get themselves all worked up.”
“Where are they?”
“Over in the corner. Corin and Dr. Jula made up a nice bed for us.” The squealing got louder and more insistent.
“Go on and feed them, Star. We can talk later.”
“Yes, tha
t’s best,” Star said. She left the side of the bed and went to see to her cubs.
“Hi Ria,” Vari said, taking Star’s place. She leaned over and kissed Ria on the forehead. “You scared me Txikreba.”
“I’m sorry,” Ria said.
“Don’t be,” Vari said. “It’s not like it was deliberate, and according to Dr. Jula, you’ll be up and getting into trouble again in no time.” Ria tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it.
“I’m sorry, Ria,” Vari said slowly. “I just hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”
“It’s all right,” Ria said, waving one hand.
“No, it’s not,” Vari argued. “Tell me please what I said that bothers you.”
“I haven’t been an impulsive little girl running around getting into trouble for a long time, Vari,” she said, momentarily forgetting the other people around the bed. “I’m the same age as you, remember? I admit that I have trouble with focus sometimes, especially when I’m stressed or tired. But you, Bean, Mom and the Dads seem to think I’m still five years old and likely to swing from the light fixtures if you don’t keep an eye on me every minute. That’s not who I am and it hasn’t been since I was at least ten.”
Silence reigned for a several moments. Then Vari reached out to touch Ria’s hand lightly. “I’m sorry, Ria,” she said. “You’re right. We do that, and it’s wrong and unfair. I never meant to hurt you though. I hope you know that.”
“Of course I know that,” Ria said, turning her hand over so that she could clasp Vari’s in return. She was surprised at herself for saying what she’d wanted to say for so long, and wondered where the courage had come from. She didn’t regret it though. It felt surprisingly good, in fact.
Silence fell once more, broken only when Talon joined Tee and Thorn. “Hi Ria,” he said, smiling. “It’s good to see you awake.”
“Hi Talon,” Ria replied as a stronger wave of heat raced through her blood. Talon looked around.
“Why all the solemn faces? Is something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” Tee said. “We were just trying to get Ria to tell us who someone named Humpty is. She said she wants to change her name to that.”
Ria's Visions (Hearts of ICARUS Book 6) Page 30