“Please, sorry. I mean, I don’t know —”
A cry ripped from the human, raw enough to scrape bone. Yu’s stomach twisted.
“What you do?” The borman barreled into the sick bay, charging straight for Bubs and the half-shut door.
Instinct drove Yu aside, all the way behind the outermost cod.
Bubs did not move. He held the door and, impossibly, stood in the borman’s path. For an instant, his round eyes flicked at Yu. A glance, nothing more. But from how it stuck, he it could as well have thrown one of the hammers. Yu should not have stepped aside. Not as a guard. Not when something big came crashing through. It was the briefest of moments that gave him all the guilt, before his mind could raise its shield and protest, Well, what the fuck do you expect me to do? Panic swept the words away; the borman would plow right through Bubs —
“We will help her!” Bubs shouted.
The borman stopped short. His chest heaved. He loomed so close he could have crushed Bubs flat against the stone. His neck craned to peer past the door into the operating room.
Bubs stood his ground, a fraction of his size. “We will reset the bone. Take out the splinters.”
“What means that?” the borman growled.
“We make the best of it.” Bubs stared up at him. “You leave now.”
“No.” The word ground out like stone. “I help.”
“You will be a hindrance.”
The borman did not move.
Bubs did not wait. His gaze cut sideways, sharp and sudden. “Yu. What was it you wanted to say?”
Yu’s tongue tangled in his beak. The borman’s shadow pressed down, suffocating. “I — Sorry. I don’t … I don’t know how to care for people. Sorry. I mean, I don’t know what to do with the selder, now or when he wakes —”
“Then do what the shaman asks of you,” Bubs cut in. “If you’re done here, serve dinner.”
The borman stared down at Yu.
Yu stared back at Bubs.
He had braced for mockery, for the sting of a jab, for some barb about shirking again. None of it came. Bubs spoke to him, yes, but without the slightest flicker of recognition. It was the stark opposite of earlier in the day, when Yu had scrubbed under his watch and felt the weight of those eyes catching every missed speck and his criticism listing every flaw. Now, his words fell into the air with seemingly no awareness of the tension spilling into room. The change was so jarring, that Yu’s mind caught on the tone and blanked out the meaning entirely.
Pages:
Pages:
Pages: