By the time Dr. Citali and the ranger get back upstairs, Cleve has cleaned out and properly wrapped the wounds in my left arm and right leg. The amount that makes me feel better is way out of proportion to the actual restorative value of clean and neat little bandages on body parts that still hurt. It’s just… I feel so much safer now, having someone take care of me. My poor handkerchief, though, is soaked through with blood from my leg. Hopefully it’ll wash out clean in the laundry.
“I think it’s better to have Marina look into your other stuff,” Cleve tells me, knowing his own limitations. “She’s got a better skill for this all.”
I thank Cleve for treating the surface injuries. I certainly don’t expect him to run labs on me to try to figure out what serum Dr. Gupta injected me with. Or what she extracted. Making sense of my scattered bruises, which I assume correspond to things she did to me internally, will have to wait for a proper medical facility.
“Wait, where did Marina go?” Cleve asks suddenly, pausing as he packs away his little first aid kit.
“She went downstairs with the ranger.”
“Does she know about the serum?”
I shrug. “I told her about it, but I don’t know if she found anything in the notes down there indicating what it might be. Or what it might be doing. Briar beast things kind of took precedence.”
That’s when Marina and the ranger come up the stairs. Dr. Citali has a large cooler resting against one hip, held by a hefty cross-body strap. Dr. Gupta’s body is slung over the ranger’s shoulder. Cleve looks back and forth from that to Xiao. “Is that following protocol?” he asks of the ersatz police officer.
“Dr. Gupta was a ranger. She’ll be buried as one of our own,” intones the auto-tuned voice.
“This is a crime scene,” Xiao counters, taking control of the situation. We can’t see the ranger narrow their eyes, of course, but there’s definitely tension in their frame as they set down the body and then square off against Xiao. At their full height they’re several inches shorter than him, but that doesn’t make them any less menacing. “You can have Dr. Gupta’s body after we complete the full investigation. This man is a visiting emissary from one of our allies,” Xiao explains, gesturing down at me.
“Do what you have to do,” the ranger says. “But she was a ranger. You will not disgrace her.”
“She doesn’t need us to do that for her—she did that for herself!” I grumble from my seat on the ground.
The ranger looks at me with that impassive masked face. “We all make a lot of hard choices to survive and to thrive on this planet. But we do whatever it takes—”
“I am sick—almost to death—of hearing people use that phrase to justify anything they want to do at any point in time!” I explode. How many times have people used that to just, just, just do whatever the hell they want? Dr. Gupta did. Marina did. Who else in the Garden of Chiron will stomp all over other people’s rights, their lives, and then blithely justify it that way afterwards?
“This was unnecessary,” Cleve says, backing me up. “This was a higher level of risk than was warranted. This was more than what it takes.”
The floodgates are open now, and I rant for a while about unnecessary risks being taken on incomplete information. “I came here to share data, to invite scientists to take a look at me. She almost killed me. She wanted to kill me. She intended to kill me, which would not have served the long-term effort.”
Everyone is looking down at me now. Marina is pale, Xiao’s brow is crinkled, Cleve is nodding along. The ranger—who knows what they’re thinking. “You know, in Morgan domes, there are two pictures of the Stepdaughters of Chiron. There are people who think that you are idealists protecting the environment and everything in it. But they’re wrong,” I spit out angrily. “You’re just as opportunistic as Morgan is. And you’ll abuse briar beasts and enslave xenodragons.” Xiao’s eyes widen at that accusation, shocked at the turn this has taken. “And craws—wait, no, that wasn’t you.”
I shake my head, trying to clear the cobwebs of a long night with too little sleep and too much blood loss. I catch back ahold of my thread of argument and continue, “And then there are other people in the Morgan domes who think you are terrorists.” I glare at Marina, as I bite out, “Blowing up factories. Sabotaging equipment. Causing the deaths of people.” She flinches. “It didn’t have to be this way!” I shout, throwing up my hands in frustration.
There’s the click of the voice modulation coming on, as though the ranger is about to speak, but all I hear is their breath for a moment, then silence. After a beat, they abruptly turn and walk away, disappearing out the door and into the night. I close my eyes to this whole situation and to the tears gathering in them and let my head fall back against the wall.
I hear the rustle of fabric, and then Marina is there, crouched next to me. “We—” She stops, changes her mind about what she was going to say, and then continues gently, “There’s a proper medical clinic. Terrible things have been done to you. Would you like to go there so that we can start making this right? And get out of this place? Because I saw how much blood was lost.” She lays a hand on the cooler alongside her.
I open my mouth to answer but quickly clamp back down, breathing deeply and trying desperately not to cry.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Cleve answers for me.
I look up at him. “Do not leave my side,” I croak out.
“Absolutely,” he agrees with a nod. “Do we have all the rest of him?” he asks Marina.
She flips the case open and gives it a quick look over. “Yes, we have the spinal fluid, and—” She exhales sharply and turns to look out the front door, but the ranger is long gone. “One of the samples is missing,” she reports.
“Whatever it takes, right?” Cleve says, grasping the strap his rifle hangs on. “That goes both ways, guys.”
Xiao encourages us to just go to the clinic and leave handling the rest of the scene to him. He offers his heartfelt apologies to me. “I’m sorry, so sorry, that this happened to you here, on your second day in the Garden of Chiron. I’m going to do what I can to make this right, but I’m not a dictator, so I can’t do everything. You all need some rest, though.”
“Well, it’s a problem for leadership,” Cleve says. Was that a dig at Xiao, who is, after all, one of the five leaders of this whole society? “We’re going to take you to the clinic,” he tells me, “and we can do whatever it takes to get the last sample later.“ He nods at Xiao. “If you need us, you know where we are.”