"Captain!" The voice came from somewhere to the left, behind a tangle of charred beams.
Walter jerked violently to the right, his eyes instinctively sweeping across an empty crater and gray ash. His head spun, and for a moment, the world dissolved into a blurry smear. He clamped his eyes shut, gripped a cold fragment of a wall, and waited for his equilibrium to steady.
His ruptured eardrums had turned spatial orientation into a sick joke.
"I'm here," Albert said, approaching from the opposite side and placing a heavy hand on his shoulder.
Walter flinched. "Don't sneak up on me like that. I can't tell where the sound is coming from."
"None of us can right now," the doctor replied dryly. "Follow me. Noah is waiting."
They walked through the camp. The survivors moved sluggishly. Some were trying to coax a fire out of damp branches; others simply sat on the bare earth, staring blankly at a single point.
Inside the "Green Zone," beneath a heavy canvas tarp, the air smelled of alcohol, rancid fat, and decay. Albert had laid out his tools on a clean patch of cloth: two curved needles, a spool of coarse thread, darkened forceps, and a flask of industrial alcohol salvaged from the workshops.
Noah sat on a crate, his jacket pulled down off his right shoulder. Albert wordlessly splashed alcohol onto the wound.
"There's a lot of grit in here," Albert muttered, using the forceps to pick a tiny shard of brick out of the muscle tissue. "I'll stitch the skin so it doesn't split further, but I'm not digging deep. If your blood can't fight it off, the arm will rot off in a week."
"Stitch it," Noah said curtly.
The needle pierced the dense skin with a distinct crunch.
"Your left shoulder isn't looking too good either," Albert noted. "A hematoma covering the entire shoulder blade. Ribs intact?"
"Hurts to breathe," Noah replied.
"Fractures, then. We'll bind them later if we can scrounge up some dry cloth."
Finishing with Noah, Albert wiped his bloody hands on the hem of his apron and walked toward those lying deeper within the tent. Count Wayland lay on a low cot. A massive bandage was visible beneath his shredded doublet.
"Wayland took a brutal beating in his fight with Elias," Albert explained to Walter. "One strike went deep, nicking a lung. He lost a massive amount of blood. But he's resilient; his heart is beating steady. If a fever doesn't set in, he'll pull through."
The doctor then shifted his gaze to the adjoining berth. Iron lay there.
"But with him, it's far worse."
Albert carefully lifted the sheet.
"I tried to remove the remnants of the hinges, but they're fused deep inside the forearm." Albert shook his head. "But that's only half the trouble. The primary discharge tore straight down his spine. Look."
The doctor rolled Iron onto his side. Along his backbone ran a thin, blue-black track of scorched flesh.
"The nerve clusters are completely burned out. If he wakes up... I'm almost certain his lower body will remain paralyzed."
"How is Elyria?" the captain asked.
"Sleeping. She's the only one whose wounds knit on their own. She just needs time."
Albert sat back on an empty crate and rubbed his eyes wearily.
"We have no food, Walter. The flour Darwin found is completely rancid. We can make it last three days at best if we mix it with sawdust. We're hauling water from the river, but the people are weak."
Walter walked to the tent's exit. Outside, the falling ash had grown heavier, mixing with a fine, icy sleet.
"Albert... do you think they'll even wake up?"
The old doctor remained silent for a long time, staring down at his trembling hands.
"I don't know, Walter. Honestly, I don't know. Brains are complicated things. In a coma, at least they aren't hurting."
"Iron will come back, at the very least," Noah spoke up without turning his head. "He's too stubborn to just die."
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