Bloodless Moon

The Examination

Sylvie's medical office was in the east wing's ground floor, a long room that had been adapted from its original purpose with the same practical intelligence as everything else in the settlement, shelves and worksurfaces added to stone walls, equipment that was current-generation but not institutional, the kind of setup someone had accumulated deliberately rather than requisitioned from a supply chain.

Seraphine sat on the examination table and let Sylvie work.

Blood pressure: slightly elevated, expected, she was running on inadequate sleep and adrenaline and a fourteen-hour compression of experiences that would take weeks to fully process. Temperature: normal. Heart rate: slightly elevated for the same reasons. Reflexes: sharp.

Sylvie did all of this with professional efficiency and the specific quietness of someone who has learned that silence in an examination is a form of respect.

"When did you last eat a full meal regularly," Sylvie said, writing something.

"The facility scheduled nutrition at regular intervals. I ate them."

"That's not what I asked."

Seraphine considered.

"I don't have a category for a full meal as a concept separate from scheduled nutrition."

Sylvie wrote something else.

"You've never been in the sun," Sylvie said.

"Occasionally. The facility had a supervised outdoor space on the roof. We were given thirty minutes twice a week in summer."

"Vitamin D?"

"Supplemented."

"I'm going to run blood panels," Sylvie said. Not a question. Then she caught herself. "If you're willing."

"I need a parameter established for my own records," Seraphine said. "Yes. But I'd like a copy of everything."

"Of course."

The blood draw was routine, she had been drawn from more times than she could count, at the facility, but always by people who handled her blood with gloved care and triple-bagged it in containment protocol and processed it in sealed environments. Sylvie handled it differently. Not carelessly, she wore gloves, which Seraphine appreciated not for the sake of her own safety but for Sylvie's, but without the performed anxiety that she had learned to read in every facility technician as a kind of sublimated fear.

Sylvie was not afraid of her.

She noted this and filed it with the other things she was collecting: the soup, the specific quality of morning light, the child asleep in the the chair, the sound of a valley that breathed.

"What are you looking for specifically," Sylvie said, labeling the vials with the brisk efficiency of long practice.

"I want to know if my blood chemistry changes in proximity to..." She stopped. Chose words. "To wolves. Specifically to this pack. Mira's research suggests a proximity effect that's bilateral. I'd like a baseline now and comparative panels at twelve-hour intervals."

Sylvie looked at her over the vials.

"You're designing your own study," she said.

"Yes."

"From inside the experiment."

"It's not ideal methodology," Seraphine agreed. "But it's what I have."

Sylvie put down the last vial and looked at Seraphine with the expression of someone who is deciding how much to say and deciding to say it.

"I've been pack physician for nine years," she said. "In that time I've treated bite wounds and broken bones and three pregnancies and one de-shifting, not from Nullblood exposure, from an Accord enforcement action, which is its own story. I have never been frightened of this pack."

"No," Seraphine said.

"I am slightly frightened of you," Sylvie said. "Not personally. The concept. What you represent in terms of the biology I understand and how far outside it you sit." She paused. "I thought you should know that I know that, because doctors should be honest about their preconceptions."

Seraphine looked at her for a moment.

"That's the most useful thing anyone has said to me since I arrived," she said.

Sylvie half-smiled. Then she said: "Cassian wants to see you when we are done. He is with his brother."

Seraphine went still.

"Lev is here," she said. "He's in the valley."

"In the medical annex. Has been for two weeks. He was in a Lyon facility before that, conventional medical care, which was doing nothing. We brought him home." A pause. "Cassian visits him every morning and sometimes in the evenings. The visits are..." Sylvie stopped. "Difficult."

Seraphine slid off the examination table.

"I'd like to go now," she said.

The medical annex was a smaller building adjacent to the main hall, connected by a covered walkway. It had two rooms: Sylvie's office which she'd just left, and a second room that was part hospice and part hospital and part something that had no clinical category.

Part home.

Someone had put books on the shelves. Not medical texts, novels, worn, with the look of books that had been read multiple times. Photographs on the windowsill. A plant on the cabinet that was real and green and alive with deliberate tending. A blanket on the bed that was handmade, the specific kind of handmaking that took time.

Lev Drav was twenty-seven years old and he looked younger and older simultaneously in the way that people do when their body and their mind have separated. He was Cassian's height but built differently, wider in the shoulders, more immediately physical, the kind of person who had worn his body like a comfortable thing before someone took part of it away. His face, in the morning light, was the face of someone who was present in the room and somewhere else at the same time.

Cassian sat beside him.

He was talking. Not at his brother, to him, which was a different thing, in a low, even voice about something she caught the middle of: something about the east meadow, something about the river level, something about a problem with the north building's roof that needed addressing in spring.

Ordinary things. The texture of daily life in the valley.

He was giving his brother the valley to hold onto.

She stood in the doorway and watched this and felt something arrive in her chest that she had no file for and no word for and she let it arrive without categorizing it.

Lev turned his head.

He looked at her.

And he said, clearly and in present tense, with the directness of someone speaking from somewhere very far away: "You smell like the old records."

Cassian's voice stopped.

He looked at his brother. Then at her. His face was doing something very controlled.

"The old records," she said to Lev. Her voice came out steady. "What do the old records smell like?"

Lev looked at her with the distant intelligence of someone who is receiving more information than they can process but processing what they can.

"Like something coming back," he said.

The room was very quiet.

Cassian stood.

He was looking at her across his brother's bed with an expression she finally, finally, had a word for.

It was not hope exactly. It was the physical sensation of permitting oneself to hope. The way you let yourself believe something after you've spent a long time not believing it. The pain and the relief of that simultaneously.

She looked back at him.

"Tell me everything the file says about reversal," she said. "All of it. Mira's research and the old record and anything Sylvie has. Tonight."

"Yes," he said.

"And I want to sit with him for a while first," she said. "If that's..."

"Yes," he said, before she finished.

She came in and sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Cassian.

Lev turned his head and looked at her again.

"Tell me about the valley," she said to him. "Tell me something Cassian wouldn't think to mention."

Lev was quiet for a long moment.

Then, slowly, with the careful retrieval of someone reaching far back, Lev described it: a place in the river where the water runs under a flat rock. In summer the wolves sleep there on hot afternoons. Cassian always pretends he does not.

From across the bed she heard Cassian exhale.

She began, very carefully, to know something about the shape of what she might be able to do here.

And she began, equally carefully, to be afraid of how much she wanted to do it.

* * *

She had thirty-nine hours remaining in the bond window.

She had not forgotten this.

She was choosing, moment by moment, not to make it the only thing.