"I need to tell him," Leonie said.
Mara held the dressing. Her forearm had begun to shake. She wanted someone else to take over so she could become the person giving orders again, but the blood slowed under her hand and she did not dare move it.
"Then tell him."
Leonie bent beside Kit's face. "Kit. Listen to me. We can connect you to what's keeping us alive. It isn't a treatment I understand completely. It changes tissue. We may not be able to change it back."
His mouth opened. The mask fogged, cleared, fogged less.
"Do you hear me?"
He nodded.
"It may keep you alive. It may not."
Mara looked at the line in Benji's hands. It emerged from a marked wall socket beside a little pump. There was a clear boundary between the medical branch and the heavier lines that disappeared toward the Bore Room. Someone had put green tape around one coupling and red around the other. Human attempts to make a thing intelligible.
"Kit," she said. "Do you want it?"
His eyes rolled toward her. Anger flashed through the terror, sharp and recognizable. He did not need her to make this question larger.
"Yes."
Leonie took the line.
Mara had expected an injection. A bag, a needle, something that would enter the narrow world of things she already knew. Leonie opened a sealed fitting instead, exposing a short clear sleeve filled with soft branching material. It moved toward her glove. She steadied it above the wound, held it there until the movement slowed.
"Benji. Return."
He brought the second line around the table, stepping carefully across Mara's air hose. His hand was clumsy from the repaired wrist. Jonah rose to help him, but Benji shook his head once, fiercely, and got the connector seated himself.
Leonie placed the sleeve against Kit's torn side.
He tried to scream. There was no breath for it. His back lifted off the table and Mara held his shoulder while Leonie kept the fitting in place. Inside the sleeve the tissue unrolled, pale and thin as wet onion skin. It touched the wound at three points, withdrew from one, pressed deeper at the others.
Blood climbed into the clear line.
"That's going the wrong way," Mara said.
"The return," Leonie answered.
Mara could not look away. The surface in the sleeve changed from cream to red-brown. A tiny fold opened at the wound edge and slid beneath Kit's skin. His fingers stiffened. She could feel the tendons standing out in his wrist.
"Kit. Look at me."
He did.
"Here. Stay here."
The thing spread under her dressing.
She felt it first through the pressure of her hand: an unfamiliar upward push, weak but persistent, as if something beneath the flesh was trying to find the light. She wanted to lift her glove. Leonie caught her wrist.
"Keep contact. Another moment."
The pressure passed between Mara's fingers. Her stomach lurched. The torn muscle at Kit's side drew inward, not stitching closed but gathering around a new center. A smooth membrane rose over the wound. Through it she could still see the damage, now webbed with fine gold lines.
Kit made a low sound.
His chest rose. Rose too far, then fell in an uneven slump. The monitor gave a shrill alarm. Hester reached for it and Leonie said, "Leave it."
"What's it doing?" Mara asked.
Leonie did not answer. Her eyes were on Kit's face.
A little ridge formed beneath his skin, traveling from his side toward his sternum. It stopped at the crushed ribs. His body jerked. Mara heard something crack, a deep, wet click that brought tears to her eyes before she knew she was afraid.
Kit's lips moved.
"What?" Mara said.
He spoke again.
"Hurts."
"I know."
"No, it—"
The word stopped. His eyes widened. The lines at the wound darkened, then lightened again, liquid moving through them in pulses. The monitor's noise changed. Numbers appeared that did not belong together.
Leonie let go of Mara's wrist. "You can take your hand away. Slowly."
Mara peeled the dressing back. It clung to the new surface. Leonie moistened it, worked the edge free. The original wound was still visible under the membrane like something under river ice. It no longer bled.
Mara lifted her hand clear.
There was an impression of her glove in Kit's side. Five shallow finger shapes. While she watched, they softened and disappeared.
Benji looked away. Jonah had both hands pressed to the back of a chair.
Kit inhaled once, abruptly. His chest held at the top of it. Mara waited for it to fall.
It did, very slowly.
Then nothing.
"Leonie."
"Watch his eyes."
"He's not breathing."
"Watch his eyes, Mara."
Kit blinked. His gaze moved to her face. He was no longer drowning in his own injury, no longer trying to sit up against pain. He looked confused. Annoyed. Alive.
"What happened?" he said.
His voice was a torn scrap of sound. The words came on the little gas left in his throat.
Mara waited. A reflexive inhale should have followed. She knew it with the part of herself that had spent her whole life inside a breathing body. He lay still instead, staring at her.
Then he swallowed, drew a small deliberate breath and said, "What happened?"
Leonie rested her hand on his forehead. "We connected you."
He looked down.
Mara tried to stop him and was too late. His head lifted just far enough to see the clear sleeve fitted over his side, the dark return line, the gold moving beneath the skin of his belly.
His eyes shut.
"Oh, fuck," he said.
Nobody answered.
For the next twenty minutes Leonie kept them working. Water. A fresh blanket. The line anchored to the table so Kit could not tear it loose in his sleep. A sample from the return port, which she sealed without pretending she knew what every component in it did. Hester reported to Sal in a voice Mara barely recognized. She said crushing injury. She said external circuit. She did not say stable until Leonie looked up and nodded.
Mara stood beside the table. There was blood on both her boots. Some had run under the bench and mixed with the water Benji had spilled making dinner. She found herself studying its edge, the dark red giving way to pink, as if she needed to know where it stopped.
Kit opened his eyes.
"Are we going?"
"Soon as we can move you safely," she said.
He nodded. "Good."
Leonie changed the dressing at the fitting. Kit watched her hands.
"Do I keep the tubes?"
"For now."
"How long's now?"
"I don't know."
He turned his head toward Mara. She put her gloved hand over his. He did not close his fingers around it this time.
"I thought you were leaving me," he said.
"No."
"When you stopped pulling."
"Your strap was caught. I had to cut it."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded, though she could not tell whether he believed her or had run out of strength to ask again.
Leonie loosened his mask.
Mara caught her arm. "Wait."
"He doesn't need it."
"How do you know?"
Leonie looked down at the motionless chest, the readings on the inadequate monitor, the clear moving liquid. "We can leave it if it comforts him."
Kit raised his hand to the clasp. It stopped short. He stared at his own fingers, then lowered them.
"Leave it," he said.
Leonie nodded and put the clasp back as it had been.
In the passage Nessa was resetting the wall guide where Benji had pulled his carrier line free. Her hands worked rapidly. One fitting would not seat. She slammed her palm against it and swore, tried again, stopped herself before she broke it. Mara went to help.
"Other way," she said.
"I know which way it goes."
Mara waited. Nessa turned the fitting over, eased it into place. It clicked.
For a while neither woman spoke.
"He pulled Benji out," Nessa said.
"Yes."
"I told him not to go. Benji. I told him."
Mara braced her hands on her knees. She wanted the floor to stop trembling, though it was not trembling now. She was.
"Can you keep the passage closed?" she asked. "Until we get the cabinet secured."
Nessa nodded.
"And don't move anything heavy on that frame."
"I won't."
Back at the table Benji had taken the ruined bowls away. Jonah held a cup while Kit drank through a straw. The clear sleeve at Kit's side moved with a tiny rhythm unrelated to his chest. Under his mask his face had begun to regain color.
Mara went to the sink. She washed the blood off her gloves. The warm water came down in a thin stream. It turned red and ran away. When her gloves were clean she kept her hands under it, feeling almost none of its warmth through the layers.
Leonie came beside her with a towel.
Mara turned the water off.
"Is he going to live?"
"I think so."
Mara looked at her. Leonie was crying, silently, without the face Mara expected crying to make. Tears ran down to her chin. Her chest stayed still.
"I thought we'd lost him," Leonie said.
Mara leaned her forehead against the cupboard above the sink. The mask struck it first, a hard little knock. She laughed once because the noise was so stupid.
Leonie stayed beside her until she could stand straight again.