Page 3 of Remmen

It worked here too. A hand the size of a dinner plate pushed a folded shirt into mine. I wadded it against the mess of Giles’s forearm and leaned my weight in.

He groaned.

“Stay with me. You do not get to die on the welcome mat.” I found the pulse in his wrist. Quick, but there. “Think how it looks. First one off the ship and already flat on your back.”

“I aim,” he got out, “to manage expectations.”

“You’ve smashed them.” The bleeding was slowing under my hands. We’d crossed the whole dark stretch between Earth and here on the same transport and traded maybe ten words, most of them me saying I was fine, I’d sit in the back, thanks. Keeping to myself was the one thing I never lost the knack for, and now here I was with both hands red with his blood.

Around us the dock was all legs. Minotaurs, dozens of them, tall as door frames and wider, close enough that a sensible woman would have been afraid.

I wasn’t. I’d read the file on the way out. Freed gladiators, every one of them, bred and sold to kill in front of crowds, then somehow loose and out here building a town with their hands. A whole settlement of men carrying more than any ward I’d ever worked, and three of us shipped in to do something about it.

I’d wanted the work. I still did. I just hadn’t pictured day one on my knees in fruit pulp with my elbow in a coworker’s arm.

A shadow dropped over us and stayed. I looked up, and up. A minotaur was folding himself onto his heels beside me, a beat-up canvas bag in one fist. Crouched, he still had a head on me.

“Otho.” He was already reaching for Giles. “You keep him breathing?”

“He did the hard part. I just held the edges together.”

He pressed two fingers along the bone. Giles hissed. Otho nodded like the hiss had told him something useful. “Clean break. Good pressure.” His eyes went to my hands. “You a doctor?”

I didn’t let myself react. That question always found the sore spot and put its thumb on it.

“Counselor,” I said, fast, out ahead of it. “First aid is just a bonus.”

The doctor part I’d wanted, once, back when I still let myself want things. It cost money I never had and years I couldn’t spare, and counselor was what I could afford to become instead. I’d made my peace with that a long time ago. Mostly.

Otho grunted, which I chose to read as a pass, and had a brace on Giles’s arm in four seconds flat. Then he turned and barked two names into the crowd. Two of the big ones came and scooped Giles up like a sack of meal.

“My office. Careful. He’s held together with good intentions and a bit of cotton.”

Giles managed to lift two fingers at me as he went bobbing off over a shoulder. Then it was just me, kneeling in a puddle of squashed purple fruit with a stranger’s blood going tacky on my knuckles.

I wiped my hands down my trousers. It didn’t help. Nothing much had, for about two years now.

I refused to think about the invitation at the bottom of my bag. Cream card, gold edge, my name in good calligraphy. Alistair and Janice request the pleasure…

I’d buried it under my spare socks the morning I left and still hadn’t put it out an airlock. A practical woman would have. I guess I was just mostly practical.

A cloth came into my line of sight. Folded, damp, clean. The hand offering it could have cupped my whole skull.

I took it on reflex and followed the hand up its arm, to the face at the top.

He was the one who’d parted that whole crowd earlier without seeming to try, every giant on the dock giving way before he reached them.

He wore a long coat made of good cloth that was actually pressed. His horns were capped in worked silver that threw the light around. He had a face that gave up nothing at all.

“Remmen,” he said. One word, low.

The mayor. That name had been spelled out on the paperwork.

“Anne.” I gestured at the fruit-and-blood catastrophe between us. “Sorry about the, uh. Everything.”

He just looked at me, and it wasn’t a polite once-over. It was slower and lower than that, and it landed somewhere south of my stomach and settled in, warm and unwelcome. Heat climbed the back of my neck.

My pulse had finally come down after the emergency. Now it took off again, with no emergency to blame it on.