On the eighth day of curfew the city had learned to live in two halves: gates open at dawn, barred at dusk, and in between, everyone lived harder than they used to. The nailing from the berth works started at first light and never stopped—one stroke, then another, in no hurry, never stopping either. The three stoves by the granary wall burned as always. The first grain issue had come down the day before, and the women of the lanes weighed their sacks one by one, the scale needles riding high, nobody saying a word and nobody leaving.
The careful ones chalked the household count on the corner of the sack, wiped their hands on their sleeves, hugged the sack and walked fast—grain in your hands was grain. There was no market anymore, but trade went on at the foot of the wall all the same: half a measure of salt for a tray of steamed buns, no hawking, hand signs only. The enforcement men stood in the dark by the street corner, rotating shifts, diligent about it.
At noon Chen Jin lifted the curtain of the med station. The queue outside had shrunk to almost nothing; the lightly wounded had gone back to their posts. The harried busyness of the first days had drained out of the place, leaving quiet, and medicine smell steeping in the quiet.
Wen Heng was changing a dressing in the inner room. She spoke without looking up. "There's food on the table out front."
Two bowls sat on the small table, two pairs of chopsticks. A basin of congee still steaming, a dish of pickles cut fine, a tray of mixed-grain buns with the cloth folded back at one corner, wheat smell working through the medicine smell. He stopped at the door. "I'm not hungry."
"I said sit down."
The congee was warm, not hot—the temperature of something timed to his entrance. The women at the stoves had worked in shifts; the water hadn't gone cold once. He sat and ate, broke half a bun into the bowl the way they did in the mines, soft enough to swallow. Wen Heng watched him crumble the bun in and said nothing; she got up and added another bun to the tray. The noise in the inner room stopped, and she came out with her apron off and sat down across from him and filled her own half bowl. Neither of them spoke; the only sound was spoons against the basin.
On the cot against the outer wall a soldier transferred down from the north wall slept badly, brow knotted, fingers twitching every little while. The med station had acquired a new class of illness these days, called couldn't-sleep. She had filled half a page of her notebook with it and noted in the margin: not a wound. Medicine couldn't fix it, so she just had them come in by day and roll bandages until their hands gave out—tired hands slept. On the cot at the other end lay a day hand with both hands wrapped, rubbed raw on his first night at the drains, asleep with his palms turned up, as if still gripping a pry bar.
He finished and drank the last of it down. Wen Heng stacked the bowls. "This meal, you've owed me seventeen days."
"I kept it on the books."
"Mm." She slid the bowls into the basin. "Does your sister sleep sound at night?"
"Sleeps like a stone."
"Mm." Her notebook stayed in her pocket.
The bowls washed and set to dry, she sat down across from him and gave him one look. "Arm."
He rolled up his left sleeve. The cut on the inside of his forearm had closed long ago; the scar was pale, a shade lighter than the skin around it. Wen Heng laid two fingers on it and ran it end to end. The small callus on her fingertip, pressed in by years of forceps, scraped across the scar—one faint itch, and he stayed still. She lifted his arm to the light, turned it through three angles, and set it back down.
"I looked at this the day after the fire. The scab came in thicker than it should, new pink at the edges. A scab takes seven days. Yours took two. This scar should have itched for a month—it quit itching in half that."
She took her hand back and fished out the notebook—corners worn round, half a pencil clipped inside. When she turned the pages, one page had a folded corner; her fingertip skipped it, flipped past, settled, and she began to read.
"The day of the fire, your blood got onto a burned child's hand. That ring of red faded at twice the speed of the burns beside it."
"The night at the water line, that bruise on your shoulder. My note says: yellow at the edges in two days. Normal is four or five."
"Yesterday at dusk, the old bruise under your right shoulder plate sat under a fresh dent. By noon today the old one had gone fully yellow, and the edge of the new one was already spreading."
Three entries, and she closed the notebook and looked up. "All of it came fast. There's no such ledger on a human body."
He remembered she had written four—the water he'd taken in at the water line was one, three mouthfuls. She skipped that entry. That one wasn't the body's fault; it was the water's.
Chen Jin put his sleeve down. "Keep it out of your notebook."
The words were out before he heard what they admitted: that the three entries were worth keeping.
Wen Heng held the notebook without moving and looked at him for two breaths. "Your name isn't in this notebook." She put it away in her pocket. "The entries are the sickness. The sickness doesn't care who you are."
"Medicine," she said. "Army issue, or did you get it yourself?"
"There's no medicine."
"No medicine—then what do I write this account under?" She leaned in a little. "The night of the siege you ran east end to west end till dawn. The next day your arms should have swelled. They didn't. That isn't endurance—I've pulled those nights myself." She turned her own hand over and showed him: split knuckles, not yet healed.
Chen Jin didn't answer right away. Wind lifted one corner of the curtain; someone in the inner room turned over, groaned into a wound, and went quiet.
"Something my family kept."
Wen Heng stared at him for a good three breaths. She had grown up in a medical house, and she had heard every provenance a drug could have—out of palaces, out of graves, off smuggler ships, and out of the council's own army medical system, with ledgers you couldn't fault.
Every one had a price, some of them the price of a rifle. Every one had a route, and every one had a ledger of the people it killed. She had followed one such ledger once—sent some names into a council prison, and sent her own name out of the building where she practiced. Drugs with unclear routes: she had seen what they did to people. She waited for him to name one.
"Whose formulation?"
"Gone," Chen Jin said. "This is what's left."
The answer wasn't in any of her books. He added half a sentence: "It never hurt anyone."
"I know it never hurt anyone," she said. "Bad medicine doesn't come in this grade."
She stood and shut her case, and the clasp clicked. The room went quiet. The nailing came in one stroke at a time; in the inner room someone worked a grinder, stroke and pause, then stopped, and someone turned over on a cot. Farther off, faint through the walls, came the rail signal from the north wall—two short and one long, round after round. The wall had a voice again now, and a wall with a voice let people sleep. Neither of them spoke.
After a while she spoke first, in the same level voice she used for orders. "I'm done writing down the cause of these."
"Then what do you write?"
"The dates. Once a month, you come by, I look. Then you go. It won't take your time."
"And if it stays like this?"
"Then it's a good ledger."
"Which day?"
"Any day." She said, "Take the armor off before you come. Don't make me unbuckle it."
He nodded. She picked up her case, went to the curtain, lifted it out, and let it fall—then lifted it again from outside. She stood in the doorway and looked back.
"Chen Jin."
"Mm."
"Don't die."
The curtain dropped. Out front her voice went on, level and ordinary, already on to the next patient; whatever she said didn't carry, only the soldier's low answer and a cot frame shifting.
Chen Jin sat at the table a while. He wrapped the rest of the buns back up in the tray cloth, neatly—take them home to Xiaosui. On his way out he looked back once: she was crouched at a cot changing a dressing, and she didn't look around. Bandages hung drying across the passage, swaying a little in the wind. The sun beat straight down, and he walked with his shadow under his heels.
Evening, the barracks. In the yard the two men borrowed out as day hands had just come back with their pay—the works foreman had reckoned it a full day, not a copper short. Gabion slings hung over the wall, drying; nobody had taken them in. He opened the panel first and looked: 1143. Nine hundred fifty-seven short of a rifle—it hadn't moved in three days.
He killed the panel and went to check the gun rack: twelve rifles, muzzles down, hung in a clean row, the new lock wiped down, no dust in the keyway. A note was pressed under the lock, brought back by the night shift from the north wall. The writing slanted, every spare stroke saved, two lines:
No wheel tracks on the north road. Five days now.
The grain convoy—day four, nothing back.
He read it twice. Five days, no wheel tracks—outbound, inbound, all of it gone. He folded the note and put it in his breast pocket, in the spot where notes went. Dusk was coming down, and the rail signal carried over from the parapet again, two short and one long, not one beat missed. He looked north, toward the wall. The watch clapper had made its first round of the city; past it, the north road was black and silent, no sound from anywhere. He stood a while, then went in and barred the door.