Elaine and Viola sat down on the bench by the door.
The bench had been in use for many years. The surface of the boards was worn to a shine, and there were dry splits at the corners.
A bamboo basket full of old newspapers stood against the wall. The one on top had been handled until it went soft, its date already a month gone, with several medicine stains on it whose original colour was past recovering.
It was cooler inside than out, and still stifling.
Both windows stood open, and the air coming through them passed across the white cloth drying under the eaves and carried a little damp in with it. Boiled herbs, cheap disinfectant and meat broth all together, and every so often the rank smell of a wound gone bad.
Doctor Marlow did not come over straight away.
He was still examining the wound on that old man's leg. The trouser leg was rolled up above the knee, the calf swollen until it shone, and several gashes cut by a plank still showed on the skin.
Marlow was quiet as he bent to clean it, and not especially quick about it.
An apprentice stood beside him holding a basin of reddening water, waiting for him to drop the bloodied cotton into it. The old man's forehead was covered in sweat from the pain, and he never made a sound, only gripped the edge of the bed with both hands.
"Do they charge?"
Elaine asked it quietly, curious. She had never had anything to do with a relief facility like this before.
Viola glanced at the old notice pasted on the wall. Ordinary external injuries treated free of charge; medicines and bandages charged according to circumstances. And in smaller letters at the bottom: if you cannot pay, the cost may be worked off by cleaning, hauling or general labour.
"It's set out clearly up there. If you can't afford it, you trade labour for it."
Elaine didn't answer. Most of the patients around them had been hurt at work.
This world was close to entering its industrial age, and in the Middle City and the Lower City you could already see factory chimneys of every description.
As industry advanced, society needed labour of every kind, and what came with that was exploitation of every kind, and policy that made no sense.
An injured worker had no way to get reasonable compensation out of a factory owner, and once a worker was hurt he almost always ended up crippled for life.
Outside, the big pot was still steaming, and every so often the wooden ladle knocked against its rim with a dull, soft sound.
The little girl with the bandaged wrist was crouched by the water buckets washing bowls, dipping them one at a time into the whitened water and drying them with an old cloth, practised enough that this plainly was not her first time.
Elaine watched her a moment longer.
The bandage was wound thickly, covering everything from her wrist to her palm, leaving only a few small fingers showing.
As though she had felt the look, the girl suddenly raised her head.
Their eyes met briefly.
She blinked, then smiled at Elaine and bent back over the bowls.
After another ten minutes or so, Doctor Marlow finally finished with the old man's leg.
The apprentice carried away the basin, by now thoroughly red, and the old man was helped out to one of the wooden beds to rest. Marlow washed his hands, then picked up the temporary registration form from the desk and gestured Elaine over.
The examination was not complicated.
Nothing more than taking her temperature and looking at her eyes and her mouth, then asking whether she had had a fever or a cough lately, or come into contact with anything contaminated.
Viola stood beside her and answered most of the questions on Elaine's behalf.
In her account, the orphanage Elaine had lived in was not merely squalid but had collapsed suddenly through bad management, after which Elaine had wandered outside for a long time and had only recently been found by Astraea.
Marlow listened and wrote it down without showing any obvious doubt.
When it came to the physical, he only had Elaine pull her collar open a little so he could check her shoulders and the upper part of her chest for scars, contamination blotches or any other anomaly.
Plenty of ordinary people did not understand why every census and every routine examination involved the same check of the chest and the shoulders and certain other parts of the body.
Elaine didn't entirely understand it either. She had been nervous about it, though.
Because she remembered clearly that when she first woke in the drainage channel, faint white lines had surfaced around her shoulders and chest. They had flickered under the skin now and then while Raea was changing her dressings, too.
Now, with her collar pulled a little open, all that showed was skin of an excessive paleness.
No lines. No trace of any glow.
Marlow gave it one look and told her to straighten her clothes again.
"No external injury, no obvious contamination."
Elaine looked down as she closed her collar, and her fingertips paused at her chest.
Strange.
It was as though the white lines had sensed an inspection coming and hidden themselves deeper under the skin in advance.
She certainly didn't think they had actually gone. They had still surfaced across her chest and shoulders now and then since she woke in that old drainage channel. There was simply nothing to see at the moment.
Doctor Marlow asked nothing further, only made a mark on the form.
"Name?"
"Elaine."
The hand holding the pen paused briefly, presumably because the name was an uncommon one to give a girl, and then went on writing.
"Surname?"
Elaine did not answer at once.
White was certainly not a surname she could use any more. As far as the world was concerned, Elaine White had died in the explosion at the ancestral manor, and a person of the same name turning up again would only invite more trouble.
Viola answered for her from the side. As the oblivious Viola saw it, Elaine probably just didn't know what her surname was supposed to be.
And since she was Raea's little sister, sharing her surname was obviously the natural thing.
"Vilan."
The nib moved across the paper and left behind a name both strange and familiar.
Elaine Vilan.
The given name was still her own; only the surname had become Astraea's. In the space of a few strokes she had gone from the young master of House White to Astraea's long-lost younger sister.
Which raised a question. Did Raea, away at work, know about this?
And if Raea found out... there was no telling whether she would be angry.
It wasn't as though Elaine could pull rank on her with the "young master" business any more.
Marlow went on to ask her age, her address and her guarantor, and Viola repeated the whole prepared account.
Finally he took out a dark red seal and pressed it into the lower right corner of the certificate.
"This temporary certificate is only good for three days. Come back in three days, since it has to be submitted and reviewed, and if there's nothing else wrong we can issue the formal local certification."
Viola took the certificate, a satisfied smile back on her face.
"I told you we'd get it done today." She looked thoroughly confident, and pushed her chest out again.
Elaine looked at the name on the paper. She didn't quite follow what a temporary certificate was for. Wasn't this the sort of thing you simply took and used?
"It's always like this. Just come back in three days. I'll come and find you in three days."
Seeing Elaine's puzzled look, Viola tried to explain. She had no idea at all what Elaine was anxious about.
Raea had said she would be home in about three days. If it wasn't finished inside three days, explaining it to Raea would be difficult.
"Is there no way to speed it up?" Elaine asked the obvious question.
"Mm... this young lady will think of something when she gets back. It's getting late, I have to go."
Viola didn't know why Elaine was in such a hurry, but now that it had been submitted she was naturally confident she could move it along with a little manoeuvring of her own.
Just as the two of them were about to leave, the bandaged girl came running over again with two bowls of broth.
"These are free, big sister. Why not have something to eat before you go?"
She held one bowl out to Elaine and the other to Viola.
Elaine looked at the eager little girl in front of her, and at the injured and the badly undernourished vagrants all around, and she and Viola declined politely before climbing into the Rosenfeld carriage.