While Elaine was still turning all this over, Lutie came running out from the far end of the corridor with the registration book in her arms.
She was plainly busier today than last time. Her patched apron was marked with medicines of several different colours, and the loose hair at her forehead was stuck together with sweat.
Once she recognised Elaine and Viola she greeted them both with tremendous energy, then dealt with the work in her hands and finally led them through the corridor packed with the injured.
She took them through it, and had to keep turning sideways along the way to avoid staff carrying hot water and medicine cases.
Marlow was in the inner room washing blood off his hands, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Seeing Lutie bring people in, he simply told Elaine to put the temporary certificate on the desk and said nothing more.
There were far more patients today than usual, and he clearly had no time to ask every question over again.
The identity re-check was much simpler than Elaine had expected. Marlow verified the old records the orphanage had issued, confirmed that Viola was the accompanying party, and once satisfied that nothing was amiss added the date at the end of the document.
As to why Elaine had no relatives, or why she had suddenly taken the surname Vilan, he did not press very deeply. The Lower City sent people with incomplete identities for help every day, and no small number of them had origins vaguer than hers.
Marlow had just picked up the seal when a chair went over outside with an enormous crash.
Then a wooden bowl smashing, and the sound of a crowd backing hurriedly away.
Elaine and Viola turned at the same moment.
The worker who had been chatting by the window a moment ago was down in the middle of the corridor with his relief meal spilled across the floor. The other knelt beside him pressing frantically at his knee, and the bandage that had been dressed and closed was turning red fast.
"Stop pressing. Get scissors!"
Marlow threw the seal back on the desk and went past the two of them at a run.
The man's whole leg jerked with the pain, his heel striking the floor over and over. Two workers tried to get him onto a stretcher and were knocked back by his struggling, and the wooden chair lying across the way went over too, blocking a corridor that had not been wide to begin with.
Viola took half a step back without thinking, her fingertips going instinctively to the rings on her hand.
Then she glanced round at the crowd of injured pressing in on all sides, and let her fingers come off the ring faces.
The rings on her fingers were Sacred Objects, certainly. But with so many ordinary people around her, she chose not to use one.
It was only a moment's hesitation. And in that chaos, a pair of ghost-green eyes had already fixed on the rings on Viola's hand.
She gathered her skirts and went round the other side, bent, caught the corner of the wooden chair and dragged it to the wall. Her cuff came close to brushing the blood on the floor and the fright of it locked her movements for a second, and still she used the toe of her shoe to push the broken bowl and the scattered food aside together, clearing space for the men with the stretcher.
Elaine, meanwhile, was called over by Marlow in the middle of it.
"Hold his thigh down."
She crouched without thinking and put her hands on the man's jerking leg.
The scissors cut through a bandage already soaked through with blood, and the wound beneath had split almost completely open. The suture thread had not broken; the flesh had rolled back along the original incision to either side, as though the blood vessels and the muscle inside had all contracted at once a moment ago.
Blood came through the gaps between Elaine's fingers quickly.
Marlow's hands stopped for an instant, and then he pressed fresh gauze down over it.
"Hold him steady."
Before Elaine could answer, the man suddenly lifted his upper body and caught her wrist with a blood-covered hand, groping. His nails dragged across the skin and left several red marks, not especially deep.
Several workers took the chance to bring the stretcher alongside. Viola, past caring whether the seat of anything was clean, put a hand out to steady one side of it so the man would not roll off again.
Only when the bleeding had been stopped for the moment did Marlow have him carried to the observation room at the back.
"He isn't leaving today. That wound will have to be dealt with again later."
He said it, wiped his hands, walked a few paces and then stopped and turned back to Elaine.
Both of Elaine's hands were nearly soaked with blood, and a patch of dark red had got onto her cuff. She lifted her wrist and looked at it. The place he had grabbed only itched slightly, but a very faint coolness came through from beneath the skin.
The feeling arrived quickly, like the lines the white mirror had left sweeping through the depths of her arm, and then sank away again.
Marlow came back, took hold of her wrist and ran his thumb across those scratches.
"Forgive me, Miss Elaine. Are you hurt at all?" He seemed genuinely embarrassed; he had not expected the situation to break out as it had.
"No... it's nothing."
Marlow did not let go straight away. His eyes stayed on that patch of skin for a moment.
Some of the man's blood was on Elaine's arm, along with the red and swelling scratches.
He drew his gaze back quickly, took a bottle and poured it onto gauze, and cleaned the blood carefully off her wrist and her fingers.
"Keep an eye on it when you get home. If you run a fever tonight, or the skin around it reddens, come and find me again."
Viola stood to one side, still rather pale in the face, making a show of nothing being the matter while she straightened the cuff that had been pulled out of place.
"What was actually wrong with that man?" Elaine was curious. She had seen the wound from close up, and it had plainly not looked like a simple tear.
"The wound was seen to too late, there was clotted blood inside it, and it split open again when he moved."
Marlow answered it perfectly naturally, as though such things happened here all the time, then turned and went back into the inner room.
The seal was still where it had been on the desk.
He checked Elaine's name over once more, pressed the seal into the red ink paste, and set it firmly at the very bottom of the certificate.
"Identity re-check approved."
Elaine took the certificate. Her first look only confirmed the name on it, and she did not notice the small break worked in among the elaborate patterning.
Marlow folded the duplicate page separately, and pressed it, together with the gauze he had just used to clean Elaine's wound, into the left-hand drawer of the desk.
When Lutie showed them back out along the corridor, the filth on the floor had been swept temporarily to the wall, dirty water mixed with blood dragging several darkened streaks behind it.
Viola checked her cuff, and only once she was sure no blood had got onto her did she push the rings that had been knocked out of place back down to the base of her fingers.
Elaine and Viola walked out of the Relief Society under Lutie's guidance. Compared with last time, there were more big, thickset workers about, and almost none of the patients who had been there when the two of them first came.
Perhaps... they had got better.
Elaine did not think about it further. She held her certificate in her hand and let her mind wander.
She had no idea what she was supposed to do next... Find a way to turn her body back, perhaps?
She could hardly go down a mine every day, could she?
Nobody around them was free enough to pay attention, and Elaine's mind was not on the road either. Lutie, still full of energy, was asking Viola questions of every sort, and Viola had taken some interest in this very brave little girl.
Viola was rather afraid of blood, after all, and inside the Relief Society she had already been instinctively trying to keep clear of the patients around her.
And while the three of them walked and talked, in a corner of that shabby, damp street, a knot of black shadow drifted slowly past in front of them.
Not one of the three, Elaine included, noticed it.
The ghost-green eyes were fixed hard on the fingers of Viola's left hand. Then the shadow gradually dispersed, and the ring on Viola's finger went with it.
So that Viola herself never noticed either.