Aura-36 // The Story So Far — Side Healing Tale II

I am Mender, I am a medic, and eleven days ago I ran out of enemy to fight.

Bracken changed the dressing on my arm this morning without being asked, which is a thing he has started doing since the door came down and cannot seem to stop doing, and I have decided this is not the same as needing to be watched. We are three weeks out from the house now and I still expect the wall behind me to be there when I turn around, nine feet of rack from floor to joists, and it is not there, because we do not live there anymore, because there is no basement left to keep a wall in.

We are on the north road again, the actual north road this time and not the one Bracken invented to explain how he found me, walking it on our own feet because the cart threw a wheel two towns back and neither of us knows how to build a new one, and I have started saying "I am a medic" to people who ask if I can fix a wheel, which used to be a joke and has started to feel like the truth.

A woman at the last crossing told us about a coast three days further on where the wells have gone bad and the fish have stopped coming in and something has been seen at low tide that nobody will describe past the word "wrong." She said it the way people say things they do not want asked about twice, and Bracken looked at me before she had finished the sentence, and I looked back at him, and neither of us said anything, because we both already knew we were going.

"You do not have to come," I say to him that night, by the fire, because I say this every time now and he lets me say it every time, which is its own kind of conversation.

"I know," he says.

"I am serious. I am the one who runs toward it. You are the one who ran two winters ago and made it home."

He turns his arm over in the firelight, the one with no scar on it anymore, and does not answer that directly. "Hallow is three days the other way," he says instead. "I checked. Whatever this is, it is not them."

"That is not what I asked."

"I know," he says again, and puts another piece of wood on the fire, and that is the whole answer I am going to get out of him tonight, and it is, if I am honest with the page and nobody else, the answer I wanted.

We sleep in shifts out of habit rather than need, and somewhere around my watch I hear something on the road behind us going faster than anything on this road has any business going, and by the time I am on my feet it has already gone past, a shape and a sound and a spray of gravel and nothing else, gone before I can call out, gone before I even know if it saw the fire.

Bracken sits up. "What was that."

"I do not know," I say, which is true, and which is also, I am starting to notice, becoming my second most common sentence after the first one.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and I meet Lark because she nearly kills us both doing something she will later insist was completely under control.

We hear her before we see her on the second morning, the same sound from the night before but coming back now instead of going away, closer and faster, and I only have time to grab Bracken by the collar and pull him off the road before something goes past at a speed that does not belong on a dirt track running along a cliff edge, three wheels where two would do, no visible way of stopping it that either of us can identify in the half second we get to look.

It does not stop. It does something worse than not stopping, which is that it comes back, turning in a space that should not fit a turn, and pulls up alongside us with a sound like tearing cloth and a very young woman standing up out of the frame of it before it has fully stopped moving.

"You are in my line," she says, which is not an apology.

"Your line goes through the middle of a road," I say.

"The road goes through the middle of my line," she says, and grins at me like this is a settled argument rather than the start of one, and I decide right there that I do not have the energy for her and also that I am almost certainly going to end up finding the energy.

Her name is Lark, and she tells us this the way people tell you things they are proud of rather than things you asked for, along with the fact that she holds the record for the crossing between here and the coast towns, four hours that everyone else takes six for, and that she has held it for a year and intends to keep holding it, and that the only reason she nearly took our heads off is that she is chasing weather and weather does not wait for two men walking in the middle of her line.

"We are going to the coast," Bracken says, before I can stop him, because Bracken has apparently decided in the last four seconds that this is relevant information to volunteer to a stranger who just tried to kill us.

"Everyone is going to the coast," Lark says. "Nobody is buying fish anymore and everybody wants to know why." She looks at the two of us properly for the first time, the bag, the rifle Bracken has not quite learned to carry like it belongs to him, the way I stand like a man used to running toward things rather than away. "You are not fish buyers."

"I am a medic," I say, because it is true, and because it has started to function as a complete sentence on its own, and because I would like this conversation to end.

"Good," she says. "Bring the bag. Whatever is out there, I would rather have you standing near it than not."

She does not offer us a ride and I do not ask for one, because I have seen how she turns, and we watch her go back the way she came at a speed that makes the previous encounter look cautious, and Bracken looks at me with an expression I recognize because it is the one I probably wore the night he first came down my basement stairs.

"I like her," he says.

"You like everyone who survives meeting you," I say, and we start walking again, three days still ahead of us, and somewhere ahead of that a coast that has stopped giving anything back.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and Lark finds us again on the second night, which she tells us was not planned, and which I do not believe for one single second.

She comes in low over the ridge with no fire to aim for and no reason I can name, and lands the three wheeled thing badly enough that I am up and moving toward her before Bracken has even worked out what the sound was, and I find her sitting in the wreck of her own machine with a foreleg bent wrong at the shin and blood already soaking through the wrap she has tied over it herself, badly, the way somebody ties a wrap when there is nobody else to do it for them and never has been.

"It is nothing," she says, which is the second time in two days somebody has told me that about an injury that is very clearly something.

"Hold still," I say, and I bring the canister round, and she goes the same shade of pale that Bracken went, and I am beginning to think this is simply what everybody does the first time, and I tell her the same thing I told him. "If I hurt you, you can hurt me."

"Fine," she says, through her teeth, and does not move again until the green mist has done its work and the shin sits straight for the first time in an hour, and she looks at the leg and then at me the way Bracken looked at his arm, turning it in firelight, looking for a line that is not there.

"You could sell that," she says.

"I could not."

"You could sell that and never fly a supply run again as long as you lived."

"I am a medic," I say, and she looks at me for a long moment the way people look at a sentence they are trying to decide is stupid or is the only sane thing anybody has said to them in years.

I ask her why she was out here at night with no fire and no reason, and it takes her most of an hour and two attempts at changing the subject to admit that she does not have anywhere she is required to be, has not for three years, since a supply contract went bad on a coast road and took the rest of her family's line with it, and that the record she holds between here and the coast towns is not really about the record.

"I go fast because slow is when you have time to think," she says, and does not look at either of us while she says it, and I do not ask a follow-up question, because I recognize the shape of that sentence, because I have said versions of it myself about a basement full of weapons I built for a threat I could never quite name.

Bracken, who has been quiet through all of this in a way that means he is paying more attention than either of us, hands her the water skin without being asked and says, "You should come to the coast with us. Your machine is not going anywhere tonight and neither are you."

"I was not asking to come."

"I know," he says. "I am telling you that you are coming."

She looks at him the way I imagine I looked at him, two winters ago on a road I never wrote down, and something in her face settles that had not been settled a minute before, and she does not argue the point again.

We fix the wheeled thing as best we can in the morning, which is to say Bracken fixes it while I hold things and Lark tells him he is doing it wrong in a tone that means she is grateful, and we walk the rest of the way to the coast three instead of two, and none of us says out loud what all three of us have started to understand, which is that this is no longer a healer and a man he saved. It is a household with no house, moving on foot toward a coast that has stopped giving anything back, and for the first time since the basement door came down, I am not doing this alone.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and the coast tells us what is wrong before anybody in the town does.

We smell it before we see it, salt gone thin and wrong under something else, a mineral smell like the inside of the tunnel under my old house, and Lark's machine idles rough the last half mile in a way she says it has never done anywhere else in her life. The town itself is small and going smaller, boats up on the shingle that have not been in the water in weeks, nets folded and put away like nobody expects to need them again soon, and every well in the place drawing water with a film on it that nobody will drink and nobody has found the nerve to test.

An old woman running what used to be a fish house tells us the water started going bad four months ago, slow at first, then all at once, right around the time the low tide started pulling out further than anyone has ever seen it pull, far enough to expose ground that has not seen daylight since before her grandmother's grandmother. She says a shape was seen out on that new ground at the last low tide, low and wide and moving with purpose, and that nobody has walked that stretch of beach since, not for money, not for a dare, not for anything.

"What kind of shape," I ask.

"The kind you do not ask twice about," she says, which I am beginning to understand is simply how coastal people describe anything they do not have a name for.

Lark, who has said almost nothing since we arrived, is standing at the tide line with her boots in wet sand looking out at ground that should be underwater and is not, and when I come to stand beside her she does not turn around.

"I flew a supply route past here once," she says. "Before. There was nothing out there then. Just water, all the way out, no ground at all."

"How far past here."

"Further than I have ever told anyone," she says, and that is all she gives me, and I decide not to push it, because I have learned by now that the people in this healing tale tell you things at the speed they can afford and no faster, myself included.

Bracken finds the well nearest the fish house and takes a sample of the film on top of it into a jar, holding it up to the light the way I have seen him do a hundred times now, a habit he has picked up from watching me work that he has never once admitted to picking up.

"It is not natural," he says. "It has a texture to it. Like something is being drawn up through the water rather than growing in it."

"Drawn up from where."

He looks toward the exposed stretch of beach, the low wide shape the old woman will not describe past one word, and none of us says the word tunnel out loud, but I can see it land in both their faces at the same moment it lands in mine, because we have all three of us, by now, learned exactly what that word tends to mean once it starts turning up in places it has no business being.

"Tomorrow's low tide," Lark says. "I want to see the ground."

"That is not a question," I say.

"No," she says. "It is not."

I am Mender, I am a medic, and the ground under the sea has a door in it.

We go out at the low tide with the whole town watching from the shingle and none of them following, three of us on ground that has not been dry in longer than anyone can measure, black rock slick with something that is not quite weed and not quite oil, and Lark walks it like she has already decided the sea is not coming back in time to matter, which I choose not to find comforting.

The shape the old woman would not name turns out, once we are close enough to see it plainly, to be a ridge of the same black rock rising out of the flat, too regular to be anything the sea made on its own, seams running along it at even distances the way seams run along something built rather than something grown. Bracken finds the door first, low and round and sealed with the same unmarked metal as the tunnel under my house, no handle, no hinge visible, no sign it has ever been opened by anyone who wanted it opened rather than simply knew how.

"This is the same make," he says, running his hand along the seam the way he ran his hand along the wall of my basement two winters ago, looking for an answer that is not going to be written down anywhere he can read it. "Whoever built the one under your house built this one too."

"Or the same people are still building them," Lark says, and neither of us has an answer for that, because it is the worse of the two options and we all three know it.

The door opens on its own when Lark gets close enough, no key, no code, nothing, sliding back into the rock the way my own door slid open the night everything came down, and beyond it a tunnel running away under the seabed, lit far better than any tunnel under a fishing town has any right to be, the same clean unflickering light I have never once managed to explain in my own basement.

None of us goes in. I want to be honest about that, on the page, where nobody but me will ever read it back. We stand at the mouth of a lit tunnel running out under an ocean that used to be there and is not there right now, and every instinct I have built over two winters of running toward things says do not, not yet, not without knowing what is pulling the water instead of just where it is going.

"The tide comes back in six hours," Bracken says.

"I know," Lark says, and does not move.

"Lark."

"I am not going in," she says. "I am just looking at it. There is a difference between looking at a door and walking through one, and I have not decided which one this is yet."

I put a hand on her shoulder, the same gesture Bracken uses on me more than he thinks I notice, and she lets me leave it there for exactly as long as it takes her to decide she has looked long enough, and then we walk back across ground that used to be the bottom of the sea, and behind us the door closes itself without being asked, the way it opened, and none of us looks back at it more than once.

That night none of us sleeps well, and I write nothing in this account for two days after, because there is nothing yet that feels safe enough to put down.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and the thing that has been draining the coast finally shows itself while we are three miles from anywhere useful to be.

We are on the cliff road above the flat, going back for rope and a lantern that will actually last longer than an hour underground, when the ground under the exposed seabed starts to move the way ground is not supposed to move, a slow heave along the ridge line that Bracken sees first because he has taken to watching that stretch of coast the way I used to watch a treeline.

"Mender."

I look where he is looking and the tunnel door is open again, wide open this time, no one having gone near it, and something is coming out of it low and wide and fast across ground it clearly knows better than we ever will, moving the way water moves rather than the way anything with legs moves, and it is coming toward the cliff road, and the cliff road is where we are standing.

"Run," I say, which is not a plan, and Bracken and I are already three strides into not having one when Lark's machine comes over the rise behind us going faster than I have ever seen her go, faster than the first night she nearly took our heads off, and she does not slow down to let us on, she simply angles the frame so that running alongside it for two strides puts us onto it, Bracken hauled up by the collar the exact same way I hauled him off a road two days before this account started, some kind of debt working itself back around without either of us planning it.

The thing behind us is fast on flat ground and slower on the incline, and Lark takes the cliff road at a speed that should not be survivable on a track that width, one wheel finding open air twice by my count, and she does not once look back to see how close it is, because she does not need to, because she can hear it the way I have started to be able to hear a wound closing before the mist has finished working.

"Left," Bracken shouts, for no reason I understand until the road actually does bend left a half second later and Lark has already leaned the machine into a turn that takes it before I have finished bracing for it.

We do not outrun it because we are faster in a straight line. We outrun it because Lark has driven this exact stretch of coast in the dark, for money, for years, chasing a record that never mattered to anybody but her, and the thing behind us has been under the sea longer than the town has had a name, and the road belongs to her and not to it.

It gives up the chase at the tree line, sliding back the way it came with the same slow purposeful heave it used coming out, and Lark finally slows the machine to something like a survivable speed, and none of us says anything for a long stretch of road, and then Bracken starts laughing, the way people laugh right after the part where they nearly died, and Lark laughs too, and I do not laugh, because I am doing the thing I always do after, which is counting how close it actually was.

"You are welcome," Lark says, when she gets her breath back.

"I did not say thank you."

"You were thinking it very loudly."

"I am a medic," I say, which is not a thank you and which she seems to understand as one anyway, and for the length of that ride back into town, for the first time since the basement door came down, none of us is afraid.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and for one evening nobody in this healing tale needs healing.

The fish house woman feeds us that night without being asked twice, the kind of meal that gets put in front of people a town has decided it owes something to, and the three of us sit at a table meant for six and take up all of it anyway, the way people do when they have stopped being careful about how much space they are allowed.

Lark eats like she has not trusted a meal to still be there in ten minutes for most of her life, fast, both elbows on the table, and stops halfway through to look at the two of us like she has only just noticed she is doing it in company. "Sorry," she says.

"For what," Bracken says.

"For eating like this."

"You should see him with soup," Bracken says, meaning me, and I do not dignify that with a response because it is accurate.

We talk about nothing that matters for most of an hour, which is its own kind of rare, and somewhere in the middle of it Lark tells us the actual reason she chases the record between here and the coast towns, not the version she gave us on the road, and it turns out to be smaller and worse than either of us expected. Her mother flew the same route for a supply contract and died on it in weather Lark still will not name the season of, and Lark has spent three years trying to beat a time her mother never set, on a road her mother died on, because it is the only way she has found of being near her that does not require standing still.

"That is not healthy," I say, because it is true and because nobody else at this table seems willing to say it.

"You keep a nine foot rack of weapons in a basement you built for a threat that had not happened yet," she says. "I do not think you get to say that to me."

"That is fair," I say, and Bracken laughs into his cup, and Lark looks pleased with herself in a way that tells me she has won an argument with somebody for the first time in a long while and intends to enjoy it.

Later, outside, with the fire down to coals and Bracken asleep against the wall the way he sleeps now, upright, ready, a habit from a door coming down that he has never fully put away, Lark sits next to me and does not say anything for a long time.

"You are going to go into that tunnel," she says eventually. It is not a question.

"Yes."

"I am coming."

"I know," I say, because I do know, and because some part of me that has spent two winters trying not to need anybody has quietly stopped fighting the fact that I need these two, both of them, in a way I have not needed anybody since before any of this started.

"Good," she says, and puts another piece of wood on the fire the way Bracken does, a gesture she has picked up from him the same way he picked up mine, three people slowly becoming the same household without anybody deciding it out loud, and I sit there a while longer than I mean to, watching the fire, thinking that whatever is under that sea, we are going to go and meet it together, and for the first time in longer than I can measure, that thought does not frighten me.

I do not write down, that night, the other thought sitting underneath it, which is that I have not let myself want three people to still be here in the morning in a very long time, and that wanting it again feels like standing too close to an open flame.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and we go into the tunnel at the next low tide with a rope, a lantern that lasts, and three people who have decided, without saying it out loud, that none of us is coming out alone.

The tunnel runs further than any of us expected, sloping down under what used to be seabed toward a chamber lit the same unflickering white as everything else this builder has ever made, and at the bottom of it we find the source, a machine the size of a house, humming low, drawing the coast's water down through channels cut into rock decades before this town had a name for the sea it sits beside, feeding something we never see the far end of, exactly the way the tunnel under my own house fed a light I never found the switch for.

"It is not attacking the coast," Bracken says, reading a run of markings along the machine's flank that none of us can translate but all of us can see are markings rather than damage. "It is just running. It has been running the whole time. Nobody built it to hurt anything. Nobody built it to stop, either."

"Then how do we stop it," Lark says.

"We do not," I say, because I have learned this lesson once already, in a basement, with a device with a countable number of doses. "We redirect it."

The thing that came after us on the cliff road finds us while we are working out how, low and wide, moving up a channel we did not know was there, and this time there is nowhere to run to, and this time it is Lark who moves first, taking the coil of rope off my shoulder before I have finished the sentence I was going to say to stop her, looping it around a stanchion at a dead run and going past the thing at a speed that should not fit the width of the chamber, drawing it away from Bracken and me and the machine in one single unbroken line that I could not have planned and would never have let her attempt if she had asked me first.

She does not outrun it by much. For one full second, the worst second of this entire account, I lose sight of both of them behind the machine's housing, and I hear a sound I do not have a description for and do not want one, and then Lark comes back around the far side of the housing still moving, the thing behind her sliding into the channel wall she has just led it into at a speed it could not correct for, and it goes still, not dead, just stopped, folded into a space too narrow for it to work its way back out of quickly.

"That was not the plan," I say, when I can speak again.

"There was not a plan," she says, breathing hard, grinning the exact grin she gave me the first morning she nearly took our heads off. "There was barely a road."

We redirect the machine's draw back out past the folded stretch where the creature is stuck, a slow patient hour of Bracken's steady hands and my own two working alongside them, and somewhere in that hour the hum changes pitch, and somewhere after that the water starts coming back in over the flat above us, and none of us says anything when it happens, because we are all three too busy listening to make sure it keeps happening.

We climb out of that tunnel into a tide that is finally, after four months, doing what a tide is supposed to do, and I do not know yet whether this is the ending, and for once, that not-knowing does not frighten me either.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and the coast starts giving things back before we have even finished walking off the beach.

The wells clear within two days, the film gone from the water the way a fever breaks, and the fish come back slower, over a week, in numbers that make the fish house woman cry without trying to hide it, which nobody at that table holds against her. Nobody in the town asks us what was under the sea, not directly, not the way you would think they might after four months of not knowing, and I have come to understand that coastal people do not always want the whole answer, only the part where it stops.

We never do find out who built the machine, or the tunnel under it, or the one under my own house, or whether they are the same hands or three different sets of hands working from the same old plan. Bracken thinks it is one builder, working alone, over a very long time, for reasons that made sense to exactly one person and nobody else. I think he might be right, and I have decided I do not need to know more than that to sleep at night, which two winters ago would not have been true, and is true now.

The creature stays folded in its channel, alive as far as anyone can tell, fed by whatever the machine still leaks its way, and the town posts a watch on it the way you post a watch on weather rather than an enemy, which feels like the correct way to think about it, given everything.

Lark's machine, patched by Bracken's hands and her own bad temper in roughly equal measure, sits outside the fish house for four days before she says anything about leaving, and on the fourth day she does not say anything about leaving at all, she simply starts asking where we are headed next, present tense, no future tense in it anywhere, and I let the question sit for a while before I answer it, because I want to be sure she means what I think she means.

"There will be more of these," I say. "Wells. Coasts. People who cannot say what they saw past one word."

"I know."

"It will not always end like this one did."

"I know that too," she says, and there is something old in her voice when she says it, older than a woman her age should have any right to, and I recognize it because I hear the same age in my own voice some mornings. "I would still rather be somewhere it might, than somewhere nothing ever happens at all."

Bracken, packing the cart we have finally managed to build a working wheel for, does not look up from the axle. "She is staying," he says. "You can stop interviewing her."

"I was not interviewing her."

"You were absolutely interviewing her," Lark says, and swings up onto the rebuilt frame of her machine, and for the first time it does not feel like a vehicle that might carry one of us away from the other two. It feels like the fourth wheel on a cart that finally has all of them.

We leave the coast three instead of two, the same as we arrived, except this time none of us is walking because we do not have to, and somewhere on the road north I catch myself thinking that this is the first time in this whole account that I have finished a chapter with everybody I started it with still standing beside me.

I am Mender, I am a medic, and this is the chapter I could not write the last time I tried to tell a healing tale.

I do not know if anybody will ever read the first one all the way through to its end, because it does not have one, because I sat down twenty-three times to finish it and could not make myself write a twenty-fourth chapter in which the medic actually fixes the thing he set out to fix. I told myself for a long time that this was because the story did not need it, that some stories are honest by staying open, and some of that was even true. The rest of it was that I did not believe, when I wrote that account, that anybody stayed. I wrote about a man with an arsenal and a canister and a tunnel he never lit, and every single dose in that story cost something, and I did not know how to write an ending where it did not, because I had never lived one.

I have lived one now. It took a coast, a machine older than any town's memory, a creature we did not kill and did not need to, and one reckless young woman who arrived by nearly ending my life and stayed by refusing to let it end a second time on a cliff road I would not have survived without her. It took Bracken staying exactly as long as I kept expecting him to leave, and then longer than that, until the expecting stopped meaning anything.

I am not going to pretend this account answers everything the first one left open. I still do not know who built the tunnel under my house, or the one under this coast, or how many more of them are sitting quiet under how many more towns waiting for somebody to ask the wrong well the wrong question. I have decided, and I am telling the page this the same way I told Lark on that beach, that there is a difference between looking at a door and walking through every single one of them, and that some mysteries can be left standing without a person owing them an answer.

What I can tell you, in a way I could not tell the last account, is how this one ends. It ends with three people and a cart with a wheel that finally turns the way a wheel should, on a north road none of us built and all three of us have decided to keep walking, toward whatever the next town needs a medic for. It ends with Bracken laughing at something Lark said before I have even worked out what the joke was. It ends with me writing four words to close a story for the first time in my life without meaning them as a wall to hide behind.

I am a medic, and today, for once, everybody I love is still here to hear me say it.