by Sarah Fine
And then Melik loses his balance and flies off the ladder, crashing onto the moving conveyor belt twenty feet below.
THREE OF THE NOOR try to grab Melik’s body before it is shuttled to a different part of the killing floor by the relentless conveyor belt. Ebian rushes over, waving his stumpy arms, all jowls and brows. “Get that filthy Noor off our meat! His blood will contaminate everything!”
Sinan’s eyes flash and he lunges for Ebian, but two older Noor grab him by the shoulders and drag him away before Ebian even notices. Ebian keeps yelling at the three boys who are now lifting Melik off the belt. His chest is a mess. His eyes are closed and his face is pale. His wine-red blood drips from his limp fingertips as his friends carry him to an open spot between machines and lay him on the grimy concrete floor. Sinan is crying now, and his pain jolts me from my frozen horror.
“Pick him up and follow me,” I bark at the Noor, who seem to understand my body language, if not my words. They hoist Melik up and carry him toward me, and I march straight for the door.
I do not turn around as I head down the hall, but I know by the shuffle and scuff of boots that the Noor are right behind me. Sinan follows them, sobbing. Even with all that noise, the sound that is loudest to me is the faint pit-pat of Melik’s blood flowing from his body. Of course, this is the day my father is gone. This is the day the clinic is closed. This is the day I am all on my own.
I fling open the clinic door and pull on my apron as the Noor lay Melik on the exam table. As I roll up my sleeves and wash my hands, I breathe—in-out, in-out—forcing myself to maintain a steady rhythm. My hands are swift and sure as I scrub between my fingers and under my nails with the only scrap of germ-killing soap we have left.
The Noor are standing over Melik. One of them has his forehead against Melik’s and is whispering to him.
“Go back to your shift,” I order. “I’m going to take care of him.” I point at the door.
The Noor don’t budge. I turn to Sinan, who is hovering in the doorway.
“Did you pray to your Ghost?” he asks, his voice broken and airy. “Did you wish for this to happen?”
I swallow back tears of frustration. It’s almost too much, that Sinan would believe I want Melik to be hurt. “I would never,” I say.
Then, because Melik cannot afford for me to stand here whimpering like a child, I suck in a breath through my nose and yank my apron straight. And when I speak again, my voice is loud and authoritative. “Tell them they won’t be able to afford medicine for him if they don’t get back to work.”
I have no intention of making them pay for Melik’s care, but I need them to back off and give me space to work on him. My response must strike Sinan as genuine, because he translates, and then all of them move slowly to the door, their eyes on the bleeding figure on the table. The door clicks shut behind them.
Now it is just me and the boy who needs me to be my absolute best.
I lean my ear close to his face and am relieved to feel the warmth of his breath. He is unconscious but alive, though I don’t know how bad it is. He must have hit his head when he fell. If his brain is swelling or if something’s broken in there, there is nothing I can do for him.
I begin with his head. My fingers map his skull, searching his scalp for soft spots, and discover a bump the size of a duck’s egg on the left side. I lift his eyelids, and his pupils go from giant to tiny immediately, reacting to the light. I think that’s good.
I touch him all over, his face, his shoulders, his arms and hands and each of his fingers, his back and hips and belly, his legs and knees, probing and poking. He is strong and whole, everywhere. Everywhere except his chest. But that is more than enough to occupy me.
I retrieve a pair of scissors, a set of clampers, a curved needle, and a spool of suturing thread from one of my father’s drawers. I place them on a tray and carry it to the exam table, where I set it next to Melik’s head. I cut his torn shirt off his body. The long wound starts at the center of his chest, right over his heart, and traverses the muscle on the left side, ending in a deep puncture wound above his collarbone. That part’s burbling blood like a little fountain, and I pack it with cotton gauze.
Melik moans and shifts his feet like he wants to run away. He’s too big for this exam table, and his lower legs are hanging over the edge. I’ll be thrilled if he doesn’t fall off while I’m trying to work.
He’s talking now, low and desperate words, but I don’t understand anything he’s saying because it’s all in Noor. I regret sending Sinan away, because he could have helped me. I bend and whisper in his ear, “Melik, it’s Wen. I’m here with you.” I need him to speak my language. I want to understand him. “I’m going to help you. Can you look at me?”
He lurches away from me and throws up all over the floor.
I lunge for a cup, fill it with water, and help him take small sips. He’s staring at the washbasin, at the floor, so dazed, like he can’t figure out where he is. “What happened?” he asks.
“You got cut with the hooks, and then you fell,” I say. “Now I have to sew you up.”
He falls back, grimacing. I turn on the bright lamp and aim it away from his face, focusing on the chest wound. It’s fairly neat, a wicked slice rather than a ragged tear, and it’s mostly superficial, thankfully. It could have hooked him beneath his ribs, under his collarbone or his chin, and left him dying in agony while it suspended him over the killing floor, out of everyone’s reach. Out of my reach. I look him over, my muscles knotting and unknotting with rage and relief, rage and relief, over and over in an exhausting battle for my state of mind. Melik is too beautiful to be ruined, too strong to be torn apart, and I need him to go on and on, because that’s just what seems right.
“I’m going to get you as near to perfect as I can,” I mutter, “but you have to stay still for me.”
“Wen always has medicine,” he whispers. There’s a ghost of a smile on his face, but it’s ghastly with strain. I think he is very confused, and also in a lot of pain. I go to the little drawer where we keep our opium, and nearly cry when I see one tiny stick left. It won’t be enough. I pluck it from its bed of cotton batting and take it over to him.
“Look at me, Melik.” I have to say it a few times, and the third time I stroke his face with the backs of my fingers, and he looks in my direction. “We’re going to have to work together.”
“You’re so angry at me,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “Don’t worry about that now. Here.” I nudge his lips with the opium stick. “Suck on this for a few minutes, and then I’ll get started.”
He does what I ask, closing his pale lips around the thin stick of purified opium as I prep his wound for suturing. I use the softest cotton I have to smear a few drops of precious antiseptic over it, and Melik’s fingers close over the sides of the table and hold on tight. I don’t give him long with the stick, maybe two minutes, only enough for his rigid muscles to slacken. It won’t get rid of the pain, but it will dull it a bit. I wish I had a soporific sponge, but we ran out of those a few days ago. Plus, I’m not sure I should let him fade into unconsciousness again, because that lump on his head looks nasty.
I secure the suturing thread to the needle, then clip the clampers right in the center of the needle’s arc. I lean over Melik, who is dozing now. “I’m starting, okay? Try not to move.”
He doesn’t speak until I have the needle poised right over his skin. “I didn’t buy the favors of a whore in that salon.”
I hold my breath and sink the needle straight into his flesh. He tenses a little, and is only just relaxing as I bring it back up through the other side. He says what I am sure are dirty Noor words while I tie a perfect first stitch with steady hands. “It’s not like you needed a haircut,” I comment, gazing up at his short rust-red hair.
He manages to chuckle, but it’s cut off suddenly as I begin my secon
d stitch.
“You are such a confusing girl,” he says as I tie my knot.
“I think that’s the opium.” Another stitch completed. I will not stop or slow down until this wound is closed and he is perfect again. Every stitch will be just right. As long as he keeps still.
But his fingers find my waist, and they scrabble along the black lace there. “Tercan was so awful to you, but a few hours later you were saving his life and selling your beautiful clothes to take care of him. When Sinan told me you had confessed to wishing evil on Tercan, I cuffed him in the head and told him to stop telling lies.”
“But then you saw for yourself and couldn’t forgive me for it,” I say, thinking of the way his body tensed as he saw the Ghost’s altar and the guilty look on my face. The way he walked away from me, cold as frost on the ground. I dip the needle in and up. The tenth stitch is completed. Melik’s still touching my waist, spanning it with his fingers, rubbing his thumb along the lace. If he weren’t so out of it, he would realize he’s being terribly inappropriate. I would tell him, but I need this right now, because it means he’s alive.
He stops rubbing and grips my waist more firmly than I’d expect. “I didn’t know what to think, Wen. I was grieving,” he says, and gasps as I slip my needle through his skin to complete the eleventh stitch. “You seemed too good to be true, and I felt stupid for trusting you so completely, for falling so . . .” He groans. He needs more opium, but I can’t afford to give it to him right now. He’s going to need it after I patch up that puncture wound in his shoulder.
He’s gritting his teeth now, and it would be horribly selfish of me to ask what he was going to say. “I felt terrible about Tercan. And I’m sorry I wasn’t as good as you thought I was.”
I think he means to laugh, but it sounds so pained that I wince. “No, you were better,” he says in a tired voice. “You were real.” His fingers fall from my waist. “My head hurts.”
“I’ll get something for you when I’m done with these sutures, all right? Can you hang on?”
It turns out he can—through fifty-five stitches, and as I pour the burning antiseptic straight into that puncture wound and stitch it up. Even though I give him a few moments with the opium stick beforehand, that part sends his head arching back, makes the tendons in his neck stand out as he bites back his cry. Sweat pours from his body under the bright lamp, under the relentless stab of my curved needle. I want to stop; I want to put my arms over his head and murmur soft words in his ear and shelter him from the merciless girl stitching him up. I want to understand the things he’s said to me. I want him to say more. But he doesn’t and I don’t stop, and when I am done, each stitch is perfect, and the wound is closed and neat. I use the very last of the antiseptic to trace a thin line over the sutures, and then I bandage him up. I let him suck on the opium stick for a few more minutes, and it sends him into a restless doze.
There are a few more hours until the Noor’s shift is over, and they probably won’t come check on him until then. I clean up the pool of sick on the floor, scrub my hands in the sink, then strip off my apron. I allow myself the luxury of stroking my hand over Melik’s feather-soft hair and the coarser stubble that dots his cheeks. I pull up a chair and sit next to him, staring at his face and trying to decide what I believe. He said he didn’t buy the favors of a whore, but I don’t know what that means. It might mean that this is some kind of misunderstanding. Or it might mean she gave herself to him for free.
Why should I care, anyway? What right do I have to be so angry? Melik isn’t mine, although I seem to have claimed him in some secret way that even I don’t quite get. But . . . he seems to care what I think. He hasn’t yet told me it isn’t my concern, which is the first thing I expected to fly from his mouth when we fought in the cafeteria. He didn’t seem surprised that I was angry at the thought that he would buy his pleasure from the whores in the Ring. He seemed more upset that I had judged him, that I had assumed he would do something like that.
The Noor return for Melik as soon as the whistle blows, and Sinan nearly crumples when Melik stirs and smiles at him. I’d much rather Melik stay here tonight. I don’t want to let him out of my sight, but with my father gone, even if Melik is horribly wounded and severely concussed, there would be whispers tomorrow if he and I were in this clinic alone all night. I give Sinan the opium stick and a lot of instructions, most of which involve keeping Melik still, and tell him I’ll come to the dorm tomorrow to check on his brother.
Melik is able to rise from the table by himself, which amazes me. I start shouting as the Noor try to duck under his arms to support him, because they come perilously close to tearing the stitches holding him together. I show them how to do it properly, and I let them go. Melik squeezes my hand before he is led away, and I don’t know what it means, except that he doesn’t hate me.
I drag myself up the stairs and fall into bed, still wearing my cream wool dress, which is speckled and smeared with Melik’s blood. He could so easily have died today. If he hadn’t moved quickly, if the hook had been a bit sharper, if he had hit the conveyor belt the wrong way, Melik would be gone. We’d be shoving his body into the furnace tomorrow morning.
It hurts me, more than I can put into words. I don’t care what he’s done; if he leaves my world, I will mourn.
It’s a terribly vulnerable feeling, like cradling a robin’s egg close to my chest.
“Wen?” Bo’s voice comes from the air vent, a whisper in the night.
“I’m here.”
“You sound so tired. Are you all right?”
“A boy got hurt on the killing floor today. I just stitched him up.”
“He lived?”
“Yes. It could have been so much worse.”
He’s silent for a few seconds, and then he says, “It was a shame the machinery was switched on before he was safe.”
I don’t want to think about it anymore. Too many what-ifs and should-haves.
Maybe Bo senses my mood. “Did you notice anything different about your typewriter this morning?”
He’s obviously trying to cheer me up, and I do my best to let him. “Did you tame it for me? It went from being a wild beast to a purring kitty.”
His laugh is sweet and happy. “Yes. I saw you smiling.”
It feels like a hundred years ago. “You’ll have to tell me how you did that, but not tonight.”
“What do you need tonight?”
I need to know that Melik is all right, but Bo can’t give me that. “Tell me something about yourself.” I pull my blanket up over my legs and settle in.
“For six of the past seven years, on the night of First Holiday, I’ve sat on the roof, up by the smokestacks, and watched the fireworks.”
“You like fireworks?”
“I love them.”
“What did you do the year you didn’t watch?”
He lets out a breath. “I . . . ventured into the Ring. To see the sights.”
“Do you do that often?”
“Just that once. It was an interesting evening.” He pauses, and I wait, but then his tone turns light and joking. “The fireworks are safer.”
I laugh, dry and airless. “Tell me why you like them so much.”
I drift away to the sound of his voice telling me about the different kinds of ingredients used to make the colored fire that comes bursting forth when the fireworks explode. He knows so much about how things work, how to make and dismantle, how to build and destroy.
And just before I fall asleep completely, a terrible question occurs to me when I think about how shocked all the workers looked as the machinery sprang to life before Melik had a chance to climb down.
Did Bo try to destroy Melik?
I AM VERY EFFICIENT at work today, even though I am low on sleep. I am determined to do things right so Mugo doesn’t keep me late. First Holiday is tonight, and the streets
will begin to fill just after the dinner hour. Vie is so excited she can barely do her work. She keeps flitting over from Jipu’s office to bother me. She’s going to wear her purple velvet dress, the fanciest she has, which I don’t think is practical for traipsing around the muddy streets all night. I learned that lesson the year my mother let me wear a dress that made me feel like a walking jewel box—it was stained and ruined, and I never got to wear it again. Practical is not what’s on Vie’s mind, though. Turning Iyzu’s head is. She wants me to dress up too, and keeps asking what I’ll be wearing. She doesn’t think my brown work dress is up to snuff.
I’m dreading telling her I’ve already made other plans.
I’m going to have to do it at some point, but I keep putting it off. After lunch Mugo comes out of his office and gives me another stack of notes to transcribe. I’m learning so much about how this factory works. Jipu is more of a figurehead. He’s from a wealthy family, and his father was the boss before him. Mugo is the guy who keeps the slaughterhouse going. He hires new workers from the Ring or surrounding towns, and he transfers older or less productive workers to another factory to make room . . . though the transfer papers don’t ever list its exact location. He also cuts every possible corner. I’m surprised anyone’s willing to work here at all. The workers have received wage increases every year . . . but their expenses have gone up as well. Mugo is a details man, so he does it in tiny, barely noticeable ways. A service charge here, a penalty there. I suspect many of the workers haven’t even noticed that they aren’t bringing more home now than they did last year or the year before.
“You’re learning quickly,” Mugo says. He’s standing right behind me, and I have no idea how long he’s been there. I imagine him staring at the back of my neck, and it makes me itchy and squirmy, but I force my fingers to keep typing. He edges closer, so that his legs are touching the back of my chair. “I think it’s almost time that I teach you a few new skills.”
