Across the room, Heather was muttering “come on, come on,” in a steady chant under her breath. Danielle didn’t spend time wondering what that was about, though; instead, she handed back the blooding pin, activated Medic’s Diagnostics, and started concentrating on what the Skill told her.

  The Skill told her a number of things in a rush. The patient behind her on the floor was breathing very roughly and irregularly. She realized she’d been hearing this ever since she’d come into the room, but it was faint and she hadn’t realized what it actually was. He had also lost far too much blood to recover without a transfusion or a Skill of similar effect. Danielle supposed that was why the Rangers seemed to have written him off already. “Focus on the patient in front of me,” she whispered to the Skill.

  The Skill immediately pointed out that the patient in front of her was hiding his wound, and attempting to mask his further symptoms. Danielle blinked at that. Masking symptoms? How did the Skill even know that? “I need to see the wound,” she told Arny. “Also, if you’re having any symptoms other than the obvious pain and bleeding, the Skill will work better if – “

  She cut off because Arny had moved his arm, just a bit, and the scope of the problem suddenly became so very clear. Tom’s cut had been both deep and nearly the full width of the limb it was on, but limited by the fact that it was on a limb. Arny’s cut was deep and nearly the full width of his torso – or perhaps not quite that long, but still, a much longer opening. Danielle wasn’t sure why he hadn’t bled even more than the third boy. He wasn’t just putting compression on a bleeding wound; he was literally holding in his guts. Danielle slapped her hand to her mouth, then remembered that if this was going to be survivable she needed to be sterile, and switched to the back of one wrist, holding her breath and trying to get her stomach under control.

  Arny moved his arm back into place and rocked forward again. Risk of colon restriction, the Skill suggested before cutting out. Danielle immediately reactivated it. “OK, that gave me a lot,” she said, a bit unsteadily. “So. The plan is to bandage this up as well as possible so the Healer will have time to get here and do her thing. Ranger, please see if he thought to grab a longer roll of ace bandages, please, and maybe some extra wound pads?”

  Her Skill pointed out the possibility of an intestinal breach; high risk of infection, there. It needed to be sterilized before it was healed over. Danielle reached for a small bottle of alcohol, and the first aid packets of disinfectant cream. “You’re going to have to move the arm again to let me work,” she told Arny, “or maybe help. This is going to hurt. No small sting jokes here, OK, this is just going to hurt.”

  “That’s not a bandage, what are you even doing?” Arny complained.

  “You need the wound disinfected; if the Healer heals you over and there’s already stuff inside, you’ll just die of infection instead of blood loss. I’m gonna use some of the alcohol on my hands, then spread the antibiotic on the edges - ”

  “Just let me do it,” Arny interrupted.

  “All right, hold out your hands for alcohol then,” Danielle said.

  “Just let him rot!” Tom shouted across the room. “He’s the one that started this, he killed Harv, he doesn’t deserve your help!”

  “He got himself in way over his head, acting like he could solve problems with a knife,” Danielle said, “but he can’t learn his lesson if he dies from it. I don’t know if I can even make a difference, but I said I’d try and I’m going to try.”

  “Yeah, so shut up, Tom!” Arny yelled. Danielle winced, as she could see the wound flexing as he breathed, now that he was holding out shaking hands for the alcohol. She poured a small amount into his palms, wondering how he could stand to yell when breathing must be hurting so much all by itself.

  She washed her own hands in the alcohol as well before putting it back in the first aid kit. The little bottle reminded her of a travel shampoo bottle; enough for two or three wounds, but no more, unless they were very much smaller than these. Even as she tore open an antibiotic packet and told Arny to spread it along the edge of the wound, she found herself wondering if she really was just wasting antibiotic.

  Foreign contamination, her skill warned her, drawing her attention to something brownish along the upper edge of the wound. She wasn’t positive it wasn’t just dried blood, but she wasn’t sure that it was either. She looked around for a clean cloth, but saw nothing that seemed reasonably clean enough to use on cleaning an open wound. High risk of infection, her Skill whispered. Do right for as long as the soul is in him, her conscience seemed to whisper back at the System. Lacking a wash cloth, Danielle splashed a little more alcohol onto a wound pad, and reached out to clean the upper edge of the wound with that, but Arny snatched it from her.

  “I said I’d do it! Your Skill’s just lore, right? Just tell me what it says to do,” he demanded.

  “Wipe the foreign contamination away from the top edge of the wound, being careful not to just wipe it down into the opening,” Danielle reported, trying to project a calm she didn’t feel. “It’s alcohol, expect it to burn.”

  “Worst bedside manner ever,” Arny complained. “And why are we using all my stuff if I’m paying you? You’ve got stuff in your bag, don’t think you can hide it from me.”

  “Hey, at least I’m not lying to you,” Danielle defended herself. “And the bag isn’t full of healing stuff, it’s just some things I had on me when the Ranger asked us to come help, that I didn’t want to leave lying around outside my room.” She wondered if Arny would believe her, and if she could get the bag any further out of his sight, so he wouldn’t be staring at it and wondering.

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  “Done!” Heather declared triumphantly from the other side of the room.

  Ranger Juliette looked up from Danielle and Arny and walked over to examine Tom’s arm. “Looks good,” she commented. “Can you move that arm for me? Gently, but go like this? Good, now do this. Good, and this? Good. Excellent job, Healer – uh, Orwellan?”

  “Orellana,” Heather corrected.

  “Right, sorry. I’ll get it right in my incident report, I promise,” Ranger Juliette said. “Actually, spell that for me?”

  Danielle tuned out and reactivated Medic’s Diagnostics again. “OK, let me see again. Hm, good job, I think you got all of whatever the ‘contaminant’ stuff was. My Skill is still complaining about some stuff we can’t do anything about, but I think we’re at the point where the best we can probably do next is get some bandages across this so it’s not just your arm letting you, um, hold on. I’m going to have to actually do this part, it needs to go around your back.”

  Danielle used a bit of medical tape to make a line of wound pads stuck to the end of the first aid kit’s length of ace bandage, and lined up the absorbent pads along the wound. “OK, hold this in place while I wrap the end around, all right?”

  “Are you just gonna go over my shirt?” Arny complained.

  “Yes. You’ve lost a lot of blood. I want to get some safer pressure on it all before you go unconscious like, well, that guy,” Danielle said. “I don’t even get how he’s alive.”

  “He’s probably not,” Tom said darkly.

  “He is,” Arny said. “He’s being stubborn ‘cause he knows when he finally kicks it, I get his mana!”

  “You’re sick in the head,” Tom accused.

  “You, healer girl, you should heal me too!” Arny said, ignoring Danielle as she tried to wrap the bandage around firmly enough to stay and apply pressure, but not so tight it would just push into the wound and force the sides apart instead of helping them come together. “I’m about to get a ton of mana, I can actually pay you back right away!”

  “That’s not how it works,” Ranger Juliette said yet again. “But now that you mention it, I think the ladies here should use the blooding pin on Harv there.”

  “What? You already said there was no way anybody was going to save him,” complained Arny, waving his hand and almost hitting Danielle in the face. She ducked and lost her grip on the bandage, and the top layer of the wrap fell. Her diagnostic Skill promptly told her that unbalanced tension in the wrapping presented a risk of separating the wound. She retrieved the loose end with an annoyed huff and started trying again, but Arny kept yelling. “And why did I get a System blood contract and not Tom, huh? You think just because he’s not the one who took the first swing, he must be mister perfect?”

  “It’s not a contract, kid, it’s just blood,” Ranger Richard said dryly. “The blooding pin makes a teeny little wound, but it’s a more recent wound than whatever the patient is dying from, so it guarantees that the Healer – or Medic – gets some mana from you if you die on the table after they’ve already spent resources on you. Harv is going to die; our best Healer could maybe have saved him if she’d been as close as Juliette and I were, but she wasn’t, and he’s definitely lost too much blood at this point. Blood replacement isn’t a tier-1 Skill, so we were never going to find a Sent healer who could do that. It stinks, but it's out of our control. We may as well level up the Healer here from it if we can.”

  “No you don’t! That’s MY mana!” Arny yelled, jerking forward. This time, Danielle managed to hold on to the end of the bandage, and he fell back with a cry of pain as he came up against it.

  “This isn’t good enough for you to be moving around,” Danielle told him. “Sit still while I find a fastener, and then we’re going to need to use the other bandage to finish the job right.”

  Arny sat, clenching his jaw. Danielle’s Skill ended, and she started it yet again, since it was apparently helpful with the bandaging – at least, it would tell her if she was doing something badly wrong.

  Unfortunately, Tom didn’t let it go. “It’s not your mana, you don’t deserve it!” He yelled back, ignoring Danielle’s quieter words. “You’re just a stinking murderer, and you deserve to die! You even broke the one and only actual law this place has, ‘cause you killed him in town!”

  “This isn’t town, it’s our room!” Arny barked back. “Rooms don’t count, that’s why the rule is if you kill someone you stay in your room until the flag goes away!”

  “That’s really not why,” Ranger Richard commented, but the two boys ignored him.

  “I don’t care! It’s my room, and I’m not letting a murderer live in it!” Tom shouted. “And I’m not letting you have all Harv’s mana! The Healer should stick him, and the Medic, and the Rangers too, so you get as little as possible!”

  “You don’t get to decide that!” Arny shouted back. “The System says the one who kills him gets his mana, and that’s me, it’s MINE!”

  “I really don’t want to poke that pin into someone who’s almost dead,” Heather put in, sounding faintly ill herself.

  “And that’s another thing! You should heal me! I’m alive and I’m staying alive, where do you get off treating me like I’m already dead meat!” There might have been a question in Arny’s shouting, but his tone of voice wasn’t questioning. “Come over here and heal me!”

  “I’m out of mana,” Heather said shortly.

  “So what?! You use tokens! I bet the Rangers can make tokens!” Arny accused.

  “I could but I’m not required to,” Ranger Juliette said, “and frankly, I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t understand – ” Heather began.

  “See! The Rangers get it!” Tom yelled. “You’re a monster, and you deserve what you got! They’re just letting the medic wrap you up so your worthless guts won’t get all over the wheelbarrow when they wheel you out to dump you in the woods!”

  “We bury people,” Ranger Richard put in. “Dumping bodies unburied just attracts dangerous animals.”

  “HE IS A DANGEROUS ANIMAL!” Tom frankly screamed.

  “I’M A SURVIVOR AND I’M GOING TO SURVIVE LONGER THAN YOU!” Arny screamed back, and reached under the bed behind him before suddenly freezing in place and gasping. “Wha – oh! Oh, yes! I just leveled up!!”

  “What?!” Tom exclaimed.

  “I guess Harv is really gone, now,” Ranger Juliette said grimly.

  Danielle bit back her own gasp at the feeling of mana washing over her, and a burning red glow erupted from Arny. “And there’s the Outlaw tag,” Ranger Richard said, sounding oddly tired.

  “NO! He’s not supposed to get all Harv’s mana!” Tom yelled again.

  “YES I AM!” Arny screamed. “I’m going to survive and I’m going to beat you all back Inside! Now get over here and heal me!”

  “Oh no you don’t!” Tom put his hand out as if to prevent Heather from moving, but she wasn’t trying; if anything, she was shrinking back from Arny and his livid red aura. “Nobody’s healing him, he’s going to die, and his mana is coming to me!”

  “NO I’M NOT!” Arny screamed, and drew his hand out from under the bed – holding a sword.