I jackknifed back into consciousness, immediately screamed as my body painfully rejected the movement, then collapsed back onto… stiff white sheets and fluffed pillows. I could feel the wrap of bandages around my head, and my arm.

  “Easy, Doc. You’re safe.”

  Dassem was sitting at my bedside, pipe in the corner of his mouth, feet up on the side table. I tried to say something, but it came out as a rasp. I must have swallowed plenty of smoke. I hacked a cough, which let me know I’d torn something internal on my left side. Dassem used a pitcher on the side table to fill a mug, and held the water to my lips.

  “Easy,” he said again.

  “Where?” I finally managed.

  “An inn,” said Dassem. “Citizens think we’re foreign merchants caught up in the mess. Put us up here, no charge, as an apology for Siat Vort’s erratic behaviour.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  “Aye, that’s what they’re saying. They also say they’re sorry, but they couldn’t recover any of the luxury goods we must have brought with us to sell.”

  I couldn’t laugh, could hardly breathe, without my ribs crackling with pain. So I just lay there and let the moment pass.

  “Thanks, by the way,” I said. “For pulling me out.”

  Dassem grunted.

  “What were we going to do, leave you to burn?”

  “You might have.”

  “Nah,” he said. “You’re one of us now.”

  Just like that.

  We sat in silence for a while. Well, I lay, and Dassem reclined. His pipe smoke curled towards the roof. Compared to Siat Vort’s apartment, it felt close enough to touch.

  In time there was a knock at the door, and the rest of the squad filed in. Tal had a black eye, and probably another bruise on the back of her head, but apart from that, I seemed to have taken all of the punishment on behalf of the entire squad, and the only acknowledgement of it was a nod and a smile from Tal.

  Briggs was also grinning at me, from ear to ear. He looked as if he wanted to wrap me in a hug and break the rest of my ribs.

  “You did it, Doc! Bagged us another, straight off the bat!”

  “Technically it was the woman,” Chuckles drawled from somewhere just outside of my eyeline.

  “Would’ve offered her a spot in an instant,” said Dassem. “Alas.”

  “No matter,” said Briggs. “We have the Doc. I never doubted your addition to our fine little band, not for a second!”

  The Captain’s face loomed over me.

  “You good?”

  I was not. I ached all over, no doubt with some nasty bruises growing, and maybe a few snapped ribs. My arm was next to useless, and would require a sling for a while. If I was one of my own patients, I wouldn’t let me out of bed for another ten days at a minimum, and I told them so.

  “You’ve got a day and a half,” said the Captain. “Then the Guabdi are moving out.”

  “What’s the rush?” I said.

  “Got word of another Finger,” she said.

  “Without the assistance of our little… double agent,” Chuckles mumbled into the corner.

  I was going to ignore that, but lifted two fingers off the bowl of his pipe and waved them. A subtle gesture, meant only for me. Two from two, and no betrayal. Chuckles was keen to get ahead of the ledger, even.

  “Remember we’d heard some rumours, about miracles being performed in some desert shanty?” Tal was relating. “Well, we found out when and where: soon, and a fair way from here.

  “Fortunately there’s a caravan heading off day after next. Not only did they agree to show us the way, they hired us on as guards. Can you believe that? They’re actually going to pay us to go exactly where we want to be. Not often we get a stroke of luck like that. Briggs is looking forward to a decent feed, especially on someone else’s coin. Says his scrip hasn’t been cashing since, oh, forever.”

  The squad laughed. I did not. I was staring at Dassem, aghast.

  “You want to go back on the hunt?” I finally spluttered.

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  “Why not?” he said.

  “We just got our asses handed to us!”

  Dassem frowned.

  “Not quite,” he said. “Siat Vort is dead, and we’re not. I’d hardly call that our loss.”

  “If it wasn’t for that woman, we’d all be dead! You’ve ridden your luck twice, but now we’re down the element of surprise now, and with two notches on our belts we certainly won’t be underestimated ever again.”

  A clinically separate part of my mind could feel the shock finally settling in, could hear the unhinged bent to the rant, could see the growing distaste on the faces as I turned potential comrades into deserters of me, not just the plotter of Finger deaths, but of the man. I could diagnose it, but I could do nothing to stop it.

  “You think can stand against men - against monsters - with capabilities the like of which we’ve just seen? You’re mad, all of you! And you two most of all, for leading them to believe they have a chance! If it’s suicide you’re intent on I can mix up a few quite common ingredients to give you a far more pleasant death. It would feel like dozing off in the sun, instead of having your internal organs -”

  “Enough!” roared Briggs. “I told the others not to let you into their hearts. I never trusted you, not at the start, and not even after your little victory. You are the seppetpi, the lizard that gets stepped on, but pretends to his brothers that he bit the beast’s toes willingly.”

  “No. He’s right.”

  We all turned to look at the Captain.

  “He is?” said Briggs. “Even after my speech?”

  “It was a good speech,” offered the Captain. “But the Doc also has a point. Most of us already haven’t survived this quest. Maybe we could have dismissed the losses from our first few encounters with a Finger as a poor showing. But now you’ve seen the reality of what we’re up against. There’s a chance we’ll have to pay a high price for our victories, which aren’t even guaranteed. We are all the seppetpi, all more likely than not to get stepped on and ground into the dirt. So you have the opportunity to walk away.”

  “I am no coward!” said Briggs.

  “No, but you’re no wise scholar either,” said the Captain. “I can’t order you either way, but think carefully about whether you’re No one here is officially contracted, so I can’t order you either way.”

  “I owe a life debt to the Empire.”

  “Then I release you from that obligation,” said the Captain.

  “You do not have that power,” said Briggs. “And even if you did, I do not want you to!”

  Mercifully, he held up a hand to stop the Captain replying, and the argument, before it could devolve any further. He took a breath.

  “I hear you. I understand. And I have made my choice free of any compulsion. Only I will know when my ledger has been made square, and this quest is my best chance at achieving that. So, I stay on.”

  “Me too,” said Tal. “You pulled me out of the gutter, and put something in my hands that allowed me to fight back against everyone that had done me wrong.”

  “As I’ve said, there was no contract drawn up between us,” said the Captain. “Nothing owed for that revenge.”

  “I know,” said Tal. “But when I was done with all of them, you asked whether I wanted to fight on behalf of other gutter-dogs, against those who had kicked them. And that seemed pretty good to me. So here I am, and here I’ll stay.”

  “Very well,” said the Captain. “Church? What about you?”

  “Well, I don’t owe you or anyone my life, for a start,” she said. “And I don’t plan to do this forever. But those dreams are for tomorrow, not for today. My mumma, bless her, retired too early, and being stuck at home sapped all her strength. She died quicker than her work was ever wearing her down. My dreams are for someone who’s properly old and tired, who’s knees can’t take it anymore. They can wait until I’ve used up all the strength that this requires. Every day that is today, I’ll stand behind you, Captain.

  “Well, in front of you. Otherwise I’d be a pretty poor heavy. But you know what I mean.”

  The Captain looked into the corner, to Chuckles.

  “My dear Captain,” he said. “I believe you’re the one contracted to me, so I don’t think I’ll be justifying my continued presence along the journey.”

  He tittered, which made my skin crawl. But the joke appeared to be private, or the invention of the insane, because the rest of the squad ignored him.

  “I believe wholeheartedly in the mission, for what it’s worth,” said Dassem.

  “Then it’s settled,” said the Captain.

  “Not quite,” growled Briggs.

  He was looking at me. They all were.

  My aching body begged me to deny them. Good sense told me it was a hopeless quest, that the price demanded for ordinary men and women to compete with those who were extraordinary, was too far high, and non-negotiable.

  But my body had hurt even before stepping out into the desert, and my rational mind had known the odds. And, like Briggs, this was the best path to what I truly wanted.

  Not that I’d tell them that.

  “Years ago, I was in Qalyon,” I said. “That bastard Uglarat* cut himself shaving and decided to wash the wound in the city’s well. They called it the Crimson Vein Rot. Suddenly I had a dozen patients, two dozen, fifty, with blood as thick as oil, struggling to move their limbs as their hearts tried to work harder and harder until they burst. I wish I had given them peace well before that. But I thought I could treat them, with blood thinning tonics, and with leeches. In truth, there was nothing to be done.

  “Hundreds dead, and all because of that monster’s entitlement. But he wasn’t just a poison in that well. He’s a poison on the land. They don’t care about anyone but themselves. Sunsuga or Imperials, we’re all just vermin to them, or stock, or tools to be used and worn down in the games they play between themselves for Azhur’s delight.”

  “I thought doctors took an oath to do no harm,” said Church.

  “Doctors know that sometimes you have to cut deep to remove a tumour, otherwise the rest of the body can never really heal. But the act of harming these Fingers doesn’t even need that justification, as far as I’m concerned, because of what they’ve done, and what they’ll continue to do.”

  I waited as they weighed me.

  Finally, Tal nudged Briggs in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Mate, I think you’ll end up liking this one, despite your best efforts,” she said. “You’ve got too much in common!”

  Briggs could not repress a smile.

  “I always knew it to be so,” he said. “Sorry to have called you a slimy little lizard.”

  “No harm done,” I said.

  I was beginning to drift back into unconsciousness. Dassem patted my shoulder.

  “Day after next,” he said. “If you’re well enough. Would be a pity to lose you, though.”