Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

Day 2

Sarjenka sat back in the overstuffed chair in the front room of her home and waited.

The hospital had threatened to sedate Rakan if she didn’t leave, so Sarjenka took her mother home. There was nothing they could do for Eliatriel in either location, but at least at home, Rakan could go through the motions of life.

They’d been through this worry route once before, back when her father had been involved in a minor shift in the structure of the secondary mine. One level had collapsed, trapping a dozen miners for several hours until the rescuers could dig them out. Her father had sustained injuries that they were sure he would not survive, but he had.

As she was neither strong enough in build to be a rescuer nor far enough along with her studies as a healer to offer anything more than first aid for wounded who hadn’t shown up yet, there was nothing she could do but wait. She pulled her small music stone from her pocket, holding it tightly in her right hand as it gave off the same lilting melody it had for all the years she’d had it.

She had no idea where the stone had come from. All she knew was that on the morning after the tremors had stopped, she’d awoken with it in her hand. A part of her felt there had to have been something special about it, as nobody she’d shown it to had ever seen a stone that gave off music before; yet no matter how many times she was interrogated on the subject, she had no recollection of how it had come to be in her possession.

The stone’s melody had always been a source of comfort to her, though, reminding her that there were things in the universe that she didn’t understand—yet. Perhaps her father’s fate was one of those things. If the news were bad, she reminded herself, we’d have heard already.

Her mother, however, wasn’t quite as patient. “This is a nightmare. They’ll tell us if something happens?” she asked, an edge of hysteria in her voice.

Sarjenka knew the look on Rakan’s face far too well. That tone of voice, the panicked look in her eyes, the otherwise placid expression, the wringing of the hands in the lap added up to one thing. Her mother was obsessing over every possible scenario that Eliatriel’s life could have taken in the explosion, and the preeminent vision was, Sarjenka was relatively certain, the same one that had been appearing in her mother’s mind far too often: Eliatriel’s body, skin charred as though it had been a teekir steak cooking over an open flame for too long, bones broken from the impact of the explosion, pain like she could not imagine, suffering in ways that no living creature had ever been intended to suffer.

Traiaka, if it is your choosing, please make your embrace quick. Please don’t allow father to suffer anymore.

“I don’t know, Mother. I don’t know.” While Sarjenka could think of dozens of possible ways her father could still unavoidably die, even sitting in his hospital bed, and think of them in ways even a fully-trained healer couldn’t treat, she didn’t dare speak of them aloud. Her mother was distraught enough as it was without adding something like that to it. If there were only a way to talk the hospital into allowing her mother to sit with her father, but the burns were so severe they had to place him in a special isolation ward for treatment. Even the slightest risk of infection was more than they were willing to take.

Rakan grabbed a small square of fabric from her skirt pocket and proceeded to wipe her eyes. “What are we to do if he dies?”

“The same thing the other families will do if they lose someone, Mother,” Sarjenka replied, her voice far more calm than she actually felt. “We will thank Traiaka for his life, and then we will move on.”

Rakan sobbed inexorably, her tiny wails the only thing breaking the silence between mother and daughter. Sarjenka considered getting up from the chair and trying to console her mother, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to her that something needed to be done. For one thing, the condition of the house had gone downhill in a drastic manner. It had only been a day, but it felt like a week. Clutter was beginning to form in various locations. The morning news journal sat unread on her father’s favorite chair, almost as though it was waiting on his return, too. The full basket sitting by the stairs indicated that her mother hadn’t even bothered to put away the clean laundry from the previous morning.

If Rakan intended to be the one to break down, then the responsibility for remaining calm and rational would have to be Sarjenka’s.

Pulling herself out of the chair, Sarjenka walked over to the front entrafield. “I can’t sit here doing nothing, Mother. I’m going to the hospital.”