Bessany gasped in shock.
The hand around her wrist was clawed, clawed and furred along its whole length. Bessany jerked her gaze up, squinting through the near darkness, and made out a towering, heavily furred shape, nearly eight feet tall against the driving snow. Light from one of the side labs that had remained miraculously intact spilled out into the darkness, revealing the last face she had dreamed she would see, tonight.
“Chilaili!” she cried. “What—how—?”
“Bessany!” Herve Sinclair shouted behind her. “Run!”
She turned, shaken and still off balance, and found the project director rushing toward her. Ed Parker was at his heels. Both men brandished makeshift clubs. It took a long, slow second to realize they thought she was in danger, that the Tersae standing above her had come to attack them. “No!” she shouted, suddenly grasping it. She stepped between the katori and the onrushing men. “Herve, Ed, no! It’s Chilaili!”
They paused, panting, a meter away.
“Chilaili?” Herve frowned.
“Yes! She pulled me out of the rubble.”
“Bessany Weyman,” the tall Tersae said urgently, “many of your nestmates are still trapped. We must dig them free, quickly. This rubble is not stable and the cold will penetrate quickly, lowering their chances of survival. And someone must start a fire or we will all freeze to death, myself included. This is not suitable weather to be aboveground without shelter and warmth.”
Bessany scrubbed her forehead, willing the fog in her brain to recede, and brought down her hand to find it red with blood. She scrubbed it off on her shirt. No time, yet, for minor injuries. “Right.” She stared at the damage, peering toward the source of light spilling out into the snow. “My God, it’s the med lab still standing!” And since the med lab’s lights still blazed, the power plant itself was undamaged. That single fact might well mean the difference between life and death.
Sinclair wrapped her up in a coat scavenged from the debris. “Yes, most of it was spared, thank God. In fact, several of the labs survived pretty much intact. Enough to provide some shelter, anyway. We’ve already shifted the less-badly injured into several of them. Power’s out in most, but it’s still better than being out in the open.”
“How long was I unconscious?” she asked sharply.
“Almost half an hour.”
Bessany blanched. If she’d remained unconscious much longer, she might well have frozen to death. There must’ve been just enough heat trapped under that solid rubble to keep her alive long enough to wake up and shout for help. “If the power’s off in most of our shelters, we’ll need wood for building fires . . .”
“There are many trees down,” Chilaili offered. “I had to climb over them to reach your nest. I heard the twist-wind from the top of the cliffs and knew it had passed over this place. I hurried, Bessany Weyman, as fast as I dared.”
Bessany’s throat tightened. She touched Chilaili’s arm, shuddering as the wind whipped stinging snow through the broken walls of the recreation room. “Thank God you did. I’ll ask why you’re here later.”
Chilaili gave Bessany her strange, head-bobbing nod. “Yes. It is more important to find the trapped ones first.”
They dug through the rubble in teams, freeing more people, locating more coats and distributing them. Herve selected four men who had escaped with only minor cuts and bruises, put them into rescued cold-weather gear, roped them together for safety’s sake, and sent them out with lights to bring in wood while the search for survivors went on. Chilaili was a godsend, lifting heavy slabs it would’ve taken three or four men to shift. They found some people unconscious, others badly injured and screaming with pain—and some who lay ominously still, crushed and broken or surrounded with sickening crimson stains where they’d bled out through arterial damage.
Bessany worked with shaking hands, trying not to look into the faces of friends who had died in the rubble. She concentrated on guiding or carrying the still-living toward shelter, helping the uninjured reach whichever side lab was closest and ferrying the badly injured to the med lab. Salvatore di Piero, their construction engineer, had rigged a temporary wall of thick plastic sheeting across the jagged hole torn in one corner of the latter.
Grigori Ivanov, their surgeon—dazed and bleeding from multiple cuts—was finally pulled free. He leaned against Herve Sinclair while Bessany bundled him into a coat, then Chilaili literally carried him into the warmth of the med lab. Bessany followed at their heels while the others continued searching the wreckage. Her hands and face were frozen and the wind whipped through her long hair like knives. She stumbled toward the med lab in a deep fog, telling herself she was more fortunate than most—she was on her feet and functional. And still alive. She couldn’t bear to look at the bodies they’d placed in a snow-covered stack to one side, awaiting burial once the living had been cared for.
They slipped past the curtain of plastic sheeting and warmth enfolded them. The relief from just being out of the wind was a tonic. Salvatore was busy examining the walls, shoring up the ceiling in places where the plascrete had cracked. The wounded lay on beds, on examining tables, on the floor, many of them moaning or crying out in harsher tones. Chilaili set Dr. Ivanov gently on his feet and braced him with one powerful arm.
He leaned against her for long moments, not even questioning her presence. He struggled visibly to still the shaking of his hands. Then he straightened with a grim look in his eyes and raked his glance across the lab, taking in equipment and supplies that had been spared and the appalling number of injured. He said only, “Bessany, can you help me as triage nurse?”
She nodded woodenly, so tired she was reeling on her feet.
“Life-threatening injuries first, everything else second,” Ivanov said, then waded in.
Bessany followed her instincts and checked the unconscious first, figuring that anyone who was still knocked out suffered potentially far more serious injury than those thrashing around and screaming. She lost track of time, moving from one critically injured colleague to another, calling urgently for compresses or Dr. Ivanov’s surgical skill. Ivanov performed miracles, doing emergency surgery to stop internal hemorrhaging, while dazed volunteers splinted broken bones and bandaged the less severely wounded.
At some point, Bessany glanced up to see Chilaili squatting beside one of the equipment mechanics, whose leg lay at an alarming angle, an injury far enough down on the triage list, nobody had reached him yet. Chilaili felt carefully for the break, then slipped something into the man’s mouth for him to bite down on and moved her big, clawed hands purposefully. She set the broken bone with one easy movement. The mechanic screamed; then Chilaili gently tied a splint in place and pulled a blanket around his shoulders, murmuring something soothing to the suffering man before moving on to the next person in need of care. People stared at the tall, powerful Tersae as she moved amongst them. It was so unlikely, seeing her here, treating the injured.
Bessany had to swallow tears. Unlikely only in context, she realized. Chilaili was a trained healer. She doubtless had enormous experience setting broken bones and treating shock and blood loss. The effects of shock were essentially the same in all warm-blooded animals and a broken bone was a broken bone, whether it was part of a horse, a human, or a Tersae huntress. The only part of her gentle ministrations that seemed so jarringly out of place was her willingness to help humans at all, when Chilaili’s species had declared unilateral, total war against the colonies.
She’s come to repay the debt for saving Sooleawa’s life, Bessany realized, watching Chilaili crouch beside a pile of food stores along the wall, which somebody else had scavenged. She broke open cans with her bare claws. She handed out food to those too injured to walk, even sent someone out with basins to collect snow, to melt for drinking and cooking water.
Through a blur of exhaustion, Bessany found herself thinking, My God, with Chilaili’s help, we might just survive this. Tears stung her eyelids again and clogged her throat. How many of them would have died in the rubble without Chilaili’s strength to shift the heavy debris before they froze to death? She couldn’t even hazard a guess. Bessany scrubbed her eyes fiercely with the backs of her hands, which only smeared blood across her face, some of it hers, most of it other people’s. She tugged off the coat she’d forgotten she wore, pulled her shirt loose, and wiped blood and tears from her face with the hem. Her hands shook so violently, she could barely control them, and her knees had gone dangerously spongy.
Herve Sinclair touched her shoulder. “Bessany. We’re past the worst now. Dr. Ivanov suggested you sit down, get some rest and something to eat.”