———

She had collected two more patients, and Soup was happily eating a bowl of Nadine’s Boxed Noodles with a bandaged leg, by the time the torches and pitchforks crowd showed up again — this time much reduced.

If she hadn’t been so distracted, she would’ve realized she was only going to collect more patients. There was a riot crawling its way across the city. It hadn’t started here, but most unpleasant things tended to end up here, eventually. Large groups of angry people didn’t care much for basic safety, or basic decency.

Here, at the edge of things, where there wasn’t much around to loot and no police presence to antagonize, there were brawls and fires and broken windows. All of that left human damage and she had just loudly advertised that she was open for business.

Now came a lighted procession bearing two men on stretchers like a flying banner: Hey! There’s a doctor over here!

This was going to be a bad night. There was no metal left in the house. There had been a fire in a sweatshop earlier in the month, and Sanaam wasn’t due back with rent and presents for weeks. (The date was circled on the calendar, still two months hence.)

Most of these wounded would be put right with bandages and care, but she had want of a needle if she was even going to do stitches. Staples, at the moment, were out of the question.

At least these two were bringing their own materials, but she had told them she would take no more from them than they needed.

“Please excuse me,” she informed a woman whose arm bristled with broken glass. “I have promised to fix these two bastards on pain of my life. Sip water and say two Hosannas to the Angel of Morphine.”

Take thee two of these and calleth me in the morning, she thought. Hosanna! Pain is ninety-eight percent stress and helplessness! Hosanna!

She supposed, with a faint smile, that Auntie Enora would take such a prayer at face value and approve.

They were moaning. That was nice. Whatever Mordecai had done, it set them back a country mile. She quashed the urge to continue her smile and made serious.

“That’s Johnny. This is my Johnny!” said the woman in the green dress.

“That’s very nice,” said Hyacinth.

That’s completely useless, thought Hyacinth.

“Your Johnny and your other boy need to come into the kitchen so I can see what I’m doing to them.”

“Edward,” said the woman in black.

Hyacinth smiled at her and nodded, thinking, I don’t care!

She led the way into the kitchen, which was illuminated with improvised glass mage lights that had been hard-stuck to the ceiling, and smelled incongruously of noodle soup. “On the floor,” she told the stretcher-bearers.

“Not on the floor!” said the woman in black.

Hyacinth sighed. She picked the bowl off the table. “Move, Soup.”

“I’m not done yet!”

“I know. Sit here and eat out of your lap. That one on the table,” she indicated young Master Edward, “and that one between two chairs, please.”

Green Dress, as expected, contained her displeasure at this unequal treatment. Hyacinth understood that she would be seeing to young Master Edward first as well.

Black Dress had not been medically precise in her description. Half of her dear child’s face was not gone — it, and his chest and shoulder leading down into his arm, had simply become something more interesting.

Hyacinth did not feel a need for any more than a cursory investigation with a poking finger. What she had here was obviously a mechanical problem.

It looked like a merger. A great deal of wood splinters and some of his hair and clothing had been caught up in it. The hospital had apparently been trying to remedy this with forceps, which was patently ridiculous.

It only looked like shrapnel. These things were rooted and accepted, and removing them with pure physical force was like pulling out fingernails — futile and ultimately damaging. Magic was regulated and suppressed, that didn’t make it nonexistent.

Could it be that the hospital had no decent materialworkers on staff?

No, they likely had several, and they were tasked with emptying bedpans and mopping floors.

Hyacinth pulled down her goggles. “Ladies and gentlemen, please shield your eyes. Young Master Edward, are you quite conscious?”

“Oh… Oh…”

“Oh, no, by all means, do not attempt to speak. I am going to bandage your eyes. This will feel hot and smell like burned pork, but it will hurt a great deal less than anything else that has been done to you this evening.”

Wood wasn’t really her thing, but there were certain constants in any materialwork. It was always much easier to destroy than build. She had to use her bare hands, the fingertips, find each individual piece and undo the bonds. They had been hastily made, Mordecai had no idea what he was doing, and there was no difficulty. It was just fiddly, that was all.

She threw the pieces on the floor in a gathering pile. The burning wood smelled like incense, slightly sweet. It was not an unfamiliar scent, but she couldn’t place it. The context was all wrong.

“What are you doing to me?” young Master Edward asked her, when he had lips and tongue again.

“I am reminding your body that you are not made of maple wood and cotton cloth. You are missing some pieces and I am going to replace some of them with more agreeable material. You will look interesting, but not more unpleasant than usual.”

“That man, that man…”

“Is none of your concern.” Now, here was a strange thing, more difficult than the rest. It appeared to be flesh. A thin little whisker of flesh.

She clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle the laugh. “Oh, shit! It’s a piece of Julia!”

“A woman!” he cried. “He blew up a woman!”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Hyacinth. She coaxed out the string, which was fully three-inches long and coiled like an ingrowing hair. “She’s a violoncello.”

“What?”

“He plays ’cello.” She looked at the pile of splinters on the floor. “Well, I guess he doesn’t play anything now.”

“He hit my boy with a ’cello?” said the woman in black.

“I wouldn’t say ‘hit,’” said Hyacinth. By the time it made contact, it looked like it hadn’t been much of a ’cello either. Well done, Mordecai. Your first merger and your first deconstruction, all in one day.

“It was an explosion, Momma!” Edward said.

“He’s a menace!” said the woman in black.

“You know,” said Hyacinth, “it’s funny. I’ve known him nearly seven years and I haven’t heard one word about him hurting anybody who wasn’t trying to kick a child to death. We all have our little idiosyncrasies.”

She put out her hand. “If you have anything gold, hand it over. This one won’t need any steel.”

With delicate suspicion, the woman laid a length of gold chain across her palm.

Hyacinth understood it by the feel. Twenty-four karat, the softest stuff. This would serve quite well for flesh. Mordecai’s own blend was ten karat and his health had suffered for it.

Not that it mattered so much on the outside.

She began to patch up the little divots that had been left by the merger and the incautious use of forceps.

“Will it scar?” said the woman.

“Slightly, but you can say it was something else. A little speckle of gold isn’t enough to say he was pulling orphans out of a burning building, but I’m sure you can come up with something cute for your friends, and his friends, and eventually his wife and children. You may even get to believe it yourself.”

There were four inches of chain remaining. Hyacinth handed them back.

The woman clutched and pocketed with a murderous frown.

“It’s hot,” Edward said, with one hand to his cheek.

“It’ll hurt,” Hyacinth said. “But not for very long. Take him back with you,” she told the woman. “He requires only sympathy, and I have none.”

Black Dress blustered for a moment, but Hyacinth ignored her and she burned herself out.

Green Dress was leaning over her own particular charge and fawning over him. “Oh, mere laal. That’s all right. That’s all right!”

“I believe you are actually hurting him,” Hyacinth observed with absent wonder. My gods, she thought, what a stupid creature.

“Do something!” said Green Dress, upstarting. “You’ve left him long enough!”

Hyacinth did not argue. She began and made done. This one was in slightly worse shape, with a cracked collarbone and a shattered cheek. He would require steel, and in places she was pulling wood out of bone.

Stupid and unlucky, she thought, with a bitter emotion that might have been within shouting distance of pity. This one had been no more or less complicit, just closer.

When she had finished with the steel structure and was ready for the gold, the heavy brooch that was laid in her hand was ten karat.

Stupid and unlucky, she reiterated to herself, already planning how and how much to steal.

It was a sea turtle, with diamond chips laid in it.

And no taste, she added.

She palmed some of the gold — literally palmed it, merging it to the first layer of skin and then concealing her hand.

“That was my grandmother’s,” Green Dress said miserably, when Hyacinth handed her a flipper and a head.

No taste in the family for generations, thought Hyacinth. Congenital. “I’m sure you can find someone to remake it for you…” The gods alone know why you’d try.

“Ow,” said Johnny, the first thing he’d managed. He was touching his face with cautious fingers.

“That isn’t pain,” said Hyacinth. “You’ll have pain later, more than your friend. Try to remind your mother I said that if she begins to shriek about how you’ve been butchered.”

He actually nodded!

“Thanks,” he said.

“Your thanks is neither adequate nor required.” She shooed her hands at them, which was enough to get them out of the room. At least, they were gone when she looked over again, but that was quite some time later. It was hard getting glass out of an arm with your bare fingers — although the gold coating did keep her from cutting herself. That was lucky.

More people had come with the stretcher bearers. Fortunately, none on stretchers, but some of them were bleeding badly enough that she felt they needed immediate attention. Mordecai, and the gold, would keep awhile.