Today's Reading
Nhika approached the bed and the man sucked in a breath through his teeth, as though about to change his mind and usher her out the door. Perhaps he just now noticed her Yarongese features: her golden-brown skin, dark irises, and hair the color of coffee rather than ink. Growing up in Theumas had wrung some of the island influence out of her, but that didn't deter clients from their paranoia. Nhika glanced back at him, awaiting a verdict, and he held open a palm to let her approach.
She took a spot at the bedside to inspect the woman. The patient held a placid expression, her eyes closed, and Nhika might've thought she was napping if not for the mottled look of her skin. Even for a Theuman, she was unusually pale.
This position was eerily familiar—a memory pulled from years ago, her at the bedside while her mother lay beneath a thin sheet. Only, there weren't so many catheters and machines, just Nhika's hand in hers, and her mother had never looked so sallow, not even in death.
She blinked out of her thoughts. "What's happened here?"
"It began as chest pain, and one day she collapsed. Since then, she hasn't been the same—weak, in pain. She's asleep now from all her medicine, but the doctors say it's only to make her comfortable. Not cure her. They say there's no more hope, but&" His gaze swept over the woman, his expression forlorn. "I don't believe that. We had plans. It's not over."
Nhika inched closer to the woman. "And what do the doctors think it is?"
"A disease of the blood, probably from her mother's side. But her mother was never like this." The man straightened his robe, clearing his throat with the air of a scholar. "If I had to guess, I would say it's those invisible micromes, some form of onslaught on her heart. We'd just gotten back from a trip out of the city. Perhaps she contracted something there."
He said this haughtily, and Nhika realized he didn't know a true lick of microme theory. He was just repeating words he'd seen in the papers, or perhaps from the physicians. She could say whatever she wanted, and he'd probably believe her.
Nhika rolled her neck. This would be easy. "I'll be doing my own exam now," she said.
"No gloves?" he asked, the curl of his lip betraying his suspicion. He wouldn't have asked that question if she were Theuman, but a touch from a Yarongese like her had become a dangerous thing among the superstitious.
"I can't feel a pulse through leather and, as you might've noticed, I'm hardly in a position to afford silk," she said. Nhika bit back the bitterness; he was not the first to question her bare hands.
With a hesitant nod, he permitted her to work, and she feigned a brief physical exam. Then she extended a hand toward the woman's neck—slowly, to show she meant no harm. With two fingers in the cradle of the jawline, it looked like she was taking a pulse. And she was, but it was so much more than that.
With the interface of skin against skin at her fingertips, the limitlessness of her awareness exploded forth, racing first across the woman's vascular system—every vein and venule, branching and collapsing in waterways across the woman's body—and then her nervous system, snapping from synapse to synapse as electrical impulses did. Nhika layered herself into the woman's skeleton, wove herself into the vibrant workings of bone and marrow, and then the muscular system, her consciousness picking through corded tissue and wrapped sinew.
Nhika felt the ghost of the woman's pain mirrored in her own chest, bursting against the rib cage. The pain expanded with her empathy and she quelled them both, but not before she learned the source of the injury. There was a mass of damaged tissue staining the woman's heart, starved of blood.
Nhika gleaned all this in a matter of seconds, less than it required to take a pulse. When she drew her hand away, she knew every ailment this woman had, could see the history of this woman's body etched in the unfurled tapestry of her anatomy.
But she didn't reveal any of that, because then even an idiot such as her client could put two and two together. Even an idiot could realize what Nhika truly was, something far worse than a sham healer.
Instead, she opened her pouch of tinctures—all just a couple drops of aromatic oil in water. Placebos.
"For the pain, I suggest some licorice extract, either taken in tea or directly as drops. As for the micromes, I would suggest—" 'What did she have in excess at the moment?' "—eucalyptus, applied topically on the chest for a week."
He nodded, and then seemed to remember he was a more discerning gentleman. "What does it all do?"
"The licorice has a certain structure of carbon rings that synapse with pain receptors to alleviate them," she said, waving a hand as if the details bored her. Now she was talking out of her ass, too, drawing from words she'd seen in stolen textbooks. "And the eucalyptus, well & It has natural anti-micromial properties. With my titer, it's stronger than fermicillin."
...
