The Prison Healer (The Prison Healer #1)(83)
The smile Kiva sent him was wobbly. “Thank you.”
The old man replied with his own brown-toothed grin. “Yeh’re a survivor, Kiva Meridan. Yeh’ll survive this, too.”
And with that encouragement, he hobbled out of the infirmary, trailing behind a cartload of corpses.
* * *
The following day, Kiva and Naari set out to collect samples involving food storage and preparation. From the butchery with its bleeding, smoking, drying, and salting rooms, to the grain silos and their sorting factory, to the large underground cellars where the fruits and vegetables were preserved alongside the milk and cheese, Kiva had her work cut out for her. Not only did she have to obtain samples of the foods themselves, but she also had to swab the hand tools that the workers used to do everything from pickling radishes to churning butter to baking bread. The rations allocated to prisoners might have been low, but the guards received three-course meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so the preparation rooms were bustling with activity as Kiva and Naari attempted to complete their task.
After moving from the busy kitchens to the empty refectory, they finally returned to the infirmary, where Tipp was waiting, playing with yet more rats. Kiva had no idea how he continued to procure them, and was inwardly horrified by how vast the nest near the crematorium must be. She was secretly relieved that there was no need to collect samples from the furnaces, since no one who went in came back out again.
No one but her.
Shaking off the thought, Kiva fed the newest samples to the rats, but after testing them the next day, none revealed any symptoms, and her hopes began to crumble.
“Tomorrow’s the d-day,” Tipp said when he saw how crestfallen she was that night. “I c-can feel it. Something b-big’s going to happen. Just you wait.”
Bolstered by his confidence, Kiva set out with Naari again the next morning, this time to test most of the remaining buildings inside the grounds, including the entrance block, the general workrooms and administration, the guards’ barracks and dog kennels, and lastly, the ten cell blocks where the prisoners slept, along with their adjoining latrines and bathing facilities. After this, all she had left to test were the aquifer, pumping station, and tunnels, which she planned to do in the four days remaining before her next Ordeal, should the rats continue to remain healthy. More than ever, she was aware that she was running out of time—and options.
When Kiva returned with Naari to the infirmary that evening, her bag of samples in hand, she expected to see Tipp waiting with more vermin. They didn’t actually need any more, since the young boy had been so proficient at catching them, but still, it was strange that he wasn’t in the infirmary, since he’d been dutifully watching over Tilda and the quarantined patients on the days Kiva went out to collect her samples. Early on, he’d wanted to join her, especially when she no longer had to leave through the gates. But with Olisha and Nergal providing only minimal care to the sick, Tipp had volunteered to watch over them, something that had filled Kiva with immeasurable pride.
“Have you seen Tipp?” Kiva asked Nergal as she dropped her bag on the workbench, waving to Naari when the guard gestured that she was taking off, likely heading to the tunnels—and to Jaren.
Kiva reminded herself that she didn’t care. What they got up to when they were alone . . . She didn’t care.
“Haven’t seen him,” Nergal said, sitting on a stool near the workbench and finger-combing his long blond hair, before tying it at his nape with a leather band.
“Is he in with the quarantined patients?” Kiva asked, aware of Nergal’s short attention span, and that he often needed prompting.
“Not sure,” the willowy man said as he stood up and stretched, as if he’d just completed a hard day’s labor. Kiva doubted he’d moved from that position in hours. “Maybe.”
“Olisha?” Kiva asked the pockmarked woman, who was hastily wiping her mouth after having helped herself to Tilda’s rations, as if Kiva didn’t know about her repeated stealing of the sick woman’s food—and that of the other ill prisoners.
“Not since this morning,” Olisha answered, one brown eye looking at Kiva, the other drifting lazily to the side. Before Zalindov, she’d owned a pair of spectacles to help with her amblyopia, but they’d been damaged during a riot soon after her arrival, the glass trampled right out of them. She maintained that she could see just as well as anyone, but Kiva often heard her swearing when she knocked things over. “He went out to prune the thistlewort shortly after you left, Kiva dear, but he didn’t come back afterward, so I suspect he ran straight off to get more of your rats.”
Unlike Nergal, who went out of his way to be as useless as possible, Olisha at least tried to help around the infirmary. If not for her chronic fear of illness and death—and her denial about her fallible vision—Kiva would have been much more grateful for her assistance. Instead, she often found that the two of them only added to her workload. But if nothing else, they stepped in when Kiva was needed elsewhere, and the reprieve they afforded her by covering the night shift was always appreciated.
“Did he say anything?” Kiva asked Olisha, as the woman subtly dusted crumbs from her tunic. Kiva didn’t care about the stolen food—Tilda was barely managing broth, and was nowhere near up to eating bread crusts—but she did care about Tipp.