She was curled in the center of her sleeping nest, an elaborate construction of blankets and soft materials arranged over several weeks, and she was shaking. When I placed my hand on her, I felt a tremor run through her small body, and she felt warmer than normal, as if she were fighting something.
“Oh, Pip.” I pulled her into my arms. She made a low, miserable keen and pressed her face against my collarbone, andmy chest tightened until it hurt. “Hey. Hey, sweetheart, I’ve got you.”
I don’t know if I called for Andrek or if the sound she made reached him through the walls, but he was in the doorway within two minutes, alert and dressed. The military training kicked in. He crossed to us and put one hand on Pip’s back.
“How long?” he asked.
“I just found her. I don’t know.”
“I’ve got her. I need the med kit. The full one, not the field kit.”
“Where?”
“It’s in the lower storage, third cabinet. Blue case.”
I went. By the time I came back, he had Pip arranged on her blankets and was assessing her. She let him fuss over her, which told me more than her temperature did. Under normal circumstances Pip would roll around thrusting all her limbs in every direction possible.
“Respiratory fever,” Andrek said. “Yxian are susceptible. It’s not uncommon in juveniles. It needs to run its course. We manage the symptoms, keep her hydrated, and monitor for complications.”
“How long?” I wiped my fingers on my sleep shirt. “I met someone who works in the medical facility on the transport here. Her name is Seri Koth. She said if I needed anything to reach out.”
“We shouldn’t need her, but if we do, we’ll go. It should clear up in two days. Maybe three.”
Pip made her sound again and turned her face toward me. I gathered her in my arms and held her against my chest.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do first?”
We did not sleep that night.
We divided the hours in a way that came natural to both of us. Andrek took the first watch and made me lie down on the small cot he’d brought in from the storage room, and I lay there for an hour listening to Pip’s breathing and the quiet sounds of him humming before I gave up on the pretense of rest and sat up. He looked at me. He didn’t tell me to go back to sleep. After a moment he poured a second cup of something warm and set it beside me, and we spent the rest of the night at Pip’s side without discussing whose shift it was.
The first day was the hardest.
I felt her fever spike in the morning before the monitor showed it. The sharp flare through the bond made me hiss and press my hand to my sternum. Andrek was already at the med kit adjusting the dosage before I could speak. He talked to Pip while he worked, low and quiet, in a language I understood some of but didn’t recognize.Must be his home dialect, I thought, and she tracked his voice with her eyes even when she couldn’t lift her head.
“What are you telling her?” I asked, somewhere in the middle of the second hour.
He glanced up. “That she’ll be all right. That she’s handled worse.” He paused. “She hasn’t, but she doesn’t need accurate information right now. She needs a confident voice.”
“You’re lying to her and acknowledging her feelings,” I said. “I’ve been a bad influence.”
The hours compacted and expanded at random, the way they do in sustained crises. There were long stretches of near-stillness where we sat on either side of Pip’s nest, monitoring her vitals, saying almost nothing, and shorter stretches of intense activity when her temperature shifted and required response. We ate when we remembered to. We took turns in short rotations that neither of us was strict about enforcing, which meant neither of us actually slept.
We talked, though. In the quiet hours, in the low amber light he’d dialed the room down for Pip’s comfort, about nothing that required our attention.
He told me about a mission three years into his captaincy, a rescue op that had gone sideways in a way I only half followed, but I understood his meaning.
“You couldn’t have known,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “But you carry it, anyway.”
I thought about my mother’s illness, the one that spurred her desire to see me married, and the choice I almost made. “Yes,” I said. “We do.”
He looked at me across Pip’s sleeping form. The amber light did something to the sharp angles of his face, smoothing them a fraction, making him seem more human.
On the second night, Pip’s fever broke, and she slept in peace. While we weren’t out of the woods yet, I felt relief. Andrek took the shift so I could shower. As the water sluiced down over my shoulders, they dropped from somewhere around my ears, and I shook as my body released the tension it had held for two days.
I was sitting against the wall beside Pip’s nest with her small body sprawled half in my lap, and Andrek was beside me. We migrated from opposite sides of the room to this position. He stared at something on his data pad, monitoring her vitals, and I stared off into space, letting my body run through the relief it needed to process.
