“Aren’t any around here.” The tea shop proprietor—she must have been the only person who’d stayed nearby when they’d seen that slogan painted on the wall. Now she called out from the door of her shop. “Medical never comes here, either.”

“They’d better come this time.” My compression had reduced the blood coming out of the translator, but I couldn’t control internal bleeding, and her breathing had gone quick and shallow. She was losing blood fast, then, faster than I could see. Down on level three Kalr Eight was opening the case where the medkits were stored. She’d moved the instant the order had come, was working quickly, but I didn’t think she would be here in time.

I still pressed uselessly on the translator’s back, while she lay gasping on the ground, facedown. “Blood stays inside your arteries, Dlique,” I said.

She gave a weak, shaky hah. “See…” She paused for a few shallow breaths. “Breathing. Stupid.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, breathing is stupid and boring, but keep on doing it, Dlique. As a favor to me.” She didn’t answer.

By the time Kalr Eight arrived with a medkit and Captain Hetnys came running onto the scene, a pair of medics behind her and Sword of Atagaris behind them, dragging an emergency suspension pod, it was too late. Translator Dlique was dead.

11

I knelt on the ground beside Translator Dlique’s body. Blood soaked my bare feet, my knees, my hands, still pressing down on the wound on her back, and the cuffs of my shirtsleeves were wet with it. It was not the first time I had been covered in someone else’s blood. I had no horror of it. The two Sword of Atagaris ancillaries were motionless and impassive, having set down the suspension pod they had dragged this far to no purpose. Captain Hetnys stood frowning, puzzled, not quite sure, I thought, of what had just happened.

I rose to make way for the medics, who went immediately to work on Translator Dlique. “Cit… Fleet Captain,” said one of them after a while. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Never is,” said the proprietor of the tea shop, who was still standing in her doorway. Not tea but blood! scrawled only meters away from where she stood. That was a problem. But not, I suspected, the problem Captain Hetnys thought it was.