“My hand is rotting!” I said. “Look!” My hand was puffy and seemed about to split open.

He rose, so tall he seemed to be on stilts. He pulled his Ka-Bar knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it. In his shadowy hand the shining blade was a small pointed length of fire. In one quick motion, he turned and jammed the blade deep into a tree. The tree stayed still, impassive, but someone cried out: it was me.

When my emotions were hot like this I couldn’t tell good from bad, all I could tell was that I was shivering, and I liked that. All elements melt together at a certain heat.

Bay turned around with a smile. “Here, sister. Let me sanitize that hand.”

He put more wood on the fire. He sat beside me, pulled my back against his chest so I was almost in his lap. He held out our hands together in the light. “Christ, that’s a deep one,” he said. “It’s metal?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought you said it would be okay.”

“Do you trust me to help you fix it?” he said.

I told him I did.

“Look at me,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

I looked at his fire-blurry face. I had that feeling again that I was communicating with an animal. His eyes were fierce but his brain was blank to me. “Yes,” I said.

He squeezed my wrist and held my hand flat, grabbed a long burning branch from the fire, and crushed the flame end into my hand.

It didn’t hurt at all, really, certainly no more than it was hurting before. He lifted the branch away and we both looked at my ashy palm. A second later, the pain hit, but I could handle it by then. The splinter hadn’t budged, though the skin around it quickly blistered. I wondered if this was how he’d intended to fix it. I could still feel the warmth of his hand compressing my wrist, of all things.

“There,” he said. “Sterilized.”

If I were him, I’d have been sorry, or at least solicitous. But he stretched out on the ground, calm again, just like after he’d shoved me at the rich people’s house, shoved me and then instantly forgotten, perhaps. I ran to get my frozen water bottle from the tent so he wouldn’t hear me gasping, because now it did hurt—I’d been skinned.

I approached the fire again, numbing my hand against the bottle. It occurred to me that you could learn tolerance to pain the way that you learn math, and I found the thought comforting. I told this to Bay.