“A joke? From the prison healer?” Jaren squinted at her. “Are you sure I’m not dying?”

Kiva didn’t deign to respond as she snipped the last stitch, smeared on some sap, and retreated to a safe distance, indicating for him to pull his tunic back on.

“How much longer do you have to stay here tonight?” Jaren asked, his gaze wandering around the infirmary. She tried to see it from his perspective: the metal benches, the wooden worktable covered with supplies, the thin-blanketed pallets with even thinner privacy curtains for patients who needed longer care. At the back of the room was a closed door leading into the quarantine room, currently occupied by a few cases of a stomach virus that was going around.

“A couple more hours,” Kiva answered. “Olisha and Nergal will come and take over when it’s time for me to sleep.”

Unlike many of the other prisoners, Kiva’s hours were extensive. Most laborers worked for twelve hours, sometimes fourteen. But as the prison healer, it wasn’t unheard of for her to work eighteen hours a day, especially when there were wagonloads of new arrivals. Olisha and Nergal, the two others who were allocated to the infirmary, shared the skeleton shift each night, but the rest of the time they were shuffled among different administrative tasks depending on where they were needed. Unless Kiva was desperate for added support during the day, the three of them rarely worked together, which was perhaps another reason why the two older prisoners were so incompetent. They had no one to teach them how to treat the more complicated health concerns.

“Here,” Kiva said, retrieving a small jar of aloeweed gel from her supplies and handing it to Jaren.

He turned it between his fingers. “What’s this?”

“It’s for your hands,” she said. “You should’ve come to see me about them sooner.”

Jaren cocked his head to the side. “Is that your way of saying you missed me?”

Kiva felt her eye twitch. “It’s my way of saying they’ll only get worse if you don’t look after them.”

“Fair point,” Jaren said with the hint of a smile. “And I guess we don’t know each other well enough for you to miss me yet.”

Another eye twitch. “There’s no need to add yet to the end of that. We’ll never know each other that well.”

Jaren’s mouth hitched up into a crooked grin. He jumped down from the bench, the move bringing him much closer to Kiva. Her instinct was to step back, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, so she remained in place.

“Maybe if you—”

Whatever Jaren had been about to say was interrupted when Tipp bounded through the unguarded door and into the infirmary.

“Kiva! D-D-Did you hear?”

“Hear what?” she asked, spinning toward him.

“There’s a n-new arrival!”