The tip of the threaded needle went ever so slightly astray over the skin.
Luan stopped his hand. Or rather, it was closer to pretending he had stopped. He drew in a breath and, beyond the back of Karen’s hand pressing down on the patient’s shoulder, watched the breadth of blood gathering there. One more stitch and the torn flesh would meet. But the thumb of his right hand, holding the needle’s eye, was trembling, very faintly.
“Medical Officer?”
Sera called softly.
“The lamp.”
Luan spoke without lifting his gaze.
“A little to the left.”
Sera moved the lamp. As the light shifted, the tremor was buried in shadow for a moment. In that brief gap, Luan changed the force in his fingers. Instead of relying on his thumb, he pushed the needle with his index and middle fingers. The skin barely met, and the thread passed through its proper place.
The patient did not notice. That was a relief, and that was why the cold sweat came all the more.
After that, the stretchers did not stop coming. A shoulder from which an arrowhead had been removed, the back of a hand scorched by fire, a thigh crushed and burst open, a messenger babbling with a high fever. Between treatments, Luan washed his hands. Each time the cold water ran over his wrist, the tremor subsided for a moment, only to rise again, very slightly, once he dried his hands with a cloth.
Because of that one small tremor, the needle’s tip lingered for too long over the patients’ skin.
“You held the scissors with your left hand.”
Sera said.
Luan did not answer.
“Just now, you pulled the knot with your left hand too.”
“There was blood on my right hand.”
Luan turned his gaze toward the tray of instruments.
“You washed it.”
Even after saying that, Sera did not step back. Her eyes remained fixed below Luan’s wrist.
Sera’s words were quiet, but they did not retreat. Luan only lowered his head as he loosened the next patient’s bandage. Sera asked no more. Instead, when she handed him tools, she watched his fingertips longer. That gaze felt sharper than a needle.
By afternoon, Bern came into the tent. He pretended to be there to look at the patients, but he looked at Luan’s hand first. The old medic’s eyes read the habits of those enduring pain faster than they read wounds.
“Open your hand.”
“The patients come first.”
“I’m saying this because of the patients. Open it.”
After hesitating briefly, Luan held out his right hand. The palm was steeped in the smell of blood and medicine, and the finger joints had dried white. Bern pressed the inside of his wrist. Luan’s fingertips trembled reflexively.
Bern’s expression hardened.
“When did it start?”
“A little, since this morning.”
“That is not a hand you can brush off with the word ‘a little.’”
“It will be fine if I rest.”
Luan tried to pull his hand back, but Bern did not let go.
“The problem is that you are cutting open people’s bellies right now with a hand that needs rest.”
Still holding his wrist, Bern let out a low breath. There was more force in the hand that held him than in the hand that scolded him.
When Bern’s voice rose, a nearby patient opened his eyes. Luan immediately shook his head. Only then did Bern clench his teeth and lower his voice.
“If the hand holding the knife shakes, it is no longer your problem. It becomes the patient’s problem.”
Those words hurt the most. Luan found the truth harder to endure than the rebuke. The moment that morning when the threaded needle had almost gone astray rose again before his eyes. The fact that the patient had not noticed did not make it something that had never happened. For the first time, the limits of his own body had reached right up to another person’s skin.
Karen had been listening to the conversation from the entrance of the tent. She did not interrupt. She only looked once beyond the access line Aizen had set, then looked again at Luan’s wrist. Her face said that what had to be guarded was not only the blades outside, but the fingertips inside as well.
Orte started to leave a small note on one side of the record book, then stopped. Tremor in right hand. Delay in treatment. Rest required. The moment he wrote such words, the record could become not a medical chart, but a report. Within Aizen’s line of authorization, the state of Luan’s body was no longer Luan’s alone. In the end, Orte wrote nothing and only wiped the tip of his pen.
“Don’t write it down.”
Luan said.
Startled, Orte raised his head.
“Do you know what I was about to write?”
“I think I do.”
Orte closed the record book. His hand lingered for a long time on the leather cover. Not writing it down was also a lie, and writing it down was also dangerous. The things that survived inside the tent always had to choose one of the two that way.
“Rest for half a day.”
Bern said.
“I’ll do the suturing. You just handle triage.”
“Triage uses the hands faster.”
“Then do it with your mouth. Put your hands down.”
Luan did not laugh. He did not even have the strength to laugh. At that moment, the stretcher team pushed aside the flap and came in.
“Two from the eastern trench. One abdomen, one neck.”
Bern swallowed a curse. Sera spread out a clean cloth first, and Orte turned the roster to a new page. Luan looked down at his hand. A small vibration was rising from the inside of his wrist. It was as if someone were pulling a thread from within.
“Bern, please look at the abdomen first. I’ll take the neck.”
“Luan.”
“If we’re late with the neck, it ends immediately.”
Instead of answering, Bern threw him a roll of bandages.
“Wrap it. Tight.”
Luan wound the bandage around his right wrist. If he wrapped it too tightly, the sensation in his fingers would die; if it was too loose, the tremor would rise. There was no proper degree of force. He wrapped it one more time and clenched his teeth. When Sera tried to tie the end, Luan pulled his hand away.
“I’ll do it.”
But the knot did not take on the first try. His fingertips missed by the slightest margin. Without a word, Sera held out her hand again. This time, Luan could not push her away. While her hands tied the end of the bandage, Luan looked only at the blood seeping from the patient’s neck.
The treatment was brief and rough. With his wrist fixed, Luan did not grip the knife deeply. He opened only as much as needed and pressed only as much as needed. He endured with his whole arm what he had usually entrusted to his fingertips. He was slower than usual, clumsier than usual. Even so, the bleeding stopped.
When the patient kept breathing, the air inside the tent loosened ever so slightly. Bern closed the abdomen of his patient and glanced sideways at Luan.
“If you hold a knife again today, your hand will no longer be your hand.”
Instead of answering, Luan looked at the next roster. Four still remained. Two with high fevers, one infection after an amputation, and one young messenger who had lost his senses. None of them were people who would die this instant. That was why they could not be put off. If they were not caught now, they would collapse in the night.
“I won’t hold a knife.”
Luan said.
“I’ll only do triage and give treatment instructions.”
Bern wore a face that did not believe him. Even so, he no longer stopped him. He knew as well that more patients would arrive while he tried to stop him.
Seeing only to triage was not work that required no hands. Luan lifted the eyelids of the fever patients, checked the smell of the amputation wound, and pressed beneath the young messenger’s fingernails to see their color. The more he tried to move his wrist less, the more strangely his shoulder and elbow stiffened. To hide one broken part, his body began to use the others more roughly.
“The second fever patient gets water first. He isn’t sweating. For the amputation patient, boil new herbal water before opening the wound, and don’t restrain the boy. If he’s startled, it will block him up more.”
His words came out as they always did. But the fingertips pointing toward the medicine bottle shook once in the air. Sera picked up the bottle first. Instead of saying thank you, Luan lowered his hand. In that way, Sera moved first three times throughout the day. Before Luan tried to grasp something, she grasped it in his stead; before he was exposed, she quietly cleared it away. The fourth time, she changed the wet cloth before Luan could even open his mouth. The patient did not notice, and only Luan folded his fingertips inward. Help came without a sound, and so there was even less place to hide.
As the sun began to tilt, one of Aizen’s adjutants stopped outside the flap. The guard did not let him in, in accordance with the new orders. The adjutant spoke only through the curtain.
“The commander has rejected two external requests. Medical Officer Luan Hesse is to maintain his current position.”
Maintain his current position. Hearing those words, Luan stopped the hand that had been changing a bandage. Between yesterday and today, he had become not a person, but a position. Yet the right hand that had to support that position kept crumbling in tiny increments beneath the bandage.
Karen went outside and answered briefly. “Confirmed.” That was all. But when she returned, she did not come straight to Luan. Instead, she stood between the water bucket and the knife-sterilizing stand and looked once more over the routes of movement inside the tent. Her eyes measured not only who might drag Luan away, but where she would have to catch him if he collapsed.
Only around evening did the inside of the tent empty for a moment. Sera dozed while arranging the medicine bottles, and Orte rested his forehead on the record book and briefly closed his eyes. Karen was outside the entrance, speaking quietly with the guard.
Luan sat alone in front of the water bucket. The bandage around his right wrist was stained with blood and medicine. He untied the knot. The flesh that had been compressed rose pale, then slowly flushed red.
He had endured in front of the patients. He wanted to hold on to that fact alone.
But before his eyes, his hand began to tremble again. It started with the thumb. Soon the index finger followed. Even when he set his hand on the rim of the water bucket, ripples spread across the surface. Small circles widened again and again.
Luan pressed his right hand down with his left. The tremor did not stop.
He recalled the face of the patient he had stitched in the daytime. If the threaded needle had pushed just a little farther, the edge of the wound would have torn. He also thought of the soldier whose neck he had held. If his fingertips had shaken one more time, he might have pressed a place he should not have pressed instead of the place he needed to. They were all alive. That did not mean it was all right.
Luan covered the ripples on the water with his palm.
The water was hidden for a moment, but the vibration rising from inside his hand became clearer.
Orte’s pen paused for a moment above the roster. Sera silently pushed a fresh roll of bandage toward him.
Outside the tent, someone called his name. Luan did not answer. If he answered, he felt as though he would have to use his hand again. He wrapped the bloodstained bandage around his right wrist again, very tightly. This bandage was not for a patient.