xp_logs | The Gates: Shattered Wings

Rahne and Medusa visit Smichov's medical clinic.

"... as you can see, we're strained to our limits here." Doctor Kucera was tall and thin, with graying hair and an air of resigned exhaustion. He had met Medusa and Rahne in the medical clinic's waiting room, and thanked them very wearily for coming before beginning the tour of the clinic that Nathan and Juliette had set up. It had been a stroke of good luck that there'd been a doctor fluent in English at the clinic, freeing up Juliette to accompany Nathan and Angelo on another fact-finding expedition. "The hospital is outside the security barrier, and medical supplies have faced the same difficulty getting in as everything else."

Medusa continued taking notes, barely managing to conceal her horror at the situation. She had known it would be bad, but seeing things made it true in a way that imagining did not. Not only were there not enough supplies, the facility was short staffed, limited to those who had been inside when Smichov was sealed. It wasn't just injuries that were filling the clinic's rooms, but everyday illnesses that should have been simple to take care of with standard care were beginning to run rampant through the population stuck inside. "Are you getting enough pictures?," she asked Rahne.

"Aye," Rahne said softly. Then, because "fluent in English" did not necessarily mean "fluent in all the vagaries of English dialects," she added, "Yes, I am." Her most insistent impulse was to put down the camera and ask if she could help with the short-staffing, but she couldn't talk to most of the patients and they needed this evidence.

Following Dr. Kucera, Medusa continued to write down specific information about what she was seeing. "It is clear that your resources are already stretched to their fullest capacity. It is admirable that you have kept running the clinic this long, but how much longer until you run out of all supplies?"

"We're already out of some basic supplies. I'm deeply concerned about sanitation, and infections," Kucera said. "We've been rationing antibiotics since it became clear that we couldn't expect new supplies promptly, but at this rate they'll be gone at the end of the week. We have very little in the way of analgesics left, of any sort," he said, his voice wobbling for a moment as he passed a bed where a boy, perhaps twelve years old, laid with both legs in casts and the dull-eyed look of someone in too much pain to register their surroundings. "Fortunately, we had few who were already seriously ill caught inside the walls when they were sealed. Unfortunately, the nightly fighting... we're having to deal with far more injuries than we've ever seen at this clinic. I am not a trauma specialist."

Rahne's fingers tightened on the camera. They had to get the word out. ...Maybe she could come back. "We heard some of the fighting last night," she said carefully, leaving it open for him to elaborate.

"It's not been as bad as it was the first few nights after Minister Syrovy was killed, but it's been constant." Kucera stopped at one curtained-off bed, calling out softly in Czech. A woman's voice answered quietly, and Kucera swallowed visibly. "I thought, perhaps, given the nature of your organization," he said to the two young woman, "that you would want to see..." Words seemed to fail him, and he pulled the curtain aside gently.

Inside, there was a woman perhaps in her mid-twenties, sitting beside the bed and holding the hand of a tiny girl. She might have been ten or eleven, but was so delicately built she looked younger. Lying on her side, she was whimpering softly. Spread behind her on the bed was one translucent, glittering, almost irridescent wing. Where there should have been another, there was a mass of bandages on her shoulder.

"Her apartment building caught fire," Kucera explained, his voice almost impassive now. "She attempted to fly down. Soldier on patrol responded to the fire and saw her, and one panicked and fired. There was too much damage to the wing, and infection... we had to amputate. I should say," he said, much more softly, "that the soldier who shot her carried her to the clinic himself, sobbing. There is no... black and white here."

Medusa pushed her emotions to the back of her mind, not allowing herself to visibly react to what she was seeing. There would be time to process later. There is regret at seeing the outcome of one's action, yet still the action took place. "Could things have turned out differently, if Smichov was not sealed?" she asked, tearing her eyes away from the little girl's injuries.

"If she'd been taken to the hospital, with a proper operating room and a real surgeon? Yes. The officer in charge of that patrol tried to get permission, but it was passed up the chain of command, he claims. And it simply took too long."

Rahne had lowered the camera for the moment and knelt by the bed, meeting the little girl's eyes with tears in her own before looking up at the woman.

The woman gave her a tiny, sad smile, not removing her hand from her daughter's. Doctor Kucera cleared his throat softly.

"We should let her rest. I have more you should see."