Today's Reading
"Stronger than fermicillin?" he repeated, and suspicion snuck into his voice. Had she pushed his ignorance too far?
"Fermicillin is made from mold, you see, so there's lots of processing to make sure it's safe for human consumption. It's diluted, so to speak. But eucalyptus oil is all-natural, so no need to dilute its anti-micromial properties." She gave him an innocuous smile, ready with the lie. "It's a secret the drug manufacturers would kill me for divulging."
That seemed to satisfy the man, and he nodded again, as though she had made any sense at all. "How much do I owe you?"
She pinched her chin, trying to discern how much she could swindle from him. While he seemed desperate, an exorbitant price might only deepen his doubt. So, maybe something middling, just to get her to her next rent. "I want to see your wife make a full recovery, so I'm willing to lower the price for such a critical case." Nhika looked back over the woman, corpselike in her bed. She could heal her, truly, if she wanted. For a moment, she had almost considered it. But her stomach flipped with hunger, and she remembered that she couldn't spare the energy.
"Fifty chem for the eucalyptus regimen, and I'll lower it to twenty for the licorice," she decided. Nhika watched his expression, half expecting him to accuse her of conning him for chem. But his eyes held only resolution as he traipsed to the bedside, taking the woman's hands into his.
"Honya, love, I've found something that might help. It's not over."
His frostiness had left him, replaced only by tenderness, lips in a half smile and eyes soft. Nhika almost expected his love alone to melt the paleness from the woman's lips, to return the rosiness to her skin. She looked away, biting the inside of her cheek. When her eyes landed on the nightside table, she found the woman's doctor's note, a misdiagnosis of hematic disease alongside a question: 'Would you like to donate the body of your loved one toward the Santo Research Initiative?' The man had marked 'No'.
As she watched the man and his wife, sympathy wheedled its way into her chest, but she dug her nails into her palms to silence it. 'Nhika, no. Don't fall for that.'
But the man clearly had no one else.
'Neither do you, and you haven't the energy for this.'
He'd pay her enough for a big dinner.
'And if you get caught?'
She'd healed blocked vessels elsewhere in the body before. She knew she 'could' do it.
'You're going to heal her, aren't you? Curse your wretched little heart.'
Nhika placed a hand on the bedside, calling the man's attention. "If you would, there is just one final physical examination I'd like to conduct, just to make sure I'm not missing anything."
He blinked, the words slow to catch. When they did, he stammered, "Of course."
"For the patient's modesty, may I have the room?" "I'm her husband," he tutted.
"Well, then, to preserve the secrets of my trade." She flashed him a tight- lipped smile. He seemed to weigh it, but only for a moment, before relenting. She walked him out of the room, closed the door behind him, and drew the curtains over the windows. Once concealed from snooping eyes, she settled at the bedside, turning her gaze to the woman. "I pity you, poor thing. Having to be wed to a fool who loves you."
Then, eyes closed, she took the woman's hand.
They connected, and she was once again privy to all the layers of her anatomy. Wading through the nausea of the woman's medications, Nhika teased her influence toward the heart, where she tasted the acridness of dying tissue. There, she found the offending ailment: a narrowed vessel, obstructed by a clot.
This, she could work with. When she was young, her grandmother had taught her on fat deposits and scabs. Then, her father had formed a blockage like this deep in his leg. Now, Nhika stretched her control first to the vasculature, where she wrapped her influence around the clot. All she had to do was force the clot to degrade—after her grandmother's tutelage, it was second nature. However, she didn't burn the woman's energy stores; her patient would need those to recuperate. Instead, Nhika burned her own, feeling the core of her abdomen heat. The fire carved a path up her chest and through her arm, warming the place where skin touched skin. She felt a surge of power as her energy, raw and healthy, flooded into the patient's bloodstream.
It took a moment to reach the site of the heart, but as it did, her influence strengthened, a fist tightened around the clot. Nhika leveraged that influence, willing the clot to shrink: cells bursting, fats shriveling, proteins dissolving. It followed her command as surely as a trained muscle, the blockage withering to rot as her own energy burned.
...
