San Bernadino Welcomes You

> “Don’t lie about things that someone’s gonna demand you prove later.”

>

> -Fredrik Calor, to Sylva, when asking about her schoolwork

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The atmosphere around the Warrior II was becoming strange, for some reason. Since she had come aboard the ship, Sylva had done her best to ingratiate herself with the people around her. She came to know a few of them, specifically Sign and Keep's close families, fairly well. She could tell when something was going on. Everyone seemed more interested in getting their job done and rushing home to their apartments than they were about gossiping and chatting. This frustrated Sylva because her whole medical practice basically depended on people gossiping about their family members troubles before they actually came to see her.

She cornered Keep on the second day she noticed this persistent, odd behavior and asked her what was going on.

"It's Deepdark," Keep said. "In like, uh, two days. You don't follow the calendar?"

"Oh, Midwinter?" Sylva asked.

Keep rolled her eyes. "Don't have winter in space, grounder."

"Well, is it any different?"

"I don't know. I've never been on a planet for that."

"Okay…" Sylva said. She didn't know what the difference could possibly be. She had been avoiding going to the temple on the ship, so she didn't know if there was something particularly different about the ways that pirates celebrated Midwinter. The reason she avoided going to the temple was at least partially because there were a lot of people gathered there at once, increasing the likelihood that someone would show her their ailment right there in front of everyone else. That was a remote possibility, but the thought of it scared Sylva away from attending.

"You have to come to it," Keep said. "I know you grounder heathens don't care about going to temple, but you have to come to Deepdark." Sylva tried not to resent the fact that Keep had just called her a heathen. She hadn't spent ten years going to the top theological school in the universe for nothing. But it was true that she hadn't been going to temple, so she couldn't really blame Keep for making her own assumptions.

"I wasn't planning on missing it." She also hadn't been planning on going, since she didn't know the holiday even existed, but she didn't want to say that and hurt Keep's feelings. She was weirdly intense about it. "Do I need to do anything special?"

Keep sighed loudly. "It's like you were raised on a planet or something. Bring an offering."

"An offering to what?"

Keep flicked the side of Sylva's head. "Your ancestors, idiot."

Sylva rubbed the place where Keep flicked her. "Go eat some lunch, I can tell your blood sugar's getting low."

"Well considering I couldn't keep my breakfast down this morning, I'm not surprised." Keep smiled at her. "I'm glad you'll come, though. You wouldn't want to miss it, even if you are a heathen."

"I'm not a heathen, I just–" Sylva began, but Keep was already traipsing heavily off down the hallway in search of lunch.

Sylva asked Iri about it later when they were back in their rooms.

"Do you actually know things about pirates, or have you just been pretending this whole time?" Sylva asked her, sitting on Iri's bed and braiding her own hair as Iri painted her fingernails.

"I know them pretty well. One in particular, anyway." Iri bit her lower lip as she concentrated on applying the black paint.

"You have any clue what Deepdark is?"

"Their version of Midwinter," Iri said. Sylva twined her braids.

"Yeah, I get that. But like, what is it?"

"I've been told that they drive the ship to some sort of extra desolate place, then do a ritual for their dead. I don't have a lot of specifics."

"Extra desolate? And regular space isn’t?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask that many questions."

"And we're supposed to bring some sort of offering?" Sylva asked.

"You asking for suggestions?"

"What kind of offering?"

"You have the power, you can make anything you want. Just go get some raw materials from the workshop. I'm sure Keep would give you whatever."

"You think I should make something?"

"Unless you've got something laying around," Iri said. Sylva's hand moved quickly to the pin she kept on her collar, the one that Captain Pellon had given her half a year ago. No, that wouldn't be an appropriate offering. She was supposed to give something for her ancestors, and she assumed that meant dead people, and Yan wasn't dead. It wasn't just a prayer for anything she cared about, it was going to be specific. What had her mother once said her great-grandparents liked? She could try to remember that and come up with… something.

"And usually people give something handmade?"

"Well it's not like there's a lot of spare charges laying around that they can toss off the ship."

"What will you be giving?"

"Shockingly, that's none of your business."

"This whole thing has you in a mood too?" Sylva asked.

"I'm just saying there's no need to pry into something deeply personal like that."

"I didn't realize it was personal."

"Well now you know. Don't go asking anybody else on the ship either. They might just laugh at you, or they might get mad."

"Fine, fine," Sylva grumbled. "I'll be weird and secretive about it then."

"Good."

The next few days passed in that same strange haze of odd tempers aboard the ship. Sylva did indeed borrow supplies from Keep's workshop, and she spent several agonizing hours meditating and forcing lumps of iron into something that resembled chiseled images of her eight great-grandparents. She had her whole family photo album saved to her computer, just in case she got homesick, so she had plenty to use as reference. It would have to do, and apparently no one on the ship would know about what her offering was, let alone what her great-grandparents looked like, so Sylva didn't worry about it too much.

Then the day came. Sylva was awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of the gravity rings slowing to a stop and everything beginning to drift in the sudden lack of acceleration. It was a disconcerting feeling to wake up to. She was worried at first that something had gone horribly wrong, but Iri came into her room, dressed in her jumpsuit, and told her to get dressed and ready. It didn't take long before Sylva figured out what exactly they were getting ready for.

From down the hallway, a riotous echo of drums and wailing sounded. Rhythmic pounding on a ceremonial drum, accompanied by rather less rhythmic pounding on the walls of the hallway, rattled Sylva's ears.

"Get your offering and get ready to join the procession," Iri said. She was holding a bag filled with her own offering. Sylva could see that it had some heft to it, from the way the bag floated in the lack of gravity when Iri yanked it around. "And once they get here, get in the back, and don't talk unless you want to join in the song." Song was a strong word for what the wailing sounded like. "Leave your phone and anything else here."

As the sounds came closer and closer, more and more people joined into the chorus, and what had sounded chaotic at a distance resolved into something that could resemble a tune. It was nothing like the structured worship music that Sylva was used to. There wasn't a cantor, just the incessant pounding of the drums, and everyone sang (or yelled) words that Sylva didn't understand. It didn't precisely sound like Old Imperial, but there were snatches of it. It was a mysterious thing. She tried her best to learn the repeating words before the line got to them.

When it did, people pounded on the doors to their rooms as they passed by, and Sylva stepped out into the tail end of the procession. Iri came out of her own door a moment later, floating behind Sylva. The whole group traveled the entirety of the ship, gathering up a long tail of people. Everyone was there. Sylva didn't see anyone missing, and the volume of the chanting and the pounding and the length of the train of people would corroborate that assessment.

The captain, who Sylva rarely saw or interacted with, was the one in the front of the line, holding the drum. Everyone else trailed behind, banging on the walls and chanting. Sylva joined in as soon as she thought she had a good grasp on the words. Some of the pieces of the words were recognizable, and she felt just from this snapshot of chanting that maybe this was some sort of proto-language that Old Imperial might have descended from. Why pirates of all people were chanting in a language older than Old Imperial, or some strange offshot of it, Sylva had no idea.

The procession left the rings, though it really made no difference as the whole ship was without gravity, and they drifted further and further down into the center of the ship. Sylva hadn't had much cause to explore the deep interior of the ship, where all the cargo was stored. She rarely left the rings. She wondered how deep they were planning to go.

Her question was answered when the whole procession ground to a halt, people bumping and jostling off each other as they came to a stop through the friction of dragging their hands and feet along the walls. They were all gathered just outside the engine room of the ship. This close, Sylva could feel the thrum of it in her fingertips resting against the wall. The chanting quieted to a whisper, but still continued unabated. The drum pounded on. In the front, the captain raised her hands for silence.

"This Deepdark. We have all gathered here to embrace this darkness, for that is where we all came from, and that is where we will all return. We have all gathered here to meet with our ancestors again." The captain and two other people disappeared into the engine room. There was a tense, waiting atmosphere for a long moment, and the chanted whispers resumed.

All power on the ship cut out completely, the thrum of the engines died down to nothing, leaving an eerie silence. If Sylva had been in gravity, she would have jumped about half a foot in the air. The involuntary motion she gave instead was a whole body shudder as the lights cut out. Iri grabbed her arm, steadying her. At least, it probably was Iri. Sylva had never been in such profound, complete darkness. The whispered chanting faded to nothing, though the drum continued to pound like a heartbeat. The captain must have passed it off to someone else before going inside the engine room. The only other sound was the shuffling and breathing mass of people.

Somewhere back in the long line, a baby cried. The mother shushed it in a barely audible whisper that still carried further than it should. It was amazing how much background noise there usually was from the engine and the rotating of the wheels and the buzzing of the lights and the flow of the air filtration and– Sylva abruptly realized that ALL the power was off, including the things that they needed to live. She hoped this wouldn't last long.

At the head of the line, the doors creaked open and the group of people who had gone into the engine room came out. It was odd to just hear the slapping of their hands and feet against the metal walls as they pushed themselves around. There was no light, no way to see. Sylva adjusted her arm so that she could hold Iri's hand instead of Iri just grabbing her. Their fingers wove together.

"The naming of the dead," the captain yelled out from the front of the line. The drumming changed pace, and abruptly there was a massive shuffling within the line. Someone nudged Sylva in the back. They were turning around, for some reason. She disentangled her hand from Iri's so that they could turn easily, and then thought that she had lost her. Luckily, Iri was better at keeping track of her than she was, and linked back up as they began to move in the opposite direction. It was difficult to move just enough to follow the person, whoever it was, in front of her without nudging or getting nudged, and Sylva was so focused on that that she almost ignored the voices around her. In the front, no, back of the line, the captain was calling out names, and everyone repeated the name in a whisper as it traveled up the line to the front.

"Call-Your-Name Dreyfus," the captain yelled, and then everyone repeated it back in a hushed tone.

"Nilan Yarrow. Never-Leave Del. Mender-of-Hearts Del. Price-of-Happiness Del." The Dels were the clan that owned the Warrior II, so it wasn't surprising that the list was comprised of a long, long litany of Dels who had died. She wondered just how many generations were represented by this list. It seemed to stretch on forever. Just where they were going in the ship? They seemed to travel through the darkness forever, yelling and whispering and bumping into each other in the caravan.

Then, once the captain finished saying his piece, which presumably had all of the people who had ever died aboard the Warrior II, and any of their ancestors who could be remembered, or anyone they knew, there was a chance for all the ship's unrelated passengers to say their piece.

Sylva jerked a little when Iri began to call out.

"Side-by-Side Vinright. God's-Home Vinright. Carry-the-Sword Vinright." It was a long list of names, and Sylva sensed that Iri was even curtailing it for the sake of everyone else in this crew, not forcing them to whisper the names of people they didn't know. These must be the names of all the people who had been on the ship of the pirate that she knew, whose identity she was borrowing. Curiously, Iri hesitated before saying one last name: "Hail-and-Farewell Vinright." That was the name of the person she had known. Was he dead? Or was something else going on? Sylva wanted to pry, but considering the way Iri had reacted to her asking questions earlier, it probably just would lead to her getting snapped at.

Iri nudged Sylva once she was finished. Oh, Sylva should probably call out the names of some of her own ancestors. But she had a fake name, so that made it a little complicated. Oh well, people changed their names all the time. She called out the names of her great-grandparents, and felt a little stir in her chest when everyone around her in the long line whispered the names too. Eventually, they came to whatever their destination was, and she crashed into the person in front of her who had come to a complete stop. The person behind her crashed into her, and so it went all the way down the line until everyone had arrived and bunched up into one clump. They were all oddly silent, with just the beating of the drum and the shuffle of clothing and the quiet huffs of breathing.

Sylva really couldn't tell where they were in the dark; she had lost all sense of direction in the gravity-less areas. Without the sense of the ground to orient her, she could have gotten flipped upside-down (though that really didn't have any meaning) and had no idea what left and right were supposed to be. Or even up and down, since the interior of the ship had tunnels that went off at all different angles. Someone at the front of the line opened a door, and a dim light filtered down onto the group. It wasn't much, but it was more than Sylva had been used to on their weird blind fumbling way through the halls of the ship.

They had come to one of the shuttle bays, the one with the big window at the front of it, and everyone crowded inside. Sylva had been there once before, and she had thought the window was a bit silly at the time, but if this was the purpose they used the room for, she guessed she could understand it. The stars stood out like knives in the blackness of space, and there was an odd puckering directly in the middle of the view. It seemed as though some of the light was smeared out around a dark point. Sylva rubbed her eyes for a second to make sure of what she was seeing. She wasn't sure, but if she had to guess, Sylva would have pegged that as a black hole. This really was a desolate place, then.

Silently, everyone put their offerings down in a box set up at the front of the bay. It filled up quickly, considering just how many people there were who had to put something in there. Most of the offerings were wrapped in fabric, so Sylva couldn't see them. And it was still quite dark in the bay; the light of the stars really only allowed her to see the vaguest outlines of people as they drifted around. Once everyone put their offerings in the box, two people sealed it up. The lid of it had a little thruster on it. It wasn't a massive engine, but it would definitely serve to blast the box out of the ship, and presumably the massive distance to the black hole (or whatever that was).

Everyone went out of the room again. Sylva let herself get caught up in the shuffle, following everyone as they drifted out back into the hallway. It was crowded in there. Someone sealed the door to the bay, and the light vanished with it. It was annoying to be in the dark. Somehow, during the whole process in the bay, Iri had gotten separated from her. Oh well. This couldn't go on that much longer, could it? After all, they had to turn the engine back on at some point, even if just to let them breathe. Or to open the bay doors to send out the offerings. Someone pounded the drum relentlessly. Sylva was getting tired of that, too. The chanting started up again. It wasn't names, this time. It was back to the old, weird, not quite Old Imperial, style chanting, just with slightly different words. Sylva did her best to learn it, but it was hard to understand when everyone was saying it at once and slurring the words. It was easy to slur words when they didn't have any meaning to the speaker. Then they were just sounds.

The chanting and the drumming got louder and louder and more frantic, and when Sylva thought everybody couldn't yell any louder, the ship's engine roared back to life and the lights flickered on. She was momentarily blinded, and everyone around her cheered and clapped for a minute. As the cheering began to die down and the spots left Sylva's vision, everyone began to disperse through the hallways, though most of them floated down towards the rotating rings that could be heard groaning back in to motion. Sylva found Iri in the crowd, and they headed off together to a less crowded area of the ship.

"How'd you like Deepdark?" Iri asked, once they were far enough away from everyone else that they could have a private conversation.

"I don't know. Was I supposed to like it?"

"How would I know?" Iri asked and laughed.

"Have you ever done one of these before?"

"No, but I knew a little bit what to expect. My friend told me."

"Is he dead, the friend?"

"Oh, no."

"Then why'd you say his name?" Sylva was asking the question, even though she had thought that she wouldn't. She just couldn't help prying.

"You noticed?"

"How could I not?"

"I just thought he'd want me to. It's more of a symbolic death than a physical one."

"I have no idea what you mean by that."

"Then it doesn't matter," Iri said."

"Are we supposed to do anything else? Is it done?"

"Yeah, it's over I think. Just go back and get some sleep before first shift starts."

"Wait, what time even is it?"

"It's the middle of the night," Iri said. "I'd show you a clock, but I left my phone in the room."

"Because of the light?"

"Yeah. Somebody would have yelled at you if you'd've had your phone out."

"I have to say, I didn't really get the whole thing. I think I prefer Midwinter."

"Well, you've left normal civilization behind, haven't you," Iri said, nudging her. They drifted, then walked back to their room. The slow spinning up of the rings was uncomfortable, but Sylva was able to fall back asleep anyway.

----------------------------------------

She had one day of peace left before the crisis happened. Someone came to her door in the middle of the middle of the night and pounded on it relentlessly until she crawled out of bed, dressed only in a long tunic top. She opened the door with clumsy fingers and stared out at the figure in the hallway with blurry eyes.

"Keep's water broke earlier today, and she's started having a lot of contractions," the figure said. Hearing the voice, she could identify him as Shielder, Keep's husband.

"God. Couldn't have waited until morning, could he have?" She rubbed her eyes. "Sorry. Send her to the clinic, I'll be there as fast as I can. If there's an emergency, call me and I'll run, but I gotta get dressed. Tell her not to start pushing until I'm there, and get all the women who agreed to help, okay? Let me write down the door code for you so you can let yourself in." All of the words came out at once, as she gave every instruction that popped into her head She reached behind her and grabbed a pen from her desk. She didn't have any paper, so she just handed it to Shielder. "Write it on your hand or something. The code is 599724."

Shielder took all of that in and scribbled the code on his hand with a look of panic on his face. He handed her back the pen. "How long will you be?"

"Give me ten minutes?" Sylva asked.

"Uh, yeah. Ok. I'll call you if there's an emergency."

"Who's with her now?"

"Sign."

"Great." That was not great. Having two overbearing men in the room would probably do no good for anyone, but he could stay for now, at least until he started causing any trouble. "Okay, the faster you get going, the faster I can get there." Sylva shooed him out the door, and she slammed it shut behind him a little harder than intended. She took a bunch of the fabric of her tunic and put it over her mouth and screamed. It didn't muffle things as well as she had hoped, at least from the perspective of her ears. Hopefully Shielder hadn't heard.

All the sound had woken up Iri, though, who came into the room in her own pyjamas and looked at Sylva questioningly.

"Keep's having her baby," Sylva explained.

"It had to happen sometime," Iri said calmly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "What are you going to do?"

"What am I going to do?" Sylva echoed plaintively.

"What you have to. Get ready." Iri shoved Sylva toward her dresser. "Put on some clothes. You feeling awake?"

"No?"

"I'll get you something for that." Sylva was already yanking her tunic top off over her head and rummaging through her drawers for a clean jumpsuit that she didn't mind getting blood on. She didn't have a lot to choose from. She hopped around getting dressed, and Iri returned to her room bearing a water bottle and a couple pills. She thrust them at Sylva as she stood with her jumpsuit half up around her knees. She pulled it on the rest of the way and took the offering from Iri. She looked at it for a moment.

"What is this?"

"Don't recognize various street drugs?" Iri asked, quirking an eyebrow. "What kind of doctor are you?"

"A fake one. Tell me what it does before I take it."

"It's a stimulant. Should keep you awake. Take one now and put the other in your pocket for later."

Sylva looked at the drug and considered it, then said a mental fuck it, decided if she was in for a gram she was in for a kilo, and popped the pill into her mouth.

"And you should eat something with that. It'll wreck your stomach if you don't have something else in there," Iri said. Sylva retrieved a mushed up granola bar that she had been saving and gnawed on it. "You ready to go now?"

"Lemme zip up. You coming?" Sylva finished zipping her jumpsuit and crammed her shoes onto her feet, shoving the rest of the granola bar into her mouth. She patted herself down, making sure her hair was still braided enough to stay out of her way, and ensuring that her clothes were all on right. She looked and felt like a chipmunk, but at least she wasn't in total panic mode yet. That might change when she got to the clinic, but a certain numbness was setting in, like her body and brain were moving on an autopilot, and she didn't actually have control over what was going to happen next.

"I'll be there," Iri said. "But I'm going to take a shower first."

"You're really going to abandon me for that?"

"Well you're abandoning the pregnant lady in order to chat with me, so you'd better get going." Iri shoved Sylva again, this time in the direction of the door. Sylva stumbled, caught herself, then left. She ran down the hallways to the clinic, not encountering anyone on the way. Inside the clinic was a bit of a different story. It felt like half of the women on the ship had arrived to help out, along with Shielder, and Keep's brother, Sign. It wasn’t actually that many, but she had expected two at most. She had at least five, and more might be coming. She didn't know if it would be worse for her to be totally alone or to have this audience. She wished Iri were here already; she would know how to marshal these forces.

Sylva entering the room got everyone's attention focused on her, without her needing to yell and corral everyone. "Alright, ladies, let's make this a clean environment. Hair nets, wash your hands up to the elbow, gloves. If you're wearing something that you've worked in, go home and change into something clean." Was this actually sterile? No, absolutely not, but Sylva didn't even have scrubs for herself, let alone all these women. "Shielder and Sign, you guys stay out here for now." She pointed to the chairs in the little reception area. "I'll call you if I need you," she said, preemptively stopping their protests.

As everyone scurried to get ready, Sylva headed into the observation room, where Keep was laying on the table.

"How's it goin?" Sylva asked.

"Not. Great," Keep huffed, grabbing the edge of the table. Her knuckles were white.

"Yeah, I can tell. How far apart are the contractions?"

"Urgh. Four minutes?" She sounded unsure, and in a lot of pain. Her face was pale. Keep was wearing her jumpsuit, but had a towel wrapped around her waist as well.

"Can I ask what the towel is for? I mean, I'm gonna need you to get undressed anyway." A weird, hyper, nervous feeling was building up within Sylva. She couldn't tell if it was the stimulant or the situation that was making her this way. Possibly, probably, it was both.

"I bled through my stupid pad." Keep leaned her head back on the table and took a few heavy breaths. "Didn't want to get blood. Everywhere."

"I think that's unavoidable, at this point," Sylva said. "Can you move by yourself, or do you need help?"

"Give me a second. God this hurts so bad."

"It'll be okay," Sylva said unconvincingly. "I can get you some pain medication."

"Yeah. Do that." Keep grabbed the sides of the table again, and hoisted herself onto the floor. "Maze!" Keep yelled suddenly.

One of the women, Maze, poked her head into the room. She was wearing a hairnet and had a circle of tattooed dots around each of her eyes. "Everything okay?"

"Help me get this stupid. Fucking. Argh." Keep closed her eyes for a long moment and shuddered as another contraction squeezed through her.

"Try to relax," Sylva said.

"Relax?!" Keep almost yelled. "Don't tell me to relax!"

"Okay, okay. Sylva backed away slightly. Maze, can you just help her get undressed? Jumpsuit needs to go, she can keep her undershirt, and wrap the towel under her belly for now, I guess."

Maze gave a skeptical look. "You guess?"

"I'm going to be honest with you." Sylva had to stop herself from blurting out the fact that she wasn't a doctor at all. "I've never delivered a baby before, and never expected to have to, and we're working with the supplies we've got. Right now, that's a towel."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"You have fucking terrible bedside manner," Keep huffed. Maze came over and started helping Keep get undressed, supporting her so that she could kick her jumpsuit off without falling over.

Sylva headed into the back room, the one where all the lab equipment was. She was glad that delivering drugs was a well known science that she could just follow simple instructions for. Keep wasn't allergic to anything, so Sylva prepared the drug she had read was best for this early stage of labor, which was a mild pain reliever in a pill, not much stronger than general headache medicine. She wasn't going to tell Keep, that, though, since she'd probably get punched. When things got closer to the actual time of delivery, she would need something stronger. Sylva walked back out. Keep was alone in the room again, presumably having shooed Maze away. Sylva handed her the pill.

"This should help a little with the contractions. When we get closer to actual delivery, there are stronger things available, but I don't want to give you those before you're ready."

"You mean this isn't it yet?" Keep was back up on the table, wrapped in a towel from hips down, and a grey undershirt from ribs up. Her massive belly was exposed.

"These things take a long time," Sylva said. "It's different from person to person. Let me get the monitor on you and see what he's doing in there."

Sylva had at least found and prepared all the birth-related equipment ahead of time, and so the heartbeat monitor was quickly retrieved and placed on Keep's belly. She also gathered up the ultrasound equipment.

"Did you feel him turn around since I last looked at him, or is he still the wrong way up?"

"How am I supposed to know?" Keep asked. The heartbeat monitor looked fine, or at least not going crazy or dead. Sylva applied the ultrasound gel to Keep's stomach. She shivered a little.

"Sorry, I know it's cold." At least Sylva had gotten some practice using the machine on Keep a few times. Though the shapes other than the baby still were incomprehensible, she was at least able to operate the ultrasound without problems. The images of Keep's baby showed up on the screen, grainy and black and white, but clearly showing all his limbs and head. Keep smiled when she saw it, again. "You know you're going to have him right out in a little bit, then you'll have the real thing and not just pictures."

"I'm enjoying him while he's still nice and quiet, aren't I?" Keep said shortly.

Sylva examined the image, and rotated it in her head to see what direction the baby was facing. "Good news is that he looks fine. Bad news is that he's ass first," Sylva said. One other thing that she wanted to look for was the placenta. She couldn't tell where it was. "You said you've got a towel because you're bleeding a lot?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know if that's normal," Sylva said. Keep lifted her head up to look at her.

"You don't know?"

“The baby's heart rate still seems fine, so I don't think there's too much reason to worry." Sylva was almost babbling. She should not have taken the stimulant from Iri. This was a bad idea. Or maybe it was just the nerves. Her hands were shaking on the ultrasound wand, which didn't improve the quality of the picture any. "Do you feel ok?"

"No." Keep smiled grimly. "But I'll live."

"Alright. I think it might be a waiting game from here on out."

"It's been a waiting game for the past ten months, hasn't it?"

"Well. Yeah."

"Yeah." Keep seemed satisfied with that admission out of Sylva.

"Okay, I'm going to goget ready. You want people in here with you?"

"Get me Shielder."

Sylva went to the door and fetched Keep's husband. Most of the women were sitting around on the chairs in the office area, chatting quietly. They had obediently put their hair in nets and washed their hands in the little bathroom sink, but Sylva was beginning to suspect that they had all been summoned a little bit early. From what she had read, if Keep's contractions were still three minutes apart, she still had a long way to go before the baby would actually be ready to come out. That gave Sylva at least a few minutes to go check what heavy bleeding during labor meant. She glanced at the discarded jumpsuit on the floor as she passed it. There really was a lot of blood. It was somewhat concerning.

In the back room, Sylva entered the symptoms into the medical database and scrolled through the list of possibilities. She remembered, during her first conversation with Keep, that she had mentioned having light, painless bleeding for a couple of weeks. It hadn't sounded too concerning at the time, so Sylva had forgotten about it. Why was she so stupid about stuff like that? She wanted to bang her head on the wall. Sometimes it felt like important information would just go right over her head, because she was too busy focusing on something else. In that case, she had probably been so focused on pretending to be a doctor that she had forgotten that she was actually supposed to be gathering and evaluating medical information.

Jalena had been right: this was a bad and immoral thing that she was doing. Now she had two lives literally in her hands, and she had been fucking up everything, all the time.

She couldn't beat herself too much up yet. That would stop her from being able to go forward. She forcefully jerked her train of thought away from how much of a failure she felt like, and focused on the problem at hand. Apparently, bleeding like this was a sign that the placenta was covering the cervix. So, that was fantastic. Two things were going against this birth now: upside down baby, placenta in the wrong place. According to the database, this misplaced placenta happened a lot with test tube babies. Weird. The mean part of Sylva's brain offered a snide comment about meddling with the natural order of things, but she tossed it out and tried not to think about it. After all, Yan had also– Well it wouldn't do anybody any good to think about Yan right now.

Sylva needed some way to confirm what was going on with the placenta. She pulled up the most recent ultrasound images, and squinted at them. All the fuzzy lumps didn't look like anything. Maybe that outline there… But it could have been anything. Why had she gotten herself into this?

She really hoped that the placenta was not down there. The only solution for it seemed to be surgical removal of the baby. The thought of that made Sylva's hands shake. She glanced across the room to where she had earlier prepared all sorts of surgical implements, just in case. She was glad, now, that she had prepared that beforehand, but she was also desperately hoping that she wouldn't have to use them.

If Sylva considered what she knew about giving birth, it was about the same as what she knew about surgery, which was to say, nothing. And just letting Keep pop a baby out on her own was, well, it seemed a little less like Sylva's fault if something went wrong. If she was doing surgery on Keep and like, stabbed her bladder with a knife by accident, that would be really, really bad, and definitely her fault.

She had looked up how to do the surgery. It looked… Well it didn't look as bad as it could have been. At least it wasn't on a brain, and there weren't that many layers of things between the skin and the baby, but still. The idea of slicing someone open with a knife was not a fun one.

And she liked Keep, no matter how snippy she could be. Sylva couldn't blame her for that.

She put her head in her hands for a minute, palms on her temples and stretching back the skin so much that her eyes watered. She couldn't stay in this back room forever. She was going to have to go give the news to Keep, and maybe figure out a way to confirm what was going on. She could do a cervical exam to see if she poked the placenta rather than the baby's butt. No. She would just look at the ultrasound more carefully. It wasn't worth risking internal damage by fucking around with a cervical exam, which Sylva had no experience with, and she didn't know if she'd be able to make a determination based on that either.

Sylva looked at the ultrasounds with renewed focus, checking them against examples provided by the medical database. That faint, dark line was probably the cervix; that blob was the bladder; the baby was clearly visible; and the placenta, a faint, almost indistinguishable blob. Right where she expected it to be. Just so that she wasn't convincing herself of a ghost that wasn't actually there, Sylva checked each image fastidiously to be sure she wasn't mistaken. The whole procedure had taken a long time, and intense concentration that Sylva hadn't felt in, well, maybe years. At the twenty-fourth hour, she finally was able to sit down and figure out where the placenta was. Different feelings bubbled up inside her: pride at figuring it out, anxiety that it was indeed in a dangerous location (almost completely covering the cervix), and anger at herself for not sitting down and figuring this out before it was almost dangerously late. She was such an incompetent doctor.

She wasn’t a doctor.

No. She didn't have time to beat herself up over this. She took a few deep breaths and prepared to deliver the bad news to Keep. She stood, hands shaking slightly, and went back out into the area where Keep was. She was pacing slowly around the room, gripping Shielder's arm tightly. Her towel had a red patch on the back of it from where she had been sitting and laying. She and Shielder both looked at her as she came in.

"I've got some good news and some bad news," Sylva said.

"Good news first," Keep said firmly, shutting up Shielder, who was starting to open his mouth.

"I have a solution to the problem of the bleeding."

"Bad news?"

"Your placenta is directly over your cervix." Sylva took a deep breath. "You need a surgical extraction."

"Fucking really?" Keep was angry, and her hand clenched on Shielder's arm even tighter.

"You knew this was already a possibility, since he's breech," Sylva said, trying to calm Keep down. It didn't work.

"A possibility, but I don't even get to try before you rip me open?"

"No, you don't." Sylva tried to put as much firmness as she could into the words. She hadn't been able to figure out what would happen if someone tried to deliver a baby where the placenta was covering the cervix. If she had to take an uneducated guess, she would say that it would probably cause the baby to be starved of oxygen and the uterus to get all ripped up from the placenta not coming off right. But really, that was just a guess. "It's too dangerous to try to deliver him naturally at this point. There's too many things going wrong, and I couldn't find anything in the medical database telling me how to deliver a baby like this. As soon as the placenta is in this position, the surgical method becomes necessary."

"Fuck. FUCK!"

"It'll be okay," Sylva said. "This is one of the most common medical procedures. It's just one cut, and then some stitches. It will be okay."

"You keep saying that," Keep hissed. "I'm starting to not believe you." She couldn't really blame Keep for that. Things were just getting worse and worse.

Sylva looked at Shielder helplessly. He patted his wife's back, and murmured something presumably comforting into her ear.

"I'm sorry that this is so stressful for you, Keep, but I promise that I won't let you down."

"How long do I have before you cut me open?"

Sylva scratched the back of her head, dislodging a few chunks of hair from her braids. "We need to get you completely numbed, but the operating room is prepped already, just in case. We should do it as quickly as possible. The blood loss is dangerous, I think. So we want to deal with all that as soon as we can."

"Will I be awake during it?"

"Do you want to be?" Sylva did have medication to knock her completely out, or just completely numb the lower half of the body. It was Keep's decision whichever one she wanted. To be honest, Sylva probably preferred that Keep be asleep, just so she wouldn't have to deal with that audience, but she wasn't so unethical as to not present Keep with the choice. Well, she was exactly as unethical as posing as a medical authority, but it was the little things that she could try to get right.

"Yeah. I do."

"Okay, then I can numb you from here down." Sylva gestured to her own body, right at about the bottom of her ribcage. "I'll get that set up." Sylva had prepared this all in advance– this anesthetic at least was the same as what she would have given for a normal birth, so she had that lined up ages ago, as with everything else for Keep's delivery, just in case. That was the one thing she had managed to do right, get all her tools in line in advance. She’d had them ready for at least a week and a half. "We should probably move into the other room." Though Sylva hated the operating room/morgue, it was definitely a better place for the eventual surgery. The regular doctor table was all well and good, but it didn't have the lights and space set up for a major procedure.

Sylva held the door open for Keep as she headed into that other room. It was as clean as she could get it, and she had tried to make the table a bit more comfortable by putting a pad down on it. She had also remembered to cover the knives and such that were laying around with a cloth. It wouldn't be great to scare Keep even more than she already was. There was a stool to help Keep get up onto the table, and she clambered up with some difficulty. Shielder stood next to her, rubbing her shoulder with his large hand.

"Let me just go prepare the anesthetic. I'll be right back." She slipped again into the back room. Keep and Shielder both were doing their best to focus on eachother, and not Sylva, which was for the best. She almost felt bad about her earlier threats to kick him out. He was acting much more calm than she felt. Sign was outside in the office area though, and that was good. Sylva had caught a glimpse of him through the window earlier, pacing like a caged animal.

She was familiar with how to administer this type of anesthetic, even though it had to go in through the spine. She had looked up extensively how to do it, and she had been able to practice once, on the Iron Dreams. Sylva was thankful to Jalena for being able to wrangle people into being volunteers for Sylva's trials. The amount of trust that people had in Jalena was truly astounding.

She came back out with all the required pieces on a tray, and she put them down on the counter in the operating room. "Alright, let's get this started," Sylva said. "First things first, I'm just going to put a port in your arm, in case we need to give you fluids or anything."

"Great," Keep grumbled. She was sweaty, pale, and tense. She might have just had a big contraction before Sylva came into the room. She tried to give her a sympathetic look as Keep held out her arm. Sylva bit her lip as she focused intently, remembering the many, many blood draws Jalena had made her practice. Sylva wiped down the area, and neatly inserted the needle and port, taping it down quickly. Keep cringed and looked away.

"Perfect," Sylva said. "Unfortunately, this next one isn't quite as quick or pleasant. I have to put the nerve block into your spine."

"Is it too late to change my mind and ask to be knocked out instead?"

"Then I'd have to tube you," Sylva said pointing to her throat. "That's less great."

Keep shuddered. "What do I have to do?"

Sylva grabbed the pillow from the end of the table and held it out to Keep. "Grab this and lean forward. It helps stretch out your spine. I'm gonna do a local anesthetic first, so you shouldn't feel the needle too much."

"That's what everybody says," Keep said bitterly.

"Everybody who?"

"I had this done once before. Our last doctor." Sylva remembered the sad story about Keep's previous pregnancy.

"I'm sorry. I'll do my best not to make it hurt."

"If I break Shielder's hand, it's your fault."

"Please don't break my hand," Shielder said. He gave Sylva a look that communicated just how much trust he was putting in her. It was clear from the way that he hovered around Keep that he loved her.

Sylva positioned herself behind Keep, and vigorously wiped down her back to clean it off. Then she poked her lightly with the local anesthetic. "It'll take a minute for that to kick in."

"And I have to stay sitting like this?"

"That would be the easiest thing, yeah. Actually, if you could go to the bathroom, just make sure your bladder is empty, that would be great." She changed her mind at the last second to give that instruction.

"Fantastic."

"I'll be right back, I'm going to go and tell everyone out there what's going on, unless you have some objection to that."

"No, go ahead. I'll follow you out and use the bathroom out there." Shielder helped Keep down from the table, and she waddled out with him.

Sylva went out into the waiting/office area. The group of women (and Sign), were all sitting around, talking. Iri had also made it, finally, and she gave Sylva a bright smile. Someone had made coffee and passed it out. They all greeted Keep and Sheilder as they passed into the bathroom.

"I've got some good news and bad news," Sylva said, getting everyone's attention.

"Good news first," Iri said.

"You won't have to spend hours sitting around waiting for Keep to be ready to pop out her baby," Sylva said. A few of the women, the ones with particularly dark circles under their eyes, tried to hide smiles at that pronouncement.

"And the bad news?" Sign asked.

"We're going to do a surgical removal," Sylva said. Seeing the look on some of their faces, she quickly added, "It's not an emergency." Yet, she thought. "But I've decided that there are too many factors working against having a safe, natural birth."

The room was fairly quiet. Sylva didn't know what she had expected everyone to say, but it certainly wasn't nothing.

"I'm still going to need your help. Keep is getting ready for surgery right now; I'm waiting for local anesthetic to kick in so I can give her a spinal block, and once that's all set, we're going to start as quickly as possible. So I'm going to assign you all into teams to help me during the procedure. Does anyone have any questions?"

Most of them shook their heads no. The atmosphere in the room was tense.

"Sign and, uh." Sylva looked around the group of women, and settled on one somewhat randomly. "Comfort. You two will be responsible for taking the baby after I pull him out. You'll need to clean his mouth and nose so he can breathe, make sure there's nothing going wrong, clean him up, and give him to Keep. Got that?"

Sign and Comfort nodded. That seemed like the easiest job to get Sign out of the way.

"Maze and Evie," Sylva said, giving Iri a hard look. "You're my surgical assistants. Evie will pass me instruments, Maze, you'll need to help me hold the cut open and get the baby out. Can you handle that?" Maze considered it for a second, then nodded. Iri gave a little smile. She had picked Maze to do that part of the operation mainly because she seemed to be the woman Keep was closest with aboard the ship. If she herself had been on the operating table, she probably would have wanted someone she knew and trusted to be fishing around inside her. Granted, she would have preferred a real doctor, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Hold-Fast and Praise, you two will be doing everything else. Making sure the area stays clean, getting anything I need from the other room, staying in contact with Keep to make sure she doesn't have any problems, stuff like that. Understood?"

The last two women agreed. Sylva didn't know what else there would be to come up during the operation, but it didn't hurt to have all hands on deck.

"Shielder's obviously going to be in there also, but his job is to stick with Keep and just like, hold her hand. It might get a little crowded, but I think we'll cope. Does anybody have any questions?"

"How long until we get started?" Praise asked. She was short for a spacer woman, with curly black hair and a button nose.

"I'm going to go in there now and give the second part of the anesthesia, and then it'll probably be ten or twenty minutes before she's completely numb and we can get started."

"Anything we should do in the meantime?" Maze asked.

"Pee if you think you're going to need to. Say a prayer if you like. Wash your hands again. Get clean gloves on right before we get started." Sylva's brain felt like it was running at about a million kilometers a second, flashing from one thought to the next. She slipped her hand inside her jumpsuit pocket and fingered the second pill that was in there, collecting lint.

"I'll come get you in a bit," Sylva said, and headed back into the operating room.

Keep came back in a moment later, helped along by Sign. She clambered back up onto the table and resumed the hunched over pillow position. "How's it going?" Sylva asked.

"You're the doctor," Keep remarked. "I just want to get this over with."

"Soon. This'll be way faster than it would if we were going to let you go through labor."

"Yeah. Well. Still." Keep was clearly just nervous and in pain, and Sylva felt pretty bad for her. She walked around behind her and poked her bare back with a gloved hand.

"Feel that?" Sylva asked.

"Only a little. Feels kinda weird."

"You're probably numb enough then. Shielder, can you just…" Shielder grabbed Keep's hands. "Yeah," Sylva said. "This might feel a bit weird. Sorry in advance."

Sylva wiped down the area once again, and poked around for a moment to determine where the big needle should go. It had to go right there, into the spine. And it would leave a little port behind, just in case she had to put more medicine down it, if something went wrong. She lined it up carefully, and poked it in.

Keep half jumped, twitching. "FUCK," she yelled, voice ragged. Sylva dropped her hands away from the needle in surprise, but quickly grabbed it again to make sure it didn't fall out and wreck everything.

"Sorry, sorry, I'm almost done," Sylva said quietly. "Just try to stay still. I know this sucks."

Keep choked back a sob as Sylva finished the injection. The medical reference had warned that some people have worse reactions to it than others, but Sylva couldn't be sure if this was because Keep was particularly sensitive, or if she was just doing a shitty job. Her hands shook as she removed the needle. This wasn't boding well for her being steady in the future.

"Alright, all done." She rubbed Keep's shoulder ineffectively, and made an apologetic look to Shielder over Keep's shoulder. He didn't respond, but from the way that Keep's knuckles were white while gripping his hands, he probably was feeling the strain. "Now just lay down, and it should be about ten minutes before this kicks in. You might feel like, weird tingling. That's normal. And I'll get your monitor on." She probably should have put the monitor on Keep before giving her the intense anesthesia, but it had slipped her mind. She found the cuff in the other room and put it on Keep's arm. Everything looked mostly normal, except for her blood pressure, which was a little low.

"So I just have to lay here?" Keep asked.

"Yeah, basically. I mean you probably won't be able to walk that well, since we're literally numbing your whole spine. You shouldn't be able to feel anything at all."

"Great." Shielder helped Keep lay down, sticking the pillow back under her head, and helping hoist her long legs up onto the table.

"I've got this screen, so let's put this up. I don't think you really want to, uh, see what I'm doing." Sylva pulled a wheeled screen over from the other side of the room, and started to set it up between Keep's top and bottom half. It was a bit awkward, and Shielder, being so tall, could see right over the top of it. While the table had clearly been made with spacers in mind, some of the other equipment in this room had not. Either that or operating tables just were that long. Sylva didn't know.

"You don't think I could handle it?" Keep asked. "I've seen way worse."

"Keep, I have absolutely no doubts about your ability to handle anything. I just am trying to make this easier. If you don't want it, I can put it away."

Keep rested her head and closed her eyes. "It's fine. It's whatever. Sorry."

"It's okay. I know this is pretty stressful."

"Understatement of the year."

"Just chill out for ten minutes. I'm just going to prep some things, then I'll be back to check if the anesthetic took."

"I hope it did, because I don't want to go through that again." Before she headed back into the waiting room, Sylva checked the monitor on Keep and her baby's vitals. It didn't look any different than before.

"If it didn't, we'd have to try a different kind," Sylva said as she left. She walked back through the examining room and into the waiting room where everyone was standing around, looking tense. She got their attention once again. "Okay everybody, I've given Keep the anesthetic, so this is your ten minute warning. Evie, you're with me so I can get you set up with the tools."

Iri followed Sylva all the way to the back room where the lab was. Sylva shut the door behind them. She didn't know how soundproofed the walls were, so she whispered so that Keep in the next room wouldn't hear. "I'm freaking the fuck out," she hissed to Iri.

Iri shook her, putting her hands on both her shoulders. "Get over it. Even if it wasn't you out there doing it, it would be someone else, with even less training. You just have to do it."

"What if I fuck it up?"

"This is an easy, easy surgery, right? Just one cut and two sets of stitches?"

Sylva laughed harshly. "That’s easy to say. Not so easy to do."

"It'll be fine." Iri squeezed her shoulders. Sylva shook Iri's hands off and began to start washing up in the sink, cleaning her hands all the way to the elbows, like she used to see her dad do. She splashed her face for good measure, feeling wide awake despite the late hour and the tremor in her hands. She held them up to Iri.

"Look how much I'm shaking."

Iri pursed her lips. "It's just nerves. As soon as you get in there, you'll steady right up. How many times did Jalena make you practice stitching?"

"Only like, a billion."

"Then you're fine."

It was true that Jalena had made her practice stitches in all variety of situations, starting her out with using the tools on fabric, then moving her up to meat she pulled from the kitchen, then finally culminating in stitching up a knife wound that someone had given themselves while trying to pry open a stuck electric cabinet. That had been a pretty minor wound, and this was a major surgery.

Sylva didn't respond, just bit her lip and started getting her own new set of gloves and hairnet on. She tied her facemask, and felt a little better now that no one could see how much she was nervously chewing on her own face.

"Wash yourself up," Sylva said. "I'm gonna get all the rest of the tools out of the autoclave." The autoclave in question was in the back of the room, and had a heavy, locking door. "We don't have all the fancy equipment that was in the instructional video. All the specialty dressings and stuff. I know because I basically memorized that video. Well, I watched a lot of them. But I guess that's the one that's going to come in handy. I thought it might because of the breech, but, yeah." She was rambling.

"Don't need any of that," Iri grunted as she struggled to tie on a face mask.

Sylva handed her a tray full of the rest of the tools, then checked in the closet for a stack of clean towels, which she draped over her own gloved arm. "Should I say a prayer?"

"Don't bother. Better to just get started and get it over with." The thought made Sylva cringe, and so she silently said a few words of prayer inside her own head while turning away from Iri.

She took a deep breath. Holding the towels steady was keeping her a bit steadier, too. "You ready?"

"Yeah. If you pass out, I'll take over."

"God. Hope that doesn't happen."

"You squeamish about blood?"

"No, thank goodness."

"Guess I should have asked that question back during the planning stages of this whole idiocy."

"We're in it now."

"Once this is over, we need to talk."

"Don't say shit like that to me. Not now." Sylva would have punched Iri, but both of their hands were full, and she didn't want to risk dropping all of the clean towels and sterile instruments.

"Just about our future plans. We can't stay here forever."

"Yeah, well, if I fuck this up we definitely won't be."

"Deep breaths; it's fine," Iri said, somehow calm. Sylva envied her, but she also hadn't taken a stimulant. How Iri was the one who had drugs on her when Sylva was the one who controlled access to the entire medical facility was a mystery that she didn't really want to contemplate. If she had to guess, she'd say that Iri probably got them from Sign somehow, while they were having one of their trysts. She shook her head, physically trying to get the thought out.

"You don't have any of the," Iri lowered her voice even further, "power healing stuff, do you?"

Sylva laughed again, this time bitterly. "I can barely control it enough to do the basics. What kinda superhuman do you take me for?"

Iri shrugged, rattling the instruments on her tray. "Sorry to bring up something painful."

Sylva glanced at the time on the wall. "We gotta get going."

"You're saying that again, but you're not moving."

Sylva took a couple steps toward the door and grabbed the handle. It took a few more calming breaths before she stepped out into the operating room. All the women were there, now fully decked out in as much sterile gear as they could find. That mostly meant facemasks and hairnets and gloves; even Sylva didn't have a full set of scrubs available. Two of the women were setting up the harsh lights.

"Glad you're all dressed up and ready to go," Sylva said, trying to sound cheerful.

"You look green as a leaf," Maize said dryly. "Don't puke on my cousin, okay?"

"I'm fine," Sylva said shortly. "How are you feeling, Keep?"

"Like I want to get this done." Keep sounded miserable. The towel that Keep had wrapped around her was covered with blood now. Alarming, but it was only going to get worse from here on. All the vital signs still looked good, though, so Sylva tried not to panic just yet. If she could have, she would have run away screaming, but here she was, and she was going to plow forward. After all, she had made this plan, so it would be worse than anything for her to quit on it now.

"You numb?" Sylva poked Keep's foot. "Actually Ir-Evie, can you grab me an ice cube from the freezer in there." There was a clunky old freezer in the lab used for storing samples. Iri put the tray down on the little wheeled cart near Sylva's hip and went to go fetch the ice cube. She returned a moment later. Sylva took it in her gloved hand and ran it over Keep's stomach and legs. "Feel that at all?"

"Ice, I assume? No, I don't. That mean I'm ready?" Keep's hand was draped off over the side of the bed, so Sylva could see it past the cushion. Shielder was clutching it, both white knuckled.

"Yeah. It does. Does anyone have any last minute questions before we get started? Everybody knows what they're doing?"

"How long is this going to take?" Keep asked.

Sylva considered this for a second. The medical reference videos were done by people who did this day in and day out, and they were extremely fast at it. Sylva, on the other hand, had never done anything like it before. "We should have the baby out in less than ten minutes, but it will take longer to close you up," Sylva said. "I don't know the exact time. I'm not the fastest stitcher." And she wouldn't want to go too fast to risk messing it up. "Any other questions?"

No one said anything.

"Right. Let's get going. Praise and Hold-Fast, I need you to switch out this towel for a clean one. Evie, I need the sterilizing fluid and wipes." Everyone jumped into action to clean up Keep, wiping her down so that the fresh wound that Sylva was going to make would at least be a little less likely to get infected.

"Keep, if you feel any pain, go ahead and scream and we'll get you more medicine."

Sylva took the scalpel in her hands. Deep breaths. Her vision narrowed to just the spot above Keep's pubic area where she was going to cut. All the noise in the room: the beeping of the monitors, the shuffling of all the waiting women, Keep's ragged breathing and Shielder's comforting whispers, it all faded out into nothing as Sylva brought the scalpel down.

There were so many different layers, underneath the skin. She tried to keep them distinct and cut them cleanly, because she knew she would have to sew them all back up. She alternated between tools, using the, she didn't know what the names for them were, the scissors a lot. She tried to make the cut wide enough to get the baby out. It would be way worse to have everything open and then get stuck than to make a slightly larger than necessary cut. She put in a wedge to hold the cut open, and murmured something to Maze to have her towel up some of the blood. There wasn't a lot of it, at first, but Sylva needed to be able to see.

Distantly, someone retched, and Iri abandoned her post for a moment to hustle one of the women out the door. Sylva didn't look up to see who it was.

"Change your gloves," Sylva said when Iri returned. She was more focused than she had ever been in her life, which wasn't saying much. The power stirred within her, feeding off of that intense concentration, and Sylva, for the first time ever, had to stop herself from using it. If the situation had been less dire, she would have laughed.

She was down into the last layers, and she tried to be very careful not to cut the baby as she (as neatly as possible) hacked her way through the uterus. There was a lot of blood now. Sylva put down her tools, Iri holding forceps at the ready for her, and Maze holding the flaps of skin open.

The baby was in a stupid position. She had known that, but it didn't make this any easier.

"Maize, press over here, gently, I need him to just, yeah." Maize put her hands on the top of Keep's stomach and pushed as Sylva grabbed inside the hole. She felt legs, inched her fingers upward a little bit to get a more solid grasp, and found the baby's hips. So much blood rushed out of the wound. She pulled, wiggling the baby out through the hole. There was some sort of art to this, some sort of special turn that people were supposed to do, but at this moment it was all she could do to just wiggle the baby until first his butt came out into the glaring lights, then his legs, his back, his shoulders, his feet, and finally, at last, his head. The arms were the last things to come out. There was blood and liquid everywhere, pooling and soaking into the towels. She laid him down right on top of the bloody incision (there wasn't any better place) so that she could cut the cord. His arms flailed around, a little feebly.

He was grey and wrinkly and horribly ugly, but Sylva didn't have time to worry about that or contemplate it at all. "Got him out, Keep," she called. Iri handed her the clamps, and she put them down onto the umbilical cord, far away from the baby's stomach. Sign and the woman she had assigned to take the baby came over, and started suctioning out his mouth and nose. He immediately started screaming, the weak little infant sound. Sylva handed him off to them, grateful that at least one person was going to come out of this.

Now came the hard part. Watching the videos, Sylva had seen the surgeons literally pull the whole uterus outside of the body in order to sew it back up, after they got the placenta out. Sylva didn't know if she could do that, and, if she could do it, if she would be able to get it back in. It seemed scarier than any other part of the process. First, she gave Keep a shot that was supposed to make the uterus contract and release the placenta. She tugged on the remaining umbilical cord length with one hand and reached back inside of Keep with the other, trying to gently pull the placenta out. Her focus had waned a tiny bit, now that what felt like the most urgent part was over, and there was a baby screaming, but this was still– she dragged her attention back to what she was doing. The placenta was larger than she expected, and she dropped it heavily in a tray.

The uterus did come out, scarily easily, and Sylva applied the little clamping things around the edges of the cut. She didn't know why, but she had seen people do it in every video she watched. She could repeat the motions, like a clever little monkey, and maybe that's all she needed to do. After all, if she got the right end result, it wouldn't matter if she knew why she was doing anything. Right? Right? That was all she had to keep telling herself. The hysteria was setting in as she jammed a clean towel around in Keep's body, to make sure that there wasn't anything left in there. Then it was time to start sewing. She sewed up both corners of the pulled out uterus first, then worked her way towards the middle. The tools were so clumsy, and her hands were slippery with blood, and she was having a slow and miserable time. Keep was probably having a worse one, but– FOCUS. She brought her attention back to what she was doing, and then after what felt like a million tense stitches pulled around by the unwieldy instruments, the uterus was closed up. She looked to make sure it wasn't bleeding, and unfortunately discovered that it was. She had to do a couple more stitches in that spot, tying them tight. The bleeding stopped, though there was still blood absolutely everywhere on the table. It was hard to see.

Then there was putting it back in. Weirdly, it slipped in without much issue. She had to resist fishing around in there to check that it was in place. Since she hadn't ever seen anyone do that in a video, she had to assume that the whole body knew where its organs were supposed to live. And at last, it was time to sew up all the layers between the uterus and the flesh. So many layers, each needing their own tedious and difficult set of stitches. Her hands were getting tired, her mind was wandering. She made Iri count all her equipment to be sure there hadn't been anything left behind. The last thing she would want, aside from like, Keep dying, would be to find a pair of scissors got sewn up inside Keep, and then she'd have to fish them out again. That would be so miserable.

Stitch after stitch. Maybe it was really only two or so layers, the sheath, the stitching up of any bleeding in the small fatty area beneath Keep's skin, then the closing of the skin itself. By the time that Sylva closed the knot on the last stitch in the top layer of skin, her hands and legs were both extremely jittery. She felt like she had been wrestling with both Keep, Iri, and Maze, to get the right instruments in the right places at the right times.

"Maze, can you and Ir-Evie, can you clean this all up and put on a bandage. I need to sit down. It's all done. I gotta go." Sylva practically rushed out of the room, dropping her instruments in the tray with a clatter. She slammed open doors with her hips to avoid getting blood on them, and rushed into the little bathroom. She knelt on the floor and threw up in the toilet, choking, drooling, and sobbing, getting Keep's blood all over everything.