He noticed when he went to hang up to hang up the rifle, reaching up, and something in his left side that wasn't right, wasn't the usual ache of exertion, something with an edge to it. He looked down, his shirt a darker place at the left side, lower ribs. He put his hand to it, and his hand came back wet. "Huh," he thought, "when did that happen?" He couldn't actually place it.
Somewhere in the cabin, when the door came in, when he moved aside. Something he hadn't registered in the moment, because in the moment there wasn't space to register it. He looked at the wet on his hand. He looked at the door. Then he went and sat back down in the chair, and pulled his shirt down over it, and decided that right now wasn't the time.
He was wrong about that. Nayeli found out at dawn. She came in from checking the east perimeter. She'd taken to doing this herself every morning, quietly, before she said anything to anyone, and she found him in the chair, and something in how he was sitting wasn't right. The angle of it, the way he wasn't fully upright.
She crossed the room in four strides, crouched in front of him. He started to say something. "Don't," she said, "pull up your shirt. Nayeli, pull up your shirt." He looked at her face.
He pulled up his shirt. She looked at the wound for a moment without expression. Then she stood up and went to the shelf and began taking things down with the efficiency of someone who knows exactly what they're looking for. "How long?" she said back to him, still moving since last night. She stopped a single beat, then she kept moving.
"You sat in that chair all night," she said, "with this?" "It wasn't It was," she said, flat. "Lie down." "I don't need to." "Hadley."
She turned around. Her eyes were a specific kind of tired. The kind that comes from watching people refuse help when they need it. The kind she had clearly been looking at for a long time from the other side. "Lie down." she said.
He lay down. Nayeli worked with the particular focused quiet of someone who'd learned this, really learned it with purpose and instruction and not just watched it done. She cleaned the wound with a steadiness of hand that impressed him despite himself. It wasn't deep deep, a knife not a bullet. The knife he'd caught on the doorframe in the confusion and hadn't felt.
It needed cleaning and binding. She knew how to bind it. He lay still. "My grandmother used plants I don't have here." she said, working, not looking at him. "But this will hold."
A pause. "It needs to be checked twice a day." "All right." "You'll run a fever tonight." "Will I?"
"Probably. Depends on whether you've done this before and how your body handles it." She tied off the binding. "Have you?" "Once or twice."