Chapter 6: The Cabin on the Ridge

I didn't sleep that night, and neither did Conall.

At dawn we drove up the old logging road behind the lodge.

The ruts were frozen hard, and the pines closed overhead.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"To the one person who was in the room the night I was shot."

The retired healer lived in a cabin at the very end of the road.

He had left the infirmary three years ago, the week after Moonfall, and I had never once asked why.

The door opened before we knocked.

He was an old man with a white beard and a cane.

He stood in the doorway looking at me.

"You took your time," he said.

"I didn't know to come."

"No. I don't suppose you did." He stepped back. "Both of you. In."

The cabin had one room, one stove and a wall of jars.

He put the kettle on and did not offer me tea. I noticed that, and was grateful.

"Tell me about the bullet," I said.

He sat down heavily in the chair by the stove and pulled a tin box off the shelf.

Inside, on a folded square of gauze, lay a flattened gray slug no bigger than my thumbnail.

"I took this out of your back at two in the morning," he said. "It came out whole."

"One piece, mushroomed. I held it up to the lamp to be sure."

"One piece," Conall said.

"If it had shattered, I'd have been picking silver out of her until dawn. It didn't. It went in clean, and it came out clean."

I thought of the six bright flecks on the surgeon's screen.

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